591–600 of 704 posts
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His strategy also may have changed due to recent events affecting foreign aid...
True. But remember that Gates said he could not fill the hole left by funding cuts to USAID: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... .
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You are framing it as a binary "you either fund the government or only your friends." You really believe there is no in between? You are framing this as if you're on some high ground and we either have to agree with your opinion or we are selfish. There are other ways to advance humanity than your opinions. Government is not some benevolent entity. The supposition that it is has no basis in data from present reality…
> Government is not some benevolent entity. Of course not. It's quite literally just the people. If you cannot trust the people with your charitable donations, but still wish to donate to a person, then you're going to have to narrow that down to the specific person you can trust (i.e. your friends). There is no in-between.
This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate. Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality. I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations.…
> Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Ha ha, well here's mine. First, I'm way ahead of Mr Gates: I'm already worth almost nothing. But if I had billions to give , I would be supporting Science Education, Democracy and Journalism. Scholarships for bright, motivated students. With all due respect to Mr G, I don't believe any of his objectives is possible with stable, educated, science-orientated social progress. Human…
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> There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with. But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and insp…
That doesn’t really matter though? The end result is we’ll get to Mars faster than we’d otherwise do.
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Norway is basically anything but the Saudi Arabia of Europe. The ONLY thing that is similar is that they both have oil and natural gas in their territory. It's a gross comparison.
I was 100% of the impression that GP was comparing petroleum resources, and explicitly not climate, traditional dress, or human rights.
How they spend their oil resources is also quite different. :)
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Dig deep enough and there's always a kickback, some business he's involved in that profits one way or the other.
Do you have any examples?
But everything you could possibly want to know is a Google search away.
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What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.
Polio type 2 and 3 were eradicated and overall we went from 400k cases of paralytic polio per year down to less than 1% of that.
400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication."
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Do you have any examples?
No, I don't collect these things, I prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about Bill Gates. But everything you could possibly want to know is a Google search away.
Gates seems like a real embodiment of "Effective Altruism". 1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary. 2. Donate/invest in altruistic causes. Unfortunately, most people that use effective altruism to justify themselves hoarding wealth seem to forget the second part.
> by any means necessary. While I agree this is technically accurate, it implies there was something imoral about how he got his money. He created the most popular modern OS and a myriad of other technical innovations. It would be almost impossible to create more positive good in the world through his charitable donations than Microsoft
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I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future. There's always so…
> It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now I don't think that is the assumption. The assumption is that people will treat them well for planning to give away their money without them needing to live their life without their precious wealth.
The benefit of wealth is your capacity to spend it. If they don't spend it in order to give it away on a future date, they have lived their lives without it.
You can say that they are selfishly maintain optionality while they are alive, but that's a less biting critique, I guess.