> Submit a question below and we will answer the best ones in the near future.
No you won't. You will select some questions you like, and answer them. They will not necessarily be the "best" (whatever that means... according to what criteria??) or the ones most people would like to see answered. Just the ones you feel like answering.
A more democratic system would be to let people vote for questions, and promise to answer the ones with the most upvotes. Or maybe (why not) offer to answer ALL questions.
That might lead to better (or more challenging) questions, or they might find themselves obligated to answer 10 variations of "Questiony McQuestionFace." Online polls are weird.
I'm not sure they're efforting to sell themselves as open, it more feels like people are putting them on a pedestal because of Bill Gates' financial success and notability, and giving them unchecked admiration - however they will have a unique world perspective and that's important to hear so we can contrast it with where we're at in our own understanding.
Not even I have the patience/desire/stomach to answer most of the questions the general public could ask about me, and I'm a not a famous billionaire with a well-known business past and well-known philanthropic present of whom, naturally, the masses might inquire much harder questions.
"Are you imposing your values on other cultures?" and "Is it fair that you have so much influence?" are close to the touch question I expected them to not have. The big complaint I see from the left is that billionaires get to determine the direction of philanthropy--two unelected people get to impose their ideas about public education, for example.
That said, while those questions are close to the big tough question, I don't think their answers really addressed them in an adequately thoughtful way.
(I think the Gates Foundation is mostly making good choices with their philanthropy, but maybe we just got lucky. How about [Soros|Koch] (pick whichever you like least)?)
None of the 10 questions listed is "tough", and at least one (out of ten, so 10%) is of tabloid level: "What happens when the two of you disagree" -- the answer includes the nugget that there's a sculpture in front of their house, of two birds looking ahead in the same direction. Isn't that something.
If one doesn't like the idea of Internet voting or answering all questions, then let them hold a press conference with real journalists. But this is not it; this is nothing; this is a show with pictures of the couple laughing and showing a serious face in front of poor people; this is just marketing.
An interesting question would be, how do you justify speciesism[1].
When they describe how they're "optimists" and how the world is getting "better", they're obviously only talking about humans. The world is getting much much worse for every species of living things, except (some) humans, so the only way to consider that the world is indeed getting better in general is to consider that humans are so superior to any other living thing that any amount of suffering / extinction of other species is more than offset by the marginal utility we get out of it.
If you're religious, maybe your religion offers a way to accept that (depending on the religion).
But if, like the Gates (or me), you're atheists, how does this work exactly?
I love the self-awareness in their response to question #8 - we are fortunate that “the king is just” in the case of the foundation, but it is very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about at such a large scale.
Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.
The argument is, why do we as a society allow people to amass wealth on the scale of nations. Instead, perhaps that wealth should be democratically owned, and then put towards what the society needs, rather than what one person decides.
OK give a single example that is not related to raw material extraction or power generation. (A company receiving massive government subsidies to not go bankrupt would not be considered a good example at least in my opinion.)
Most European public transportation companies have a majority stake by the government, and they work exceptionally well in executing their mission. A huge amount of banks are government-owned and they're as profitable as their private counterparts.
Most public transportation companies are subsidized. I never dealt with gov. bank that was run well but there are might be some that are. I def never heard of gov. owned software company that was doing well though.
That is the whole point. State-owned companies make total sense when their goal is to ensure some common benefit (like mass transport, public utilities, health care etc), as opposed to making profit. With that in mind, subsidies are logical, because the alternative is to have a purely state-owned system (like police or military) which has no income except for government subsidies.
Essentially, if you think of government subsidies to private companies as assistance in making profit (which happens often when a government wants to promote a certain industry, even if it's only in form of a tax cut), having commercial companies to take care of common utilities is a way to assist the government paying for those utilities.
VW, the largest car company in the world, is partly state-owned. Same for Deutsche Bahn, KfW bank and a few others. They don't always work perfectly, but they sure can compete or are even market leaders.
VW is not run by government appointed managers and gorvernment does not have control of the votes. Now even if it did I doubt we want to use VW as an example of good corp. citizen.
