My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth(gatesnotes.com) |
My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth(gatesnotes.com) |
For me now, this statement by Larry Page resonates better:
“You know, if I were to get hit by a bus today, I should leave all of it to Elon Musk.”
But hey, people like him got a free pass to spit whatever nonsense came out of their mouth as long as it was pro-doom. Good news was never allowed and Gates was great at stirring up fear, panic and bad news.
They certainly were, but you've elided the reason why. The doomsayers were predicting that we would have complete civilization collapse when the year rolled over to 2000. Vast quantities of wealth erased by bank computer errors, planes falling from the sky and killing thousands upon thousands, etc. Such extreme scenarios were never plausible. The doomsayers were wrong because there was a real problem and it did get fixed, but that problem would never have amounted to the apocalyptic event they said it was going to.
Anyone else feeling uneasy that society is increasingly dependent on a handful of ultra wealthy people's generosity for investment in certain good initiatives? We live in a time where there are individuals who have more money than many small countries, governments are cutting funding for good programs while individuals are stepping in to help. What is the point of living in a democracy if big investments depend on the mood of some billionaire?
But then we can debate if Microsoft made their money honestly or not. If Microsoft exploited their monopoly, then perhaps Bill Gates stole from the rich to give to the poor...
But the track record of the rich does not inspire confidence that this is the route our society should take in reclaiming these assets.
Saying "99.999%" of my wealth invites critics later on when he donates "99.98%".
Substitute "virtually" by "almost" and it's the same. It's just style.
Not that I think giving away most of his money isn't admirable. But I think he'll still qualify for "he died rich".
Why not just do it now? Why did you act so evil for decades? You don’t just get 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.
Also, billg has laid out the goals of his Foundation and what they aspire to achieve. Which one of those aspirations do you think should be replaced with "fundamental AI research"?
A lot of the Foundation money goes on disease research and preventative and curative vaccine and medicine development. All of those areas are already being transformed by AI as a tool, and a lot of that development happens as a result of philanthropic, government, and private investment.
As far as I can tell, very few places are looking into this topic area. Jeff Hawkins group is one of the few places. I would like to get involved as this area is my passion but I can't connected to funding to do so.
Injecting this money may create inflation and accidentally increase poverty as more money becomes freely available and circulating.
Could be in some way better to just destroy it ?
How is this a good idea considering that a political instability can wipe out all that effort?
Here's an idea: Give away your wealth to run unprofitable but essential "machines" like social media and news organizations to stop the vicious circle the humanity plunged in. Do it just like Musk but hand it to an independent organization that does't push for an agenda or profits.
Russians for example, pay social media personalities to push their talking points or even better they pay people who push talking points that are beneficial to them without directly agreeing on the transaction. Hijack the method, pay influencers you believe are beneficial for your causes and ideals.
It may look like just another billionaire trying to influence politics but you can make it into transparent institution. You can award prizes(monetary and honorary) like Nobel did.
Wouldn't be great if Twitter was run buy a transparent institution that releases logs, stats and full source code and doesn't need to do sketchy shit? Sure it would be imperfect but it can be beneficial, like Wikipedia for example.
Make social media into an impartial infrastructure with decades of runway and let people build the specialized things around it.
https://www.ft.com/content/bdd9bb89-ac3c-4043-9ca4-bc7efbd41...
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
He seems to agree that politics are just as consequential
This is nothing more than a billionaire (with a rich history of his own in destroying society) trying to buy his reputation back.
Reminds me of all of the billionaire shitheads (Walmart/Walton Family, Purdue Pharma/Sacklers, …) that buy the naming rights on education facilities, dying arts academies, and even libraries. Nothing but trying to wash away the guilt.
Our shitty family contributed to the opioid addiction en masse all in the name of profit, but hey at least you get a reduced or free tuition to pristine art academy or academic institution (if you meet criteria).
Tax the rich. End subsidies given to ultra wealthy.
Seems like that to me
Cannot ignore that his communicable disease research and treatment has been effective. But his school voucher and farming initiative have been awful. Ultimately it would have been better as general revenue to provide these services through government.
i guess
tbh seems a lot of this setup is also good ole corruption with a legal veneer of goodwill wrapping
It would be more effective to use his wealth to put a president that is not a war criminal and stop making US the bully of the world. That would be a blessing for humanity
And I don't care about your Gates hating, for whatever reasons you have I am just not interested the cynicism and conspiracy theories about Gates - tell it to the hand.
Are Musk, Bezos and Zuck the only one brave enough to work on REAL and HARD problems ? /s
Glad we finally know now that babies need nutrition.
We've always known that babies need nutrition, but knowledge of the role of the gut microbiome, how to develop it and ensure it is healthy is relatively new.
It's just that I might not agree with the purposes he chose. But hey, he is the boss, he can do whatever he wants.
People think he is the antichrist because he promotes vaccines and because there are multiple quotes of him where he explains that he wants to reduce the world's population. By raising the standard of living and giving healthcare to the poor, which empirically seem to cause lower birth rates, but lots of nutjobs assume he tests weaponized vaccines or something like that. And people are distrusting of people who appear too altruistic in general, thinking it's some kind of con (and often they are right).
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.
People like the bill gates of the 90s don't just disappear
He also did awful things in the business world when he was younger. He's no saint, either, he is just a normal, messy person. But he's done more for the poorest and neediest people in the world than most countries.
Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
he's "extorted" a lot of money from various states by locking and price-gouging, money that would have otherwise been spent on social projects
basically he has done
Gates -> extort money -> fantastic personal wealth -> gave back to organization *he* decides to give too
while the normal path would be
Governments and people have lower spending because they don't need to give Microsoft too much cash -> governments and people decide by themselves how to spend extra money -> there are more, and more diversified, humanitarian actions
That people can create wealth is alien to most people!
They think wealth is money, which leads to a zero sum belief system. That is, if Bill has $200B, he must have taken it from the rest of us.
Some grass is in need of touching.
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.
For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.
But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.
It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Treatment_of_collea...
What I don't understand is the comradeship I see in people competing to effusively praise oligarchs. Bill Gates fought against technological progress, fought against free and open source software, fought against antitrust, even bribed officials to push out competitors. Why would people pat each other on the back for admiring him?
Even afterwards, when he bought his redemption by showering money upon dubious nonprofits, and by creating other, even more dubious nonprofits - simply paying everyone who could possibly have a problem with him, including dozens of journalistic organizations and hundreds of individual journalists - all of his charitable efforts are still obviously ways to play with various social theories that he has, not to help people.
It takes a real psychopath to accumulate that much power, with so few principles, and then to use it to play games with people's lives. His entertainment and the entertainment of his class is endangering the world.
And I still listen to Michael Jackson, so whatever, but we know that his relationship with Epstein was pretty extensive, and what was said during his divorce (in relation to that) was alarming, as well as the fact that he immediately crumbled and gave her the farm. There's your conspiracy theory; I'm not going to be caught praising a guy for mosquito nets whom I pretty much knew hung out with Epstein for a time as intensely as anyone else did. Epstein was giving away money for elite approval, too.
