How brave, giving all your money away by the time you will die. When you’ve got absolutely no skin in the game.
Why not just do it now? Why did you act so evil for decades? You don’t just get to “be good” now
My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
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Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#372Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.
Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them. Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.
Among billionaires maybe he is on the good side. But in general?
Linus Torvalds did more for the world than Bill Gates, IMHO. And he didn't need to set up a system that first appropriates money in order to "be generous" later.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#373How brave, giving all your money away by the time you will die. When you’ve got absolutely no skin in the game. Why not just do it now? Why did you act so evil for decades? You don’t just get to “be good” now
I can go on and on on how Bill Gates has done immense damage to software freedom etc and that is precisely the reason I will very much allow him to "be good" now.
Doesn't fix what he has already done, totally, but not only is he away from that now, he is doing stuff I actually respect. Absolute best case scenario.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, no. A government is not "a group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about." A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do, and if you don't do it, eventually people with guns will show up at your door and take you to jail.
> A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do If it is authoritarian, perhaps, but even that is still a matter of a group of people. Most seem to believe that government should be democratic. You may not find yourself in a democratic state, but that would only continue to contribute to what makes the day funny. Perhaps you didn't read the entire thread and are posting this without underst…
No, all governments have the authority to tell people what to do. Some governments operate within a legal framework that limits that authority in many ways, but if an organization has no authority over the people who live in a given area then it isn't a government.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm trying to reconcile how https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM is 'helping out your friends.' See, we can all create straw-men. It's not very useful for discourse. The vast majority of us want what is best for humanity, but we have different views on how to deliver it.
You can fund the people (government) or you can fund specific people whim whom you have an intimate trust (friends). The only other choices are to fund yourself or nobody, neither of which are applicable here. Not sure why that is so hard to reconcile.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps the government 'should' be the ideal charitable entity; but it most definitely is not. The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund. Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe; but it could do far more with substantially less.
> The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund. I don't know that it's worse than any other institution? At least voters can remove the corrupt, and they are prosecuted. Are you saying these uber-wealthy and CEOs aren't just as corrupt or worse?
What I am saying is that I have a choice whether my money goes to a corporation or to a charity. I don't get to choose whether I pay taxes or not.
More often than not, corruption in government does not result in the perpetrator being prosecuted or even removed from office.
I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass. As if the same types of people don't run both.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#377Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Helping to cure polio doesn't outweigh imagined future harms by George engineering that didn't happen yet?
He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine. This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP i…
Plus, he wouldn't touch a project he couldn't make a profit from somehow.
People don't change much.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were, I think, fair reasons to do this. A patent-free "people's vaccine" may well have reached fewer people because there's got to be money in scaling up the production of something like this.
It also conveniently benefits him greatly.
How? Guy doesn’t need anything. He’s never played the greedy billionaire part.
Vaccine IP is also a moving target. You need experts to work at it non-stop. Covid-19 mutates every three months.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#380Every billionaire running these are just doing tax avoidalnce at the highest levels i assume?
You think that they hate paying the government money so much that they.... give it all away instead? Yeah, that's some brilliant tax avoidance.
they ''''give'''' it to their own foundation, controlled by their heirs....