VW basically does what everybody else is doing (see news about Daimler and BMW). The state-owned aspect changes nothing, it just says that 30% of VWs profits go into the pockets of the German state of Niedersachsen instead of the pockets of a private investor.
That was the key point of the original discussion about Gates' money and rising inequality, so the example is very valid.
It's valid in a sense that if government does not control voting rights and plays no role in day to day operations sure there is no difference. If you start taxing the stock and transferring stock to government eventually government will have control of all entities though.
>They don't always work perfectly, but they sure can compete or are even market leaders.
Most of the time it's because these companies are government-approved monopoly (no other company can enter the market) or because they're heavily subsidised using taxes (no other company can enter the market practically because competing against someone who you fund at the same time is impossible and because the prices are below the actual expenses) and are actually losing huge amounts of money. Typically railways all around Europe are not profitable at all.
Volkswagen is a very special case, but you're partially right. I'd say it's an exception to the rule though.
Yeah. I said he was partially right because it's true that the government had some influence in the past so VW can technically be considered a success.
> We can be a society that ensures social needs are met while allowing vast concentrations of wealth.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.
the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.
I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
That is, historically, false. Concentration of wealth always ends up implying power, whether soft or hard. Having such amount of power outside of democratic institutions is a threat .
This is, historically, true: in communist countries with “equal sharing of misery”, power and wealth was 100% concentrated into the hands of a few elites or outright tyrants.
Because we, as a society, allow people to do things that we don't like. We aren't usually very good at it, but when you consider that it affords people the luxuries of doing things that others might not approve of, like having a relationship or marriage with a member of the same sex, or creating video games with unpopular themes, or creating rap music, or burning the American flag, etc.
If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.
While you are thinking that "we" shouldn't allow "them" to amass that type of wealth, remember that the average household income in the United States is $60,0000 a year. If you are an average experienced developer in a major city in the US - especially if you are part of a dual income household -you are probably in the 85-90th percentile.
Meaning when people start voting in policies that "tax the rich", you will probably be considered one of "them" by the average working class American.
Look no further than the new tax code that basically hurt the "rich" in places like CA and NY.
1) Why is it their money? Were the processes that funneled all that money to a single person, fair? Or are they overcompensating certain individuals? Even if we think "the deal is done" in this case, should we change things for the future?
2) We impose many restrictions on use of money. Some things can't be bought at any price; others already have restrictions (e.g. campaign contribution limits). Are all of these inadmissible?
If someone in their garage invented teleportation or a cure for cancer or a battery that ran on happy thoughts, why would it not be their money?
I'm not saying this is the case I Bill Gates but I'm not sure of any other way to encourage risk taking at the bottom except the promise of obscene wealth.
I think the point is, we're extraordinarily lucky that he is choosing to use his money for good rather than for evil (for whatever definition of good and evil exists). The idea that the public should not be involved with determining what counts as "public good" is super risky.
The problem with relying on philanthropy to fund the public good is that we the people are counting on the philanthropist to have goals that align with our goals. Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.
This is ostensibly one of the reasons "we" choose to democratically organize a government to fund the public good: So that we're not so reliant on the whims of a few rich people. It's to avoid the nightmare scenario where the worlds richest person decides instead to use his money for evil. Not saying that government can't use their power for evil, just that, at least in theory, we can vote in new government. We can't vote for different World's Richest People.
This is deeply strange to me. If he wanted to support an evil empire or grow a petroleum multinational, you admit you'd have no say. But Gates wants to serve the public good -- now suddenly you're in charge. Seems backwards, at the very least.
"The idea that the public should not be involved with determining what counts as "public good" is super risky". You are involved in democratic process that drives the laws being passed which not only can determine "public good" but actually enforce behavior that will maximize "public good".
> Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.
Actually, you did get that dice roll too. Look up the house of Saud.
Imagine how much further we could be if Microsoft didn't spend all that money subverting open source efforts, and spending infinite money to create a new generation of crippled developers.
It's an interesting question I know a lot of people for whom desire to unseat MS was a major driver in the amount of effort they dedicated to various open source proj. Would truly be interesting to see how things would look if MS did not reach it's dominant position. (One possible outcome could have being that IBM would've remained in it's dominant position).