What's money for if not for patronage? You can't take it with you.
Many in tech were along for the Bill Gates show and felt he was a negative actor to the industry in many ways. The fact that he is taking that wealth and channeling it through charity to achieve what he believes is important worries many on both sides of the political divide because of the enormous amounts of power he has.
Specifically over the foundation: 1. Influence Over Public Policy Criticism: The foundation’s massive financial power allows it to heavily influence public health, education, and agricultural policy, sometimes without democratic oversight.
Example: In education, their support for charter schools and Common Core standards drew criticism for pushing reforms without enough input from teachers and communities.
2. Pharmaceutical and Vaccine Influence Criticism: The foundation has been accused of favoring pharmaceutical-based solutions, sometimes at the expense of broader public health approaches.
Example: Critics argue that funding pharmaceutical companies during vaccine rollouts (especially during COVID-19) prioritized private profits over equitable global access.
3. Corporate Ties Criticism: The foundation has invested in companies that contradict its stated goals (e.g., Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil), raising ethical questions.
Example: Investments in fossil fuel companies were seen as inconsistent with health and development goals.
4. Global South Criticism Criticism: Some argue that Gates Foundation programs in Africa and other regions can be top-down, lacking local input, and continuing a form of “philanthropic colonialism.”
5. Agricultural Interventions Criticism: Through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the foundation promoted industrial farming and GMOs.
Response: Some say this undermines traditional, sustainable farming practices and increases dependence on multinational corporations for seeds and fertilizers.
6. COVID-19 Vaccine Access Criticism: Gates opposed waiving IP rights for COVID-19 vaccines, which some argued delayed access in poorer countries.
Defense: The foundation claimed that maintaining IP was key to quality and speed, though many public health experts disagreed.
He is an interesting and unique character who achieved much but don't polish those angel wings just yet.
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 work for in exchange for a high salary, at least for engineers.
It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?
What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
His #1 goal listed is almost offensive when you consider what is happening right now in May 2025 -- an utterly preventable scenario that he can't even mention lest it get "too political" and tar his image.
In other words, it's perfectly valid to be skeptical of his motives, which seem primarily to be around elevating his personal brand and legacy.
This goal might offend you but it doesn't offend me, and I don't think his motives (whether it's for legacy or personal brand) matter to me or the mother of a child who didn't shit itself to death because a vaccine for the rotavirus.
There are two possible reasons for this (the 'why' remains -- not enough money?):
- He's admitting he doesn't care about the environmental mission, just the returns
- He thinks tesla is a fraud, but isn't saying it publicly
Either way, it's sus, so it's tough to trust him.
Musk 1: behind the presidential podium during the inauguration with the country watching twice did a salute of the enemy of the American people in WW2. And 2: controls the vast majority of tesla shares and is their current CEO.
It is patriotic to short tesla. And Bill Gates clearly cares about the future direction of this country.
Not part of the Gates Foundation mandate.
As for your personal interest, have you explored the availability of university research positions and/or grants?
Your lack of funding is not philanthropy's problem to solve.
Virtually all (meaning systemically) very wealthy people had to exploit others to get to their very wealthy state.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
He's a bad dude, and the only reason he does all this is so that waiters don't spit in his food at fancy restaurants.
The world suffers under the crippling weight of proprietary M$ Windoze everywhere, and we're far worse off because of it.
Want to help, donate money to support Free Software projects with strong copyleft licenses.
Now he did lose my trust and that’s because of two things:
1. His association with Epstein. It is documented and quite possibly the reason for his divorce.
2. His trust made controversial deals during Covid. The poorer countries wanted the formula so that they could scale up production themselves. However, the gates foundation supported the patent on the vaccines instead and had themselves and middlemen to arbitrate price on the supply
https://ayudaefectiva.org/simula
Or with 10k daily, 310k monthly, adjusted by historical inflation it’s 100 million during 20 years.
That’s 3 million people helped.
However, isn’t one fix for organizations simply to have committee by-laws that say the mission statement can’t be altered?
Seems obvious yet a neglected item.
At his level, he doesn't just spend or give away a pile of money, he is somewhat like a force of nature: he controls and directs a significant portion of the money stream in the world. Think of what the Gulfstream does for air, but for money.
His story started with computers: he was among the few who built the foundation of the technocratic civilization. Computers and machinery have created a good deal of prosperity, but there is a grave problem with it: computers and machinery have been completely isolated from ethics. Research in AI is no longer guided by what's good for humanity, but by what's possible. Today this manifests in such relatively innocent crimes as disregarding copyright and data privacy when training AI. But that's a sign of a deeper disease: the isolation from ethics. If it's allowed to continue like that, in a few decades this anti-ethical AI will kill at first humanity within humans and then the civilization itself.
IMO, the biggest difference he can make now is finishing the story that he started long ago, by bringing the AI beast under the umbrella of ethical control. It won't stop it, but will significantly reduce the fall out.
Still, would be beautiful to see all megarich do the same. Keep a few yachts, mansions and planes if you give back a few small countries' worth of GDP back.
So if they all dumped their wealth and saved a billion (should be enough to retire on, even for the conservative portfolio!) we would have 3.72 trillion - it would cover the US deficit for two, maybe three years.
([*] $50B for primary/secondary ed, $150B for higher - figures via Kagi Assistant, which I didn't double-check).
You can't hold onto it regardless.
The best you can do is choose who gets it.
I can, I can take my bitcoin private keys with me when I die. He could do the same if he wanted to.
Of course, if the keys are later found, then you crash everyone out.
Heaven has no bitcoin ATMs.
The competition against Linux was often nasty. Governments often got a bad deal. Think Munich and Linux.
And I still remember ugly stories about licensing of windows and Africa. This was not necessary Billy who did it, but he profited from the corruption.
Admire Linus. Admire Richard Stallmann. Don't admire Bill.
https://www.lioness.co/post/microsoft-is-using-illegal-bribe...
This giving will have a huge impact. It sure is needed at the moment!
But also, why collect such wealth in the first place? What was the point? Was the money really better off being hoarded by one person with the fingers crossed hope that they'll spend it altruistically someday? The existence of the wealth imbalance itself, and the general practice of wealth hoarding, are frustrating counterbalances to the good of giving it away.
Seriously, just screw off. We needed you 3 months ago. We'll call you when it's time for your day in court at Nuremburg 2.0.
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
At least that would make him consistent.
Maybe throw Jerry Kaplan a billion or two for fucking up his launch of the Go Communicator.
Seeing downvotes, which means you haven't been around long enough to remember all the shit Gates pulled back in the go-go 90s. ANY new technology would instantly get a press release from Microsoft saying they were working on the same thing, leaving customers and investors to wait for Microsoft's product. Which most of the time never came or was stillborn. Gates was an asshole, and he might still be, but a tidal wave of greenwashing can fix anything in the good 'ol USA. Now he's a fucking saint, right?
