161–170 of 704 posts
"virtually" wonder why it needs to be qualified like this.
Because "20 years to give away all my wealth" would be misleading? He plans to retain some of his wealth.
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
And then I suppose that Steve Jobs is the Christ in this story.
You only have to look at the research output of Microsoft Research to know that it is the other way around. Kind of weird how even smart people get things mixed up.
Last time he pledged to give away half his wealth over x years didn't it basically tripple during that period?
Maybe it’ll triple again and he’ll throw in a cure for cancer(s) or Alzheimer’s.
>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities. Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work. When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anyth…
Though he and his company did a lot to change the prevalence of typing, if he or Microsoft didn’t come along, someone else would have led the computing revolution with probability 1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> without paying capital gains tax. It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.
That assumes a lot about the current administration.
>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities. Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work. When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anyth…
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
No billionaire will ever be a net positive to society. The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people. No token donations at the end of your life will ever remediate that situation.
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
This statement is so 90s and so BOFH-centered that it is irrelevant to a level of stupidity. Gates has done a lot to prove he's not a cold-hearted mf and compared to all the bros in their prime at the moment, dude, just think of Elon or Larry Ellison, well our man Billy is really very much a bright persona.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems. ... because a faction of the rich decided they wanted the poors to believe government can't do anything useful, and launched an ongoing decades-long propaganda campaign to that effect.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.