There is an argument that the tax breaks mean that some portion of the money is really the public's and should serve the public interest. When you give a million to a charity and get a tax break for 250k or 300k or whatever, is that money really yours? If you hadn't given it you would only have 700k or so, not 1m. You would not have all of it if you hadn't made the gift.
Apart from any philosophical considerations about whether the money is "really yours", this evaluation is already built in to the 501(c)(3) process because the IRS reviews charities before granting them that status to see if they serve a public purpose. Not all not-for-profit organizations quality. The status can also be revoked if the IRS determines that an organization isn't meeting the 501(c)(3) criteria in the future.
You can't get the tax deduction by donating money to organizations that haven't passed through this review process.
At this scale you you would have 1m of stock that you would not have to sell if you didn't want to donate that 1m to charity. How that would make things better?
It's so trivially obvious and endlessly discussed that things are taken away from individuals by the society for the greater good, for example with taxes, that your comment has no substance and gives no insight.
He is not trading in money he is trading in ownership to give to charity. There are many individuals that are not doing that and for the most part no country is taxing owning stock.
I avoided focussing on the financial aspect, because even ownership of things/lands/rights can be, and is taken away from individuals by the society under certain conditions.
It is intellectually lazy and moot to say everybody is free to do what they want with what they have (be it money or not) because that's not how we live nor want to live.
A proposal to take from an inidivual for the greater good can be worth a discussion. Just crying out for extremist, reality-ignoring individualism is not an acceptable comment worthy of HN, in my eyes.
Coming from USSR no surprise to me that left leaning individuals deem it acceptable to determine what is worthy or not worthy to be discussed. Those certain conditions are very narrow and in societies were they are not narrow USSR, North Korea etc. things have not worked out too well.
There are successful countries with very high taxes and other means by which the society takes from individuals. Just the amount of how much is taken is not an important metric. It does not matter how much is taken, but under what circumstances, i.e. is it equal law and equally binding for everybody, was it decided in a democratic way, is it used for what it is intended for, and can it practically and effectively be challenged in a fair trial?
Please, let's discuss proposals, but reasonably and with thoughtful arguments, and not with "? It's his money that he actually decided to give away why should you or I have a say in it?".
Nope because people can have tax free access to their holdings by taking out loans against the stock. For individuals in question their stock appreciates a lot faster compared to the % they have to pay for the loan.
Article 106 of the german Grundgesetz/constitution states that in Germany there is an ownership tax. It was used until 1997 when the former practice was ruled unlawful, but no adopted form of collection was introduced, while the government still has the right to collect ownership tax. There is an ongoing debate about reinstating the collection.
AFAIK, France is currently collecting ownership tax.
The USSR and North Korea suck because they are autocratic, corrupted regimes, not because of single aspects of how they run their economies.
But even beside specific examples, if we decide that it is a good thing, then we can introduce new law.
As I understand it, Netherlands have a wealth tax: rather than tax capital gains, net ownership is taxed at a 30% rate of assumed gain. So essentially you pay 0.6 to 1.5% of your shares, non-primary housing etc. in wealth tax depending on size of your assets.
very reasonable system (although can be easy circumvented by moving). It would not have prevented anyone from accumulating
the wealth that everyone is complaining about in this thread
though.
It's as simple as society gives his money value, and American society is getting anxious and resentful.
As an abstraction, I like to think of money as crystalized human effort. Society makes decisions by the power of individual behavior in aggregate.
A bunch of people buy a ~new thing~. Over time and at scale, society creates a river of money towards the ~new thing~. Its depth and breadth calibrated to reward other people for working towards bringing that ~new thing~ to society. Entrepreneurs gather marketing, sales and laborers to build a village by the river. This is society's intuitive understanding of business.
Society's intuitive understanding of competition between villages is that it occurs as an innovation arms race. Lower prices, better products are the result.
The experienced village builder learns that the best way to win is to divert the river into a cave and build a moat around the entrance.
Patent portfolios, information asynchrony, non compete employee contracts, vendor lock-in, yearly subscriptions, Byzantine government regulations and a hundred other things deepen your moat.