Any system will eventually attract corrupt people.
What is Gates going to do about the anti-vaxxers, especially now that they're running the US government health programs?
Many of the problems that the Gates Foundation wants to solve are effectively political. In other words, the dysfunction of governments allows these problems to fester, such that the only, temporary solution is for someone like Gates to step in. What is Gates doing to solve the fundamental political problems? The foundation is trying to do the work that governments should be doing, so what happens after Gates dies and/or his money runs out?
Gates has a scathing critique of Elon Musk, accusing Musk of killing millions of children, but that's the inevitable outcome of a system where everything depends on the whims of billionaires. Gates himself appears like a rarity among them now, with a bit of a conscience and sense of public responsibility. We may praise Gates for his philanthropy, but it would be irresponsible of us, the non-billionaires, to leave the public's welfare to chance like that, and neither should Gates, about to turn 70 years old, support a world that depends on his personal existence in that world.
i.e. Somebody close to the control of money funnels a disproportionate (based on expertise, intelligence, effort, contribution, etc.) amount to themselves. They quickly come to view this as the just natural order and view anyone who disagrees as a communist hater.
Elon Musk is the current best example. Despite spending most of his time at twitter last year, Tesla was trying to set Musk's compensation at over $100 billion[1]. For what, exactly?
Bill Gates was every bit the problem billionaire in his own time. Only a tiny proportion of billionaires ever decide to engage in significant philanthropy, much of which wouldn't be necessary if their peers weren't draining society of the capital to do it's own research and building. Some argue that billionaires can serve society by hoarding resources and then directing them intelligently in directions governments are too stupid to consider, but that argument falls flat if most billionaires never get past the hoarding stage. Gates has called on his peers to do more. Few have listened.
It's great that a few former robber barons are engaged in serious philanthropy, but it's like slapping a band-aid on a bullet wound. It would be far better to stop the shooting. Reigning in executive pay would be a solid start. How do we do that?
[1]https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...
Don't misunderstand me, I'm all for reigning in excessive executive pay. We should do so in any case. However, what I'm trying to say is, we can reign in executive pay as much as we like, and billionaires will simply siphon that leftover money to themselves in addition to the money they currently hoover up.
So if you consider Jobs’ boat or Apple Park or the fact that 700M people hold a literal masterpiece of design and engineering in their hands in order to send nudes and memes to each other a work of benevolence then it makes sense.
This is great, but what about the rich people who don't give? Won't they just continue to get more and more power?
The scales are tipped and this is not sustainable. Gary Stevenson is a bit extreme, but he's not wrong about centralization and it's dangers!
No they don't. It can also be that neither the government nor private parties give.
Making it an either/or often makes space for the individual to make excuses for why they don't share because out there somewhere there exists some government program that vaguely looks like charity.
> the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/magazine/bill-gates-found...
At least that's what we've been voting for.
... 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.
The public sector doesn't work because it's been sabotaged by the private sector.
Examples: healthcare, food and water for sustenance; insurance; pollution; parks and roadways, residential property; respectively.
The impact of having caeserian delivery on an infant's initial gut biome is relatively new knowledge, which is leading to changes in healthcare delivery for child health.
Maintaining good gut biome health is also still being researched, as well as what actually is a good gut biome. Whether it is dependent on different locations, or diets and what are the side effects.
This is not just "good food is good for you" research that the Gates Foundation is funding.
It's fundamental basic research that pharma development is not focused on delivering that will lead to better health worldwide.
But in practice they are the same thing. Almost the entire developed world has a fertility rate below the replacement rate. Even the upper half of developing countries are below replacement rate. If you bring health care, urbanization and the economy across Africa to levels comparable to Russia or Brazil we can expect their birth rate to similarly fall below the replacement rate too.
https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-to-blame-for-world...
But they were a significant force in electing the current president and his health secretary who is currently endangering whether we all get a flu and Covid booster this autumn.
While concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine are highest (24%), significant numbers of people still feel that "normal" vaccines are unsafe, like MMR (9%) and flu (11%).
[1] https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/vaccine-confiden...
Ever met a flat earther, a Qanon, or a chemtrails guy? I'll put good money they also believe that vaccines cause autism
Vaccine IP is also a moving target. You need experts to work at it non-stop. Covid-19 mutates every three months.
For anyone actually curious and unaware there are plenty of new articles that talk about Gates and Epstein, it's not some hidden secret. However it's a topic those who like Gates philanthropy like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist as can be seen in this thread.
We have a metric for the difference between what you charge for something and what you paid to provide it, it's called net income. Here's Microsoft's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
Elsewhere, we tend to call that embezzlement.
>>What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
Care to reply to this?
This is just mental gymnastics on the level of "it's not murder when the military does it!".
> Care to reply to this?
No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
This is literal theft from the working class of the fruits of their labours.
It's perfectly accurate to say that billionaires steal from the public, it's just that what's being stolen isn't easily quantifiable because it's effectively 'potential'. Think of the constant enshittification of everything and you get a sense for what's being stolen.
What definition of embezzlement includes both parties willingly engaging in exchange of labour for financial compensation? I think you are right, there is mental gymnastic happening, just not where you think it is.
>>No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
How so?
Democrats running a candidate that lost their only attempts during a competitive primary. As well as that candidate being unable to read the room and saying they'd do the same economic decisions as the unpopular _incumbent_ Biden. And they still were within 1% of votes!
It is absolutely disheartening and horrible to face the reality that democracy may result in outcomes you don't like, and people may have voted wrong with full knowledge and forethought.
Edit: I think it's great that he is doing this, but I don't think it's a good system. Giving money is so hard at scale that you need to set up a corporation just to figure out how to do it, and either it's so hard that they can barely shave away at the amount they have or their MO has evolved to include preserving themselves as an entity. If that wealth were more distributed, the social distance between those in need and those with money would be less.
I wish we had completely unregulated capitalism, so that middle class people would have more weapons to climb up society instead of paying the bill for everyone while drowning in debt and soulcrushing careers.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
"Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past".
Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/...
American healthcare is literally what you get with unregulated capitalism. Your statement makes no sense.
She divorced him over Gates cheating, not over the relationship with Epstein - if I'm wrong please correct me.
>>like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist
I honestly don't want to, like the other commented said "just google" - so I "just googled" and none of the articles I found suggest they had anything beyond a very superficial relationship where they met a few times. Again, if I'm wrong please correct me.
>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.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/melinda-ga...
If you just Google what Bill Gates later said then of course you will find how he only met a few times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
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 doesn't read to me like the kind of relationship that people try to portray it as. If I met with someone "numerous times, sometimes for hours" you wouldn't immediately think we are friends or that we even share any values together, would you?
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
I can't access that without a sub, you'll have to give me the jist or some quotes.
