441–450 of 704 posts
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> 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.
It's OK to do both and who is this ideal charitable recipient you are talking about? You mean the one that takes your money and does whatever it wants with it?
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> 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.
What research?
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The thing that's always made me skeptical of Gates and any other enormous foundations is that they operate at such a high level and with such enormous budgets that they basically exist in the same "amoral" world of nation states and corporations, but yet they face none of the scrutiny or criticism that those entities face. How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets,…
Small-scale local charities are fine, but they are by definition _local_. And even the poorest parts of the US are doing much better than a lot of poor countries in Africa and Asia.
Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.
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Even under ideal circumstances, the priority of a government is to serve the needs of its citizens. Sometimes, these happen to align with global needs, and sometimes not. In order to improve global health or address other issues that impact countries beyond where you live, the government (even an idealized version without waste, corruption, or political games) might not be the most effective way to accomplish this.
Right. But taking the combined $140 billion net worth of Bill and Melinda, about 30% (or whatever 'fair' rate you want to assume) shouldn't have been theirs to give away. Let them spend the other part however they want. What I find kind of interesting is that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet argue that they should be taxed more, but they don't do anything to further that goal aside from media soundbites and headlines. Th…
It seems fortunate that some charitable funds aren't subject to that risk. They have other risks, but they seem lower.
In an imperfect world, government funding alone seems insufficiency diversified. That's too much power in one place.
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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.
That's a very narrow aspect of government, and one that I have hardly ever encountered. Law-abiding people don't do it because of government coercion but because they believe in being cooperative members of their community and don't want to hurt others. Another, much larger aspect of government, especially democratic, is people getting together and doing things as a community that can't be done individually.
People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government. We can and should do that of our own free will. That's not to say governments aren't needed. But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
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Yeah, sure. Just cheating. >In a 2022 interview, Melinda said, “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” per Page Six, adding that she only met the child sex offender once because she “wanted to see who” he was. “I regretted it the second I walked in the door,” she went on, adding, “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.” https://www…
Well but that's exactly what I was asking for - thank you for posting this. I asked to be corrected and I was. But let me quote what the article you linked says: "claimed that Bill had met the disgraced financier on “numerous occasions.” One of those meetings allegedly lasted for hours." Does that sound to you like they had a deep relationship of any kind? I'm just trying to form my own view on it - and that just doe…
https://web.archive.org/web/20250505081209/https://www.nytim...
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The oil fund isn't a Nordic Thing™, it's norwegian. We in the rest of the nordics don't even have (significant amounts of) oil.
Yes, Denmark, Sweden and Finland combined don't even have 20% of the Norwegian fund. Norway is basically the Saudi Arabia of Europe.
It's a gross comparison.
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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.
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And? I would welcome that. This isn't team sports where I'm rooting for my favorite billionaire. That said, this book actually exists.
I know the book exists as I'm very familiar with the kinds of claims that get repeated in threads like this. To me - these claims seem to fuel a conspiracy like mind set about why certain efforts or movements fail. "Because the billionares didn't want it to". "Or they bought the media and control the narrative". "Its all just a uniparty!". If I were to replace the word billionare with the name of the first Abrahamic…
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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…