I'd request Gates to contribute to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals
Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
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Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#32If you put aside the "M$ was evil and he is just atoning" arguments, Gates is a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he's passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe inspiring. I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the 90's. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee's knees, I wanted to be as effective as Gates.
I'm of the opinion that Gates hasn't really changed, just found a more socially-acceptable way to use his fundamental personality.
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#33I'd request Gates to contribute to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're right, then I'd say that it's still trivially outweighed by the Gates Foundation's efforts on disease reduction. Each billion dollars spent fighting malaria buys a whole lot of indulgences.
Also, he is giving back the money he took, and then more. That also buys him a lot of forgiveness.
What money did he "take"?
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're right, then I'd say that it's still trivially outweighed by the Gates Foundation's efforts on disease reduction. Each billion dollars spent fighting malaria buys a whole lot of indulgences.
Also, he is giving back the money he took, and then more. That also buys him a lot of forgiveness.
Not to diminish the magnitude of his foundation, but he's still personally worth over $77 billion and is the richest person in the US (Forbes, 2015).
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're right, then I'd say that it's still trivially outweighed by the Gates Foundation's efforts on disease reduction. Each billion dollars spent fighting malaria buys a whole lot of indulgences.
Also, he is giving back the money he took, and then more. That also buys him a lot of forgiveness.
Gates didn't take his wealth, he created it and earned it.
Having a monopoly isn't illegal in the US. Making billions of dollars with a monopoly is not illegal in the US. The abuses in the market that Microsoft was found guilty of, they were punished for. What else are you asking for exactly?
Gates doesn't need any forgiveness. His former company's wrongs have already been accounted for - a long time ago - through an appropriate legal process.
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#37If you put aside the "M$ was evil and he is just atoning" arguments, Gates is a huge inspiration, at least for me. This guy finds problems that he's passionate about and attacks them with such ferocity that it is truly awe inspiring. I'm mildly embarrassed to admit it, but he was my childhood hero through the 90's. Even later when everyone thought Jobs was the bee's knees, I wanted to be as effective as Gates.
I'm of the opinion that Gates hasn't really changed, just found a more socially-acceptable way to use his fundamental personality.
This qualifies as goodness in my books. No one is free of egoism and selfishness. People are good if they subordinate their egoism and selfishness to a higher principle of care for others, and seek satisfaction of their baser impulses through actions that are socially constructive and beneficial.
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#38Before you lionize a convicted monopolist ... 1) The USA tax code encourages wealthy people to create foundations. The money in the foundation is still controlled by them and has tax benefits. 2) In other countries, wealthy people are taxed to provide social services like education and healthcare. In the USA, they're not - the capital gains rate of 15% is basically a round-off error compared to 90% last century. 3) F…
I worked for the Gates foundation as a researcher. I don't claim objectivity. My impression of the division I worked in was that it was poorly managed, very political, had little oversight from the big man himself as far as I know, and most importantly that it will not accomplish any of the goals it set out. Despite everything there was a lot of patting on the back and pretty words, with zero meaningful progress.
Internet is no longer free. After http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac... I have trouble believing any account I read. You may be right but corruption is so rampant that you'll have to forgive me for my skepticism
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#39i'm curious as to whether it is more effective for an individual to hold a contribute-as-you go style to philantrophy vs a make-money-first-then-donate strategy like gates did. Given that most people aren't going to be billionaires, I would guess the former but maybe someone who has looked at the data can provide some insight.
Re: Bill Gates' Philanthropic Impact Put in Perspective
#40Bill Gates was a tough competitor, to be sure, and you had to bring your A game when dealing with Microsoft. But the complaints that he was 'evil', when you drill down to see what the actual complaint is, just seem to fade away. Most of it seems to be simply envy. See "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman. P.S. I was in the industry throughout that era, and competed directly against Microsoft in programming languages.
Sure, it was just smart business plays in the tech industry, not really "evil" like physically harming people or stealing stuff from them.
But as an engineer (well, at that time, a tinkerer in high school), it was very frustrating how they had their own flawed formats and protocols. They made it as difficult as possible to interoperate in order to entrench their dominant position. I guess it's what all the biggest tech businesses did in their day.
Networking sucked, filesystems sucked, windows updates sucked. There were arbitrary limitations on "home" and "pro" versions (like number of concurrent connections). And it was all closed, so third party fixes were brittle binary patches.
And then there was OOXML, microsoft's "hey, we have an open XML format too! we named it so common people would confuse it with openoffice, and we had to whip it up quick so we just gave the ambiguous binary bit flags names and put them in xml tags!"
Surely you recall this memo about ACPI, and how unfortunate it would be if linux worked great with it: http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000...
So yeah, Microsoft wasn't an african warlord conscripting children or anything like that. They weren't dumping toxic chemicals into the environment. They were just offering software, and people more or less did fine with it. And these days they're doing practically everything differently than they used to. But a software engineer hating microsoft in the early 2000s was completely justified. It wasn't personal, just business, but they went out of their way to make my life worse, over and over again.