(I'm highly skeptical of social movements that claim to be for equality, but of course there are officials who suspiciously enjoy non-equal luxuries. Then it just looks like greedy sociopaths leveraging 'equality' PR in bad faith, as a tactic.)
Natural resources also are not distributed equally and e.g. living longer life is a basic human need. What if some other country has the technology to save humans but they don't give it for free? Some start hoarding wealth in order to get that and it changes the political attitude in general.
That said, this book actually exists.
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 religion, you and I would both see that view point as low intellect nonsense. And it would be. But somehow, sub in the word billionare and then it becomes brilliant analysis for some.
maybe you could read the book to dispel your mistaken notion that it's just "billionaires bad", since it's stated (and successful) objective is to cover a specific group of highly-influential people that have worked on very specific projects in furtherance of a specific political/economic ideal that we're reaping the fruits of now in real time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250505081209/https://www.nytim...
And thank you for the archive link, I didn't know you could do it this way. If this surprises you then I'd link to link you this:
You are welcome for the archive link. I already knew what XKCD comic you were going to post before I opened it. The irony is that you don't know the basics of hacking and news, yet want to pontificate on the highest levels of reality. That is evidence of a skill issue, which permeates everything about your life, and resultingly, all your beliefs and writings.
The irony of thinking you are edgy and enlightened, while all your beliefs and idioms are exactly the new mainstream norms is pretty funny. The basic-bitchness sneaks on you faster than you can see it coming I guess.
again, i dont think this is a matter of political party. it's a matter of capital interference in politics.
I don't think any of the folks pushing for deregulation of media ownership (to allow it to consolidate) and defanging anti-trust and cutting rich people's taxes and reducing government social spending or other spending that competed with potential "market solutions" or made the labor force less-desperate, or pushing anti-union policies, while promoting the view that "actually all of that is good for normal people, so you should vote for the party promoting it... also, the blacks and gays are out to get you, in case that other argument didn't convince you" had in mind getting someone like Trump, specifically, into power, though without their actions over several decades it surely wouldn't have been possible.
I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go.
I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political advocacy group that does little to advance his charities or even his legacy.
Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-11-fi-2620-s...
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" (paraphrasing). If this philosophy is used for the right purpose, we can get some cool things happening sooner. Recent events also show that there are people who are not interested in being charitable at all, so it's even more of an imperative.
(And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there is a major question of whether 'keeping your powder dry' is a huge mistake - one way or the other.)
But I think current AI (not where it might be in a few months or years) is absolutely amazing for disadvantaged people. Access to someone who's average is so freaking cool if you don't already have it. Used correctly it's a free math tutor, a free editor for any papers you write, a free advice nurse.
This sucks in a business setting but I could see it being incredible in a charitable setting. When businesses try to replace someone great with something average it sucks. But if you're replacing something non-existent with something average, that can be life changing.
I'm an AI skeptic and I can empathize with his AI enthusiasm given the problems he's trying to address (or at least professes to be trying to address).
In that sense, I suspect targeted and planned large investments into charities with scalable plans is a lot more efficient than years of trickle donations.
Gates moved $50 billion into a tax-exempt entity he controls, avoided all capital gains tax, secured over $11 billion in total tax benefits, and only needs to distribute 5% of the foundation’s assets annually, all while retaining effective control and reaping massive reputational returns.
This is nothing more than tax optimization for billionaires and can guarantee you the private plane bills, security costs, hotel suites are invoiced to the foundation...
People who believe this, also believe Warren Buffet makes money by value investing and picking stocks. Warren Buffet who by the way also used the Gates foundation for tax optimization to the tune of avoiding 20 billion in capital gains tax.
If politicians wanted they could set a 95% tax on billionaires tomorrow, just like next Monday, and none of these 250 individuals would have the minor inconvenience of their lifestyle. It seems to be possible for tariffs...But those are a tax on the other 99% tax payers. It happens overnight...
Such a smart guy, but not smart enough to stay away from Epstein...
Many will say Bill is attempting to reshape his legacy and narrative post-Epstein.
The most important thing is that money is being returned to society on an accelerated timeline.
Without this redistribution of wealth from billionaires back to especially the middle and lower classes we are headed for violent revolution on a massive scale.
Hopefully other billionaires redistribute during their lifetimes to address housing, education and health issues as well.
Anyways, the type of person who can earn a lot of money in this economy, and the type of person who can best decide how to spend it altruistically, are almost certainly not the same person. The person who earned the money certainly understand this. Yet. Here we are.
Your cynicism is failing you.
The psycopaths that have accumilated all the money in the world are certain that they are the type of person who can best decide everything in the world on any topic, especially when it comes to people poorer than them - which is of course everyone.
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. But i've seen the institutional desire for self-preservation supersede essential purposes at a few of them, with disastrous implications for their effectiveness.
The Gates foundation probably controls ~5% of the ~$2T that charitable foundations have in endowments globally. If the majority of these organizations adopted these sorts of depletion goals, their program budgets could probably more than double.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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 have much (at least, in the sense of helping others).
I enjoy being a dev, and I've given serious thought to simply continuing working once I reach my FIRE number and donating half of what I earn to charity. I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
Since his net worth is only up 3x, that means he gave away about 70% of his wealth.
In the billionaire’s defense, he probably didn’t plan on us as a society deciding to shoveling money at his class as quickly as we possibly could.
I think accelerating that timeline is a good thing as I think he will be better than anyone who came after to direct how the funds as applied.
Appears to be more along lines of approval from others, which is a type of self-promotion if you will. IMHO a true do-gooder would go about his philanthropy/help/charity with zero publicity and would actively shun any.
Steel-manning: Gates has run a deliberate PR campaign for decades to rehabilitate his reputation. In the 80s & 90s (before the Gates Foundation) he was known as a ruthless corporate tactician who crushed competitors like ants and earned a federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. Prior to his divorce he had a widely-publicized affair with a subordinate. He befriended Jeffrey Epstein and appeared in his flight logs after Epstein had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. (Gates has worked very hard to distance himself from Epstein since then - another example of the PR machine at work).
Someone who wants to paint the least charitable picture possible of Gates could factually describe him as a cutthroat businessman and a philanderer who associated with a pedophile on at least a few documented occasions. And that's ignoring the nuttier Gates conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid microchips).
Sure, everyone knows him. But he'd rather be known as a voracious reader who fought polio & malaria and provided drinkable water to millions. Not a bad use of his billions - what else could he spend those on that would materially affect his life?
Bit of an unfair comparison though.. Most people dont retire from a job where you're literally handing people money.
That said, I'm a huge fan Bill's work post-microsoft :)
Still the same greedy asshole though.
Alone his money and the pledge he pused is breathaking.
Why would you say he is a greedy asshole while he spends all his money to help humans?
Trump is greedy. Musk thinks probably he is good but is greedy as f and wants to go to mars because he thinks earth cant be saved anymore. But Gates?
> People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.