These kinds of moats improve your margin -- but in a different way than what society is used to. It isn't resulting in better products at lower prices, it's making competition more difficult.
Other experienced builders try to take a tiny drop from every river, for every transaction. They're starting to build their villages vertically and profit from the organically grown river network. Exploiting insider knowledge on the foreign exchange market, transaction fees, whatever.
These kinds of businesses intercept money that would normally return to society when the people in the villages go home.
The village builders have begun consolidating and moving upstream, getting closer to society. Society has BENEFITED. Their desires are now easier and faster to fulfill than ever before!
And yet.. society (remember, people in aggregate) is starting to get weary. Most people are restless and anxious, despite full employment, stock market blowing up, etc. Your average person can feel the reservoir getting lower, while other people are filling lakes.
"U.S. consumer spending rises; savings drop to 10-year low".
Money is power. Your average run of the mill person is slowly shifting from a belief in the Virtuousness of the American System, Land of Opportunity to one of Powerlessness within inevitability of whatever that system hands you.
Ultimate power is derived from a mandate from a masses, and most people on some level know that! They just feel like they're strapped in to a slow motion train wreck, and they're afraid of how it's all going to end.
Just my opinion on why people might have the audacity to discuss and critique how some billionaires spend their money.
You are prob right just after living first hand in society that faced what happens after you run out of "other people's money" to spend (USSR) I am really averse to this line of thinking I guess.
> it is very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about at such a large scale.
This is my biggest critique about charities, but if there are transparent rules and processes that can be fixed.
But in general, I think the govt would be a in a better position to serve their people than charities would.
While some might feel that it is unfair for the market to decide who gets billions and who gets nil, democracy isn't perfect either. Frankly I feel more comfortable having Bill Gates picking what causes are just than Donald Trump.
I’m not assuming your politics here, but replace Bill Gates with Koch Brothers, and Donald Trump with Barack Obama, would you still feel comfortable with your statement?
I'm not the GP, but I'm comfortable saying I'd prefer for people to decide what to do with their own money than have politicians do it for them, yes — even if they put it toward causes I don't personally consider wise.
I use to believe that the Koch Brothers were the boogeyman. No, I don't agree with many of the politicians they support, but they are also donating to causes like criminal justice reform, getting rid of civil asset forfeiture. They have spoken out against the demonization of "other". They have worked with the ACLU to abolish mandatory minimums.
On the other hand, they have funded studies that try to dispel that global warming is real, and they have been accused of having undue influence on colleges they give grants to.
The problem, of course, is not Bill Gates but the many other billionaires, who are less enlightened.
There are also billionaires who use their fortune to actively influence politics (in a way that is probably mostly beneficial to themselves - such as the Koch family supporting Trump). There must also be lots of billionaires who, just by passively remaining billionaires and taking no broader responsibility, add to the problem.
The Koch Brothers originally were outspoken opponents of Trump. But like many Republicans, they seem to see him as a "useful idiot" as long as he can get their policies passed.
I'm making no judgement - here at least - on whether Trump is an idiot or not.
> it is very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about
In this case the cause they 'care about' is getting the most good out of each dollar. We have to ask why democratic/government giving does not have the same goal. Answering this question may very well lead to the conclusion that having some non-democratically controlled donors is better for everyone.
>Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.
Instead of trying to tackle problems of wealth inequality in such a roundabout bureaucratic way, why not just start directly dividing income up more evenly with your employees to begin with?
Arguing is not the same as doing something about it. Gates has shown he can take on problems he cares about by using his money and get results. Why doesn't he put money/resources into making the tax system more fair rather than just saying it should be different.
Buffet, Gates etc. always say they should be taxed more but I haven't heard of them actively supporting candidates and causes that will actually do this. If they really want it to change they have a lot of power (money) to influence politicans and help make it happen.
very undemocratic for the wealthy to solely pick causes they care about
It's undemocratic, but is it actually worse? Looking at the results of democratic processes, I'm not so sure the answer is yes. Democracy optimizes for the popular, the sensational, the scandalous. The hard work on the ground that Bill & Melinda put in doesn't square with that model. The public has the attention span of a toddler; they just aren't captivated by a decades-long vaccination and prevention campaign against malaria or river blindness.
