221–230 of 704 posts
>There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people. You can't hold onto it regardless. The best you can do is choose who gets it.
> You can't hold onto it regardless. I can, I can take my bitcoin private keys with me when I die. He could do the same if he wanted to.
Heaven has no bitcoin ATMs.
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The state is never going to be as agile as private people engaging on topics they are passionate about on their private time.
A group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about in their private time is what a state is. Perhaps what you are trying to say is that you only want to help out your friends?
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts. Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise ha…
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And Gates is investing in Alzheimer's research FYI.
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Do you have any details on the exact nature of their relationship, so we can read up on it?
Not OP, but this information is easily available by Googling ‘Bill Gates Epstein’. I’m not trying to be snarky. It’s just a widely covered news story.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/21/jeffrey-epst...
Gates addressing their relationship:
https://people.com/bill-gates-addresses-jeffrey-epstein-frie... https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/bill-gates-regrets-j...
Articles saying that they met "sometimes for a few hours":
https://pagesix.com/2025/04/15/celebrity-news/melinda-gates-...
Etc etc.
Nothing (as far as I can see, and tbh I'm not going to read past the first page of google results) suggesting that they were close friends in any meaning of the word.
Like, I don't know what kind of conclusion OP wants people to draw out of this. A lot of people were "friends" with Epstein, since he knew pretty much everyone, there are pictures of him smiling and shaking hands with lots of well known VIPs.
Which is why I asked OP for a source so we can just read about this - the whole "do your whole research" thing is just such an easy cop out because like you said "just google" doesn't really confirm anything, it's just a bunch of news articles from more or less reputable sources.
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I often see this sentiment whenever a billionaire is in conversation, but I don't understand. Can you elaborate on how his wealth was "stolen" from people? The way I see it, he's wealthy because he founded a wildly successful technology company by first creating something of value (MS-DOS). Microsoft has since grown to be one of the largest companies in the world, which hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily wor…
Billionaires become billionaires because of preferential treatment by governments, not out of any kind of merit. There are lots of better things the world could have had, Linux and the software commons would be much much much better if Microsoft hadn't hired all the best software engineers to make proprietary software and if the federal government hadn't coddled it and overlooked its monopolistic practices. The Inter…
>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…
Javascript? Check.
Android? Check.
Windows? Again, capturing market via transitioning from DOS.
They did focus on many important things like having exceptional backwards compatibility (transitioning from DOS, etc), and kernel team does a decent job usually, but none of this is necessarily attributable to Gates and it's simply what you have to do to capture a market/platform.
I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
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> 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.
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.
Is that ever?
I am not saying Gates is a monster. So I am not commenting on him. I am commenting on your logic of doing supposed good and hence they becoming good.
When you look at the history of most colonial monsters you will notice is an often repeated trend. Those despicable monster amassing wealth literally on the bodies of natives and then going back home (including some to USA) and buying a "good name" (sometimes literally in the form of those fancy titles and peerages etc).
Oh by the way, Musk and Ellison from your example are benign non-beings compared to pretty much all those "monsters".
I don't know where you are from or where you are now but a lot of world sees "good deeds of good people" with great suspicion.
How much power is concentrated in the hands of individuals... It's great that Gates is choosing to use that power philanthropically, but it also raises questions about the long-term role of private wealth in solving public problems.
He talks about this in today's NY Times interview and he is pretty unsparing against Elon Musk in particular for his role in killing USAID. Says he is directly complicit in killing children while at the same time, he is technically still a signatory of the Giving Pledge.