It's easy to forget how absurdly wealthy the very richest in society are. Say he started this initiative on his 70th birthday and he's spreading his giving fairly lineraly over the next 20 years but dies just 1 day short of his 90th birthday, he'd still have about $13,698,630 to his name. I think most would consider someone with that money to their name rich.
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 anything.
Then computers completely take over all aspects of business in the early 2000s. No one is writing TPS reports by hand.
All of a sudden my horrible handwriting doesn't matter. It's still really bad. But I've made 6 figures for well over a decade, along with an amazing year at about 200k.
None of this would of been possible without Gates. I also owe the creator of Android Andy Rubin. It's been a while ( and it might of been one of the other co founders), but I was able to thank Rubin. His response was something like "Well, we still need to get building applications working on Android."
I've also been able to thank( on this forum) Brendan Eich, the inventor of my first programming language, JavaScript. Amazingly humble for someone who helped create trillions in wealth.
Apart of me thinks Gates could still lead some innovation in computing. I hope somehow he's still coding under a pseudonym perhaps, and occasionally answering tech questions.
His gift to us has been this amazing industry.
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.
Bill Gates pledges 99% of his fortune to Gates Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43926212 - May 2025
He should dedicate the remaining 12% to venture capital for all of the businesses he crushed and the people who suffered, for “boiling the tech space” and killing the innovation. The least he can do.
And the rest of the rich crooks should do the same dedicating their wealth to reversing the harm that they caused.
I have to assume that anyone who thinks of Gates as a rich old man who just wants to cure Malaria is quite a bit younger (or their memory is easily overwritten).
- Should you first educate anyone who cannot read or write?
- Should you first feed anyone hungry/thirsty?
- Should you first provide shelter for all without homes?
- Should you first make peace for all without safety?
(all the way down the Maslow pyramid of needs)
How would the philanthropic billaires united ensure peace, if he had even more money? (Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's, to send out the message that every nation that started an armed conflict would regret it? Not sure if that could suppress war, but perhaps one would not feel inclined to call that "peace"...)
If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.
However, in a geopolitically unstable world one could then argue it is a "waste" of resources to help people by first feeding them when they get invaded and killed by their neighboring country soon after. But creating world peace has historically not been something that a single person - billionair or otherwise - has been able to solve.
You left out expectant mothers under control of a repressive regime that demands their death sacrifice.
You'd be better off starting a clandestine agency that simply assassinates evil people. If anyone who started a war or oppressed their people was bumped off they would soon learn.
Future generation will be richer and better-off than the present. Saving your charity for the future is, effectively, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Also, giving now maximizes the compounding effect of your charity. Saving 100 lives today is way better than saving 10 lives every decade for the next 10 decades.
It's the same thing as if a child who was given all the toys decided they want to hoard them for themself until after they were no longer a child.
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. Humanity depends on it.
Which charities are giving away less than 4% a year? Charitable foundations in the US are required to give away at least 5% of their endowment a year:
https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Per...
All money spent is voting for allocation of resource. Sometimes there is too much money fighting the same goods in which case it may not be a good allocation of resources. That money can sit to become more money.
At a personal level, because wealth sitting still, having 4% pay for the overhead of maintaining the 96% and then using the pennies left doesn't accomplish much of significance.
Charities that aren't actually spending money to do good are just banks in disguise. Banks that don't pay out interest. Why would anyone donate even one cent to banks?
Even if you trick-feed donations to charity over 100 years, the sums may be insufficient to reach a usable scale. - A big investment in research. - A concentrated push to vaccinate against a Disease so it goes away for good. - An infrastructure investment that lifts a community out of poverty.
These themselves produce "good over time," perhaps even faster than the money in the fund rises in value. It's a balance, but immortal trickle donations are likely quite far off to one direction of that scale.
Depends on investments. Arguably tech advances are more effective for alleviating hunger than direct food donations long term.
I havent looked, and frankly can't be bothered [0], but I expect that even after giving away an unfathomable amount of money, the foundation and gates are probably richer (dollar net worth) than they have ever been.
It has been sat in investments, they have been giving it away, but they can't keep up with it.
[0] Turns out I could be - https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-ga...
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.
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.
An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments
In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors
Strictly speaking, the foundation discourages individuals from donating directly to them, mostly because the tax treatment of giving that way isn't necessarily favorable. They've set up Gates Philanthropy Partners as a 501(c)(3) charity which is aligned to the same philanthropic goals.
(Of course there's also many other worthwhile players in the broader EA space.)
It'd be smarter to see who they are giving money to (which is all public) and give directly to those orgs. The Gates foundation itself spends a lot of money on consultants, "government engagement" (aka lobbying by another name), and fancy dinners.
That's fine or maybe even noble for a family foundation, but it's probably not something individuals would want to fund.
I find this dishonest.
And i find your point regarding 'fancy dinners' weird. You do know why they might spend money on this right? For doing lobbying which leads to real impact. Your 'fancy dinner' might be the difference between a political decision in favour for the right thing vs. some other company lobbying for the opposition.
If he was really serious about giving away his money, he could write a single check to the Red Cross || Doctors Without Borders || insert charity here and in five minutes be done with it.
The world doesn't need more vanity charities. It needs its existing charities to be better funded.
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.
You could be massively wrong about that. Many charities are desparate for IT help. I am a developer and volunteer at a charity. I have done some IT stuff for them (mostly setting up some Airtable databases) and it has been (modesty aside) transformative for them.
Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.
That's just insane. Bill Gates is absolutely not a good guy but you cannot be convinced to that given how much you idealize him. Have children. I would have replied to the sibling comment saying the same but comments become unreplyable once they get enough downvotes.
Of course, he could choose to not live a super-high consumption lifestyle in addition to his climate philanthopy, but if I had to take one or the other, I'd rather him continue throwing money at climate work than take fewer private jet rides.
Helping people out of poverty is really bad for the environment too but I don't think we should be complaining when someone does that.
On a global scale his yacht(s?) and private jets are nothing, and if it helps him do good by establishing/maintaining relationships with the right people they're an "investment" into a stopping climate change.
A bit of a naive take as opposed to yours.
I mean, having more than one of either already seems ridiculously wasteful to me, and I don't care if that's standard billionaire lifestyle.
How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets, take down regimes, and change people's lives for generations?
We take them at their word and assume that everything they do is well-intentioned and good and has zero negative impact or secondary effects, but is that really the case?
To me it seems like the only charity that can be trusted is a small-scale one that acts locally and with lots of transparency.
And even the poorest parts of the US are doing much better than a lot of poor countries in Africa and Asia.
You could pick some slightly less sci-fi measures like "number of trivially preventable deaths from diseases for which we have vaccines", for example.
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.
Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.
Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.
I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.
On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.
Gates is more notable for NOT Netscaping or Sunning or Lotus-123ing his company than for any particular decision.
Of course this was anti competitive, but it was a massive net good.
The point is computers became extremely cheap. We're at the point where you can get a used laptop for 100$, install Linux on it and write code to your hearts content. The only thing limiting you is your own skill set.