The top 400 taxpayers pay about $100 billion in income each year. Let's use that as a rough proxy for how much income billionaires make (there's about 550 billionaires in the U.S., but billionaires won't necessarily be the highest-income people in any given year). That $100 billion is taxed at 23% (largely because of lower taxation of capital gains). Even if you taxed their income at 50%, that's just $27 billion more into the Treasury. It's nothing. And the 23% tax rate arises out of a conscious decision to tax capital gains at a lower rate--something that almost every Western country does.
Now look at the top 10% (minus the top 1%). That's the income range of $100-350k. They have 25% of the U.S. income--$4 trillion. In Europe, these folks are taxed like rich people. In Germany, individual income above 52,000 Euro is taxed at 42% (the highest marginal rate is 45%). In the U.S., these people have been redefined as "middle class." The tax rate is just 24% up to $150,000. If you taxed these folks as the Germans do, you could raise maybe half a trillion dollars in extra revenue.
Talking about the tax rate of billionaires is a red herring. It's not tax cuts for billionaires that are keeping us from increasing NIH spending, etc. It's tax cuts for ordinary rich people.
Depending on the state you may not even have state taxes. In most states the top marginal rate with state taxes will be under 30%. Also, Germany has 20% VAT, plus health and social security contributions which I’m not counting.
I doubt the top 10% of earners come from these "most states." I presume strong correlation between income and high cost-of-living high state tax states.
An income of $150,000 puts you at the top 13% in New York, and the top 12% in Dallas (no state income tax) and the top 14% in Seattle (no state income tax). The income distribution isn’t as skewed by state as you’d think, and some of the largest states have very low state taxes (Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania).
I wonder how Bill Gates can use a huge yacht for its own enjoyment, while at the same time spending money to fight climate change. I'd be curious to know his point of view.
It is not about "asking" then to abandon it. It is about a mismatch between what they say and what they actually do (if you look close enough).
But is it too much of an ask to think that some one who seem to be so dedicated to such causes, won't actually do everything that is in their powers (including giving on luxuries), to advance their cause?
at least the transaction involves the yatchmaker... who, while rich, wasn’t as ridiculously rich, and in the end the transaction came down to the pockets of people who live around the yatchmaker a little bit. Not perfect but it’s something.
Free rider problem. People locally optimize for their own benefit and those same people can rightfully decry the effect. We are all hypocrites from time to time. Let’s not let hypocrisy be a reason to discount a thought or idea. The validity of the idea is not based on whether or not proponent is beyond reproach.
I think his answer would be to admit to selfishness. But to also maybe point out that he has trouble responsibily spending his current endowment and his yacht isn't preventing the foundation from getting the budget it needs and can spend.
There are people who try to be more radical also with regards to limiting their own lifestyle, e.g. Toby Ord founded Giving what we can [1] and is giving away a large proportion of his monthly salary (more than one third).
I personally admire such people, but maybe that is not the right way for everyone. If you consider helping others as all-or-nothing choices in the end less people may be willing to help, so being a bit more lenient likely has overall beneficial effects.
Maybe one of the most controversial statements they make is: "In our U.S. work, one premise we start with is that a college degree or career certificate is critical to a successful future. In short, a college education should be a pathway to prosperity for all Americans."
I wouldn't dispute that having enough skill/education to offer value to the global/US marketplace is critical, but I have some doubt about whether what we call "college education" is the way really large numbers of people (not just the elite) can obtain that skill/education.
Maybe we're over investing in an outdated, inefficient process and it will never be good enough.
You don’t even need to be near a campus to go to college these days. It can all be done online provided the infrastructure are there. I see two critical problems to address and a third more radical option.
1-Invest in bridging the last mile gap for broadband.
2-Clear headed planning to address the fundamental employment issues undermining labor/per capital wealth.