I don't think computers become affordable without Microsoft
I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.
The computer would have taken off regardless of him. Just like the electric bulb and the radio, the computer had no one single inventor/promoter/business.
I dunno, my 3rd grade teacher in the 80s said of my handwriting "We've done all we can do. He'll have a secretary, so it'll be ok"
Sadly, I never had a secretary; but my terrible handwriting hasn't been a major deterrent to getting things done.
Though he and his company did a lot to change the prevalence of typing, if he or Microsoft didn’t come along, someone else would have led the computing revolution with probability 1.
It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
You seem to have very weird ideas about how EA funding works in practice. Long-termism is flashy and peculiar so it gets a lot of excess visibility, but "fighting poverty" tends to get the bulk of EA money, and the most controversial cause that still gets real sizeable funding seems to be animal welfare.
Weird that you have that impression, since most EA-related organizations (GiveWell, Effective Altruism Foundation, etc) are heavily focused on donating to charities that address poverty or malaria in Africa
This implies that they got rich by pillaging instead of countless people voluntarily giving them money in exchange for what they offered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
This assumes the money would not have been better spent by giving it to the workers of the company that generated it in the first place.
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
Microsoft is not an ethical company - a pattern that has continued today with their user-hostile decisions.
> but I expect the [Gates] foundation will spend more than $200 billion between now and 2045
Top 10 individuals in the world worth $1.77 trillion
The U.S. government has spent $ 3.57 trillion in fiscal year 2025
So to determine X, we can just ask how much money he’d have now had he not given any away, and it looks like he has about 70% less than that.
You confidently gave an explanation earlier that was hogwash.
First of, i do know his history very well, i'm quite aware that he was not a saint before but that doesn't change the fact what he is currently doing and it is very good.
Do you have anything real? Like real talking points? Real sources? aything besides just shitting at him?
I'm not sure how making the OEMs pay for a license on all the computers they sold (and report on those numbers), regardless of what was installed is 'essentially giving away'. Yes, the OEM price was a lot lower than the retail price, but OEM versions came without direct support, and at least for large OEMs, without all of the trappings of retail (wholesalers/distributors/cross marketing expenses/shelf rental/etc)
Maybe my judgement or efficiency is bad when I try to help my neighbor. Okay, whoopsie. Now apply that margin of error to a foundation whose decisions impact millions of people and possibly entire societies, possibly for generations. The unintended or possibly negative effects can be enormous and long-lasting.
And it’s not like we’re talking about some huge sacrifices here. Go from a 50K sqft house to a “modest” 10k sqft one. Don’t sail around on personal yachts. Fly commercial. Use Zoom. Simple stuff that would give them a lot more credibility. As it is, it’s a whole lot of “do as I say, not as I do.”
This has always been the sticking point for me when it comes to supporting large charities.
The way to fight climate change is to keep people at a low level of consumption, and spend his own money very slowly, very scarcely. And keep people with small cars, no Cadillac for any consultant.
In the 50's the Congress in US was getting suspicious about those foundations already. There were a investigation for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...
Are you sure about that?
Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?
If anyone deserves a bit of good faith it'd be the Gates family, it's probably not all pretty and perfect but I am convinced they're doing a lot of good.
You'll have to ask someone else about proof, but I imagine someone would've leaked something within these 25 years if they were running a tax evasion scheme or something else fishy.
So without hard proof I repeat: Let Bill have his toys, it's a piss in the bucket on a global scale and the donated 100 billion dollars will have offset that in some way or another many times over.
Let's just say my "sniff test" says good, and while not always right I think I am here and that's good enough for me.
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.
It seems that our notion of charity has been warped in such a way that it somehow doesn't count unless it's some enormous large-scale mission carried about by Charity, Inc for the benefit of some group of people far away. It's all very abstract, and that just creates room for fraud or exploitation.
Paying off a local person's debts or putting their child through college will probably be far more impactful and meaningful than sending your money off to some giant organization.
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 in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.
Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.
Wow. Just wow. Where the heck do you get this garbage from?
They can also lose or squander it. One of the Gates Foundation’s value adds is monitoring.
I’ve tried volunteering at certain orgs before, I filled out forms and literally they rejected me because they had no more staff to organise and oversee more volunteers.
If your solution is just invest it, well, the Gates Foundation may as well hang on to it (you think you can do better job than Buffet?) and setup a system to dole it out.
If the org has to find new uses for it, surely the Gates Foundation is in a better position to get that done?
Just googling it delivers enough critisism on worst level than you think Bill Gates Foundation is: "misusing funds, poor logistical planning, inadequate responses to specific crises, and even allegations of fraud and theft. "
Impact matters. Impact doesn't mean to just give money to some organization. Bill Gates actually played a significant role in Ebola vacination. Why? Because he/his team revisted why just giving out vacines was not enough.
Impact means helping as efficient as possible with the money.
And btw. a lot of other charities of this style (especially christians ones we all know) have also borderline ways of missusing believers to do their work. My aunt worked for nuns and got paid shit. This is now a problem for her retirment. Guess who pays that? Yeah the state...
That seems like an incredibly stupid way to spend money that has been eradicating diseases and saving lives in countries where food insecurity isn’t a choice.
Interestingly, I think AI, if its biggest boosters are correct, will end up being an absolute disaster for disadvantaged people.
The fact is that the vast majority of people in the current world are able to survive by selling their labor. If AI makes it so that, say, 50% of the world's population is no longer able to survive by selling their labor, that leads to massive serfdom, not some sort of Star Trek utopia.
And the thing that is shocking to me is that I haven't seen any (like, absolutely zero) credible explanation from AI boosters of how this dystopian end state is avoidable. I've either heard misdirection (e.g. yes, I agree AI is amazing at what it can do, but that doesn't explain how people will eat if they don't have jobs), vague handwavy-ness, or "kumbaya talk" about stuff like basic income that seems to completely ignore human nature.
I would absolutely love to be convinced I'm wrong, but that would need to start with at least something approaching a rational argument as to how the benefits of AI will be more equally distributed, and I have yet to hear that.
I think you’re on the right track, and, alongside the scale of service (reaching more people and more topics with an average level of advice or recognition), there’s a second component to it: scale of analysis. The newly possible solutions that AI advances have created include more than those famous models that answer broad prompts with art, copy, or code.
They also include focused, sometimes incomprehensible tasks which can only be done at an impactful scale due to the creation of deep learning and advances in compute-inexpensive language understanding, computer vision, and audio analysis:
A network of affordable, durable, solar powered, LoRa meshed audio sensors analyzed by a model to diagnose changes in the biodiversity of the Amazon and other rainforests (via ambient bird and animal calls across thousands of species). Visual analysis done on a cheap camera network estimates herd sizes of larger, silent animals.
A model that analyzes satellite imagery to evaluate major shifts in the industrial use of land, including tracking the national development of solar farms to evaluate nations receiving new energy grants.
A social analysis bot that tracks the rapid introduction of propaganda narratives or intentional agitation by foreign state actors (Russian bot farms), including building a map of associated IPs. Sadly, the social networks basically shrugged when given this data, so Msft gave it to LEAs.
These things are being done at a scale that would be incomprehensible to an organization of people.
Scale of analysis tasks are still, IMO the smartest use of AI today, despite the fashionable trend of GPT and the promise of AGI. A few models to spark ideas:
Recognition tasks with a dictionary too deep for human experts to grok when scaled up - like identifying thousands of wildlife
Recognition tasks with a timescale too rapid or sudden for human attention - Amazon Prime Vision predicting a QB sack in a football game before it happens
Recognition tasks when human vigilance or sensitivity would miss an occasional or slight occurrence - measuring eccentricities in electrical signals, vibrations, etc. to predict the failure of industrial equipment
It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.
Same goes for the others, if you have the means I think you should get a tutor or an editor as well.
However, if you’re choosing between nothing and an llm then the llm starts to become a great option.
I used to work rescue and if I had caught one of my coworkers asking an llm how to treat a patient I would have flipped.
But if I had rolled up to an incident and some Good Samaritan was trying to help out by using an llm that would be awesome!
Call a professional for help. Are they breathing, is their heart beating, are they bleeding.
If you haven’t called someone that can actually save the persons life no amount of first aid will help.
Unfortunately unless something is obviously preventing breathing as someone untrained theres not a lot you can do if they aren’t breathing.
Heart beating is pretty easy, chest compressions…
Bleeding again, pressure, and a lot of it to try to prevent the bleeding.
I would want to check what an AI response is to some situations but as long as it just tackles those cases it can probably only do more good than harm.
Id be more worried some good samaritan would start cutting people to try to “get an airway” or some nonsense. That would significantly increase mortality rates…
...this is a really interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true?
If we're talking about a business's core competency, I think the assertion makes sense. You need to be better than your competition.
But businesses also need a whole lot of people to work in human resources, file taxes, and so on. (Not to mention clean bathrooms, but that's less relevant to the generative AI discussion.) I can certainly imagine how having a world-class human resource team could provide a tire manufacturer with a competitive advantage. However, if those incredible HR employees are also more expensive, it might make more sense to hire below-average people to do your HR and invest more in tire R&D.
I think my sense is that the zeitgeist around AI (at least in business circles) is much more “The only way to ensure our continued survival is by embracing ai in all our core competencies” than “your tire company is going to have some adequate hr for a great price.”
An example that springs to mind is the arms race between tech CEOs over who can have more of their code base written by llms.
It’s amazing tech and it seems like it’s being marketed for all the wrong things based off of some future promise of super intelligence.
I really liked the article posted on here a week or two back along the lines of AI is a normal technology. Imo, the most sane narrative I’ve read about where this tech is at.
...if I was really cynical, I might say that one of the reasons you might want a "world class" HR team is in order to break the law, or come really close to the line, without getting caught, in a way that increases profits.
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.
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 inspiring virtue?
We may be closer to going to Mars, an extremely inhospitable place, at far greater expense than simply making the world we were evolved to survive in a little better.
It's not like it takes a lot of effort to find out the truth about that scumbag.
That’s what I mean. Like the housing shortage, food insecurity is trivially solved if voters cared about it. We don’t at almost every political level.
The only case I've experienced where it wasn’t was when someone in our area was actively listening in in emergency channels and trying to preempt ambulances. The issue was that they had training in the basics but often went past that in care they provided. Something that I believe is not covered by Good Samaritan laws.
I’m much more worried about folks like that than people who find themselves in an emergency and are trying to help.
At a much smaller scale I've thought about a small city place and concluded it just wasn't worth the effort vs. renting at a nice time of the year.
In fact the acceleration seems like it’s happening because it has suddenly become far easier to identify unnecessary deaths because someone who shall remain nameless here lied about fraud in US Aid and cancelled all their funding leaving millions of people to die unnecessarily deaths.
Gates decided to step up and prevent as many of those deaths as possible in his lifetime.
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."
That's amazing and I am very happy I live in a world where someone helped that many people, regardless of who you compare their accomplishments to.
If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.
Calling a few hundred reported cases a year globally "very, very common" is... a stretch. You have better odds of getting struck by lightning.
Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.
But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.
We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.
If you stop vaccinating, cVDPV will spread person to person. Some people carry virus for decades and it can become infectious at any time, many years after they were first vaccinated or infected. There will sparse but significant episodes until all humans who were vaccinated with OPV (or infected with the wild virus) have died.
but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it! It's ok if we don't eradicate the virus. The point is to prevent children from being paralyzed, and it works for that.
Also, Gates's pet project of a novel OPV has been shown to have caused a few confirmed cases of VAPP now, so it seems that project won't save OPV.
Essentially the best hope for eradicating polio within 20 years seems to be giving out a lot of OPV to places like Afghanistan and the DRC and forcing the local warlord to give it to the kids who need it (the latter has generally been a total failure of the Gates project). Once OPV gets wild-type and cVDPV outbreaks under control, a global switch to IPV seems safe to prevent future outbreaks. But, to get there, it seems a very aggressive OPV campaign is necessary compared to where we are now. It may take a militarized organization to do this, also, given the fact that you necessarily have to deal with tribal warlords. Shame we don't have USAID any more...
We aren't going to do that because it seems we generally aren't capable of doing that. So we're likely stuck with a decent amount of polio for a long time.
People also don't carry the virus for decades. That's a myth. People with a weakened immune system can get infected with polio even after a childhood vaccination, so that's probably where this myth comes from.
In some rural area of Africa they came across a car crash. Two people hop out and assist while a third drives off to notify someone to send emergency help.
An on device LLM might be very useful there depending on what it says…
I have shown up at scenes where people have googled what to do though and, you know what, it was super helpful.
If someone is dumb enough to perform a tracheotomy because an llm, google, or a passerby told them to. The issue isn’t any of those factors. That person is just so incredibly dumb as to be a danger to everyone around them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022663/
Immunocompromised hosts can shed infectious polio for their entire lives.
These outbreaks sometimes die on their own, but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't spread widely if we completely stopped vaccinating
People also do amazingly dumb things because a piece of software with a tone of authority told them to do it, even when they're not under duress. Look at the number of people who find themselves stranded or dead because they uncritically followed the directions of a navigation app, and who weren't in a panic state when they did it.
For all intents and purposes, yes, cVDPV is the same thing as WPV. There have actually been instances where cVDPVs have evolved into things that look quite a bit like WPV. Declaring victory over "type 2/3" because WPV is gone is meaningless when lots of people still get cVDPV and have exactly the same symptoms.
This took me about three clicks to find:
https://cagj.org/2020/04/the-nation-bill-gatess-charity-para...
Which sounds more like the BG I know from back in the days.
Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.
If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.
Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.
When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.
People with lots of money and power get their representatives to pass laws that reduce their taxes.
You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.
The government's tax income is allocated by the masses (in theory anyway). It is fair and dispassionate.
Philanthropy / charity is picking winners and losers based on your personal whims, and for many it is about gaining social capital.
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.
This is only ever true if you assume that government tax spending is 100% efficient, with nary a fraction of a cent being wasted. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.
Or a school admin system built for 100 million dollars and crap. They even spent a lot of money trying to prevent a open source client that solved a lot of the issues they had.
Maybe in absolute money it is less than the US. But remember US also have a lot more people.
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.
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?
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.
If we're talking specifically about the U.S. government, I suspect its decisions cause more suffering globally than they alleviate, though of course there are open philosophical questions inherent in any attempt to quantify suffering.
I think there is value to letting people allocate some percentage of their income directly to causes they are passionate about. Even if you assume the government is efficient and not bloated, and benevolent, this lets people contribute to causes without waiting for political consensus, or to smaller causes that would not be on the government's radar (yet) or ever. It's more pluralistic. It lets smaller causes bloom. It keeps me civically engaged.
On a personal note, I do take issue with the amounts spent on "defense" (which is often bombing people or threatening to directly or indirectly), and would rather help folks than bomb other folks.
Of course, you wouldn't expect them to be the ideal charity; they are explicitly not a charity. Anyone who is actually trying to be a charity should have little trouble using funds more charitably than any government in the world.
But guess what? If you give too much power to a position, people who want to abuse the power will try to get themselves there.
I wasn't upset that Obama was consolidating power because I thought Obama would abuse it. I'm upset that he consolidated power and then left it to whoever would come next, and then has the gall to be surprised that consolidating power under the Executive would undermine the power of the Legislature the moment a President who was willing to abuse said power was sworn in.
We're cooked because of the fucking team sports. Both parties have had the chance to reign in the Executive and neither has the balls to use it against their own guy
The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.
It is problematic even with good intentions.
People don't have time, expertise or usually even the motive to systematically examine ROI. They or someone they know has a 'good cause' and they support it. For example, endowments at their alma mater - likely a school for wealthy kids, new buildings for the hospital (that serves wealthy people), new research in diseases that are problems for the wealthy, etc.
They can't know without talking to people who have experience with poverty, for example, and those aren't the people coming to dinner tonight.
The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are. The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do. You should be a lot more worried about wealthy folks who don't donate to charity and just spend the money on big luxury yachts and the like, because these folks are essentially free-riding on everyone else.
Supporting government programs at the same time as you insist money could be better used elsewhere (at charities) is somewhat amusing.
Its probably not so much that government gets a pass as much as government is the organization that, by virtue of being a citizen, they own and control, so when things go wrong it is their own fault, and they really don't want to accept blame for their own faults. They would have to ask "How did I manage to fuck this up?", which is a hard question for most people to ask themselves.
When it is distinctly someone else's organization it's much easier to throw pointless shade to make one feel better about their own failings.
Where do you find these people? I've never met them. It seems like everyone complains about government waste and corruption - even when it's not happening!
Even in qualitative terms, the "consolidation" was incorrect. Congress abdicated its responsibilities, and the Federal agencies picked up the slack. They're not controlled _centrally_, it's not like Obama was ordering agencies to write particular rules.
We now see what the central consolidated control actually looks like.
Is there some data that shows that?
> The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do.
We can find public goods in common for many groups, but that's actually a bad example. Wealthy people care about clean air in their neighborhood; pollution is therefore concentrated in poor areas. They don't site the new incerator (or drug treatment facility) on the Upper East Side of Manhatten.
Many needs are specific to poverty. For example, wealthy people are not subject to malaria; they are no illiterate; they don't need toilets or labor rights; they can afford college for their kids regardless of tuition; they have unlimited access to safe, fresh, healthy food. They don't need more available and less expensive health care, so they donate to cancer research and high-tech therapy and not to the medical clinic in the poor neighborhood.
I also agree that wealthy folks spending their wealth on luxury yachts while the public suffers is also something to worry about. Who knew? Gargantuan wealth inequalities are mostly downside for everyone but the wealthy!
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. They could fund an incredible war chest for a lobbying apparatus who's sole purpose would be to create a more fair tax system. But no such thing happens.
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.
It's a gross comparison.
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.
How they spend their oil resources is also quite different. :)
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.
That may be true, but government (at least a democratic one) is just people getting together and doing things, so if you already have one you can save the effort of the community trying to organize a second community on top of the community they already have for no good reason.
> 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.
That literally tells of people getting together and doing things. These are not magical powers. They are simply community action. I suppose it highlights that people getting together and doing things isn't all sunshine and rainbows, despite your apparent dream for a world where there is only happiness, but such is reality.
I expect the aversion is that those who wish to donate to charity only want their friends, not entire communities, to benefit. The "trouble" with a community at large is that everyone is able to participate, whether you like them or not. That's not to say that a community cannot see a charitable benefit indirectly, but the key point is that they want to keep the primary benefit away from strangers.
That may be logical, but it doesn't happen. I've had unpaid parking tickets for long periods and nobody showed up at all, much less with guns. Where do you live that they jail you for it, much less go out and find you? Your local government must be very well-funded to have resources for that, not to mention having a fascist attitude - how popular is that with constituents?
> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.
It depends - many times it is the most or only effective way. It has decision-making mechanisms - including elected representatives, hearings, experts - and executive mechanisms including employees, equipment, contract managers, processes, institutional information such as maps of infrastructure, and loads of experience. Imagine some neighbors in NYC trying to put in just a new streetlight.
> 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.
It doesn't ignore it, but your prior comment repeats the Internet trope that that's what goverment is - a coercive mechanism with guns. That's only one narrow aspect - the great majority of what government does, and how society works, has nothing to do with that. It's for the outlaws, not for the great majority.
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 understanding the full context under which it is taking place?
But, again, that government is the very people we're talking about, at least as far as a democracy goes. Although even in the case of an authoritarian government, the individual authority is only as strong as the people are willing to go along with recognizing it, so it is not really that much different. No magic here, just people.
It's nothing to be proud of.
What you can be proud of is in REDUCING dictatorship, by removing power in centralised entities and giving it back to the individuals.
It is not - that would be some theoretical pure democracy, also called 'mob rule'. Democracy, as the word is actually used, requires universal human rights which protect the minority. For example, freedom of speech means the majority can't control the minority's speech, whether they like it or not.
Democracy also includes separation of powers, usually between legislature, executive, and judicial, which prevents the concentration of power.
> It's nothing to be proud of.
It's only something to be proud of if we make it that way.
The government is the only one with a legal monopoly on violence; it redistributes resources in the society and it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.
It's a recipe for disaster.
Government is a recipe for disaster? Democratic government has worked for centuries without disaster.
> it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.
Yes, that is the trick of every human endeavor, the great ones and the failures. It depends on you and me - let's make it happen.