—-there aren’t enough jobs to employ everyone given current market conditions. Ie lower the full time/OT line to 20-30 hours or so and make better support systems (healthcare for all, housing projects for all that aren’t crimes dens)
—-make programs to help college students prepare, correctly for the labor force.
It always amazes me how pessimistic people can be in terms of where the world is heading, especially people who tend towards populism (on the left and the right). In debates, I eventually point out actual data about living conditions[1]. Looking at data instead of news stories, it becomes clear that extreme poverty, vaccination, child mortality and education are vastly improving for a majority of humans on this planet. This leaves aforementioned populists with nothing to argue about but the validity of the data they are seeing, unable to reconcile reality with their world view.
For me the pessimism stems from the fact that having 8 billion or so well off consumers is not environmentally sustainable. We are polluting on a grand scale. Plastics, toxins, and trash are doing great harm to the environment. Right now it appears we are headed for a crash. Maybe not in my lifetime but within 100 years or so will the planet be so polluted that living in it is hellish?
This assumes that humanity will not find a way to reduce, recycle, convert, or find better uses for trash in the next 100 years.
Coming from a country where nearly everything that can be recycled gets recycled, and having seen this change take place in a span of less than 30 years, your assumption does seem a bit too pessimistic.
The same kind of pessimistic assumption underlines the ridiculously high death tolls that people often predict will be caused by global warming. Most of those deaths are attributed to infectious diseases such as malaria. This assumes that humanity will not find a way to prevent and/or cure such diseases on a large scale in the next 100 years.
The reverse is also true. You assume humanity will find a way to deal with the trash. Not just the trash that will be made but also the trash that has already found it's way into the oceans.
The number of people who recycle a lot is quite small in relation to the total population. Is the increase in recycling enough to offset the increase in trash and toxins? I'm skeptical that this will happen soon enough.
Since you come from a country where nearly everything is recycled I'm going to assume you come from a wealthy country. If so then you, yes you, consume far more than most humans. You are a drain on the resources of the planet. Your consumption leads to strip mining, deforestation, and industrial pollution. This damage has been conveniently shipped off to poor regions of the world but the ultimate cause is consumers like you and I. Your recycling hardly makes up for the damage that is done for your consumption.
“If the levels of consumption that...the most affluent people enjoy today were replicated across even half of the roughly 9 billion people projected to be on the planet in 2050, the impact on our water supply, air quality, forests, climate, biological diversity, and human health would be severe.”
No, I don't assume that humanity will find a way to fix all those problems in a timely manner.
I'm pointing out that both are assumptions pulled out of thin air, and that we should not be too quick to get all pessimistic (or optimistic) based on mere assumptions.
People 100 years ago could not have had imagined the kind of technological and sociopolitical changes that we take for granted now. What more right do we have to make assumptions about what we'll have 100 years from now? Heck, I can't even trust anyone who says what will happen 10 years from now, whether good or bad.
Let's stop pretending to be prophets and actually start working on the problems. Only then will we know which of the assumptions were correct.
It's not prophecy. It's a fact that at current trends things are looking dire. The trend may change but only if people heed the warning. I don't know what will happen in 100 years. I do know that without a significant change in behavior/technology soon then a crash is coming.
100 years ago, some people made dire predictions that most cities would be buried in 9 feet of horse shit if people didn't act quickly to fix their reliance on horse-drawn carriages.
A quarter century later, cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, averting the horse shit crisis. Not because people heeded the warning, but simply because cars were faster and sexier. Of course, we've just traded CO2 for horse shit, and now we've got a different problem.
If history is any indication of what will happen in the future, we'll probably trade some other type of pollution for CO2 this century, and then another type.
Hence, the “current trends” portion of what I wrote. Also, history is not a guide in this matter. The creation of new tech depends on knowledge and it is not predictable whether or not enough new knowledge will be gained to offset current trends. It’s possibke but looking to the past is not an indicati9n that this will happpen in a particular area.
Also, I was talking about solely about CO2. I was talking about deforestation, massive dumping of toxins, plastics and other forms of waste. It is without a doubt that at current trends humanity’s future is dire,
We in the developed world are working hard to make sure we won't have to replicate the levels of consumption over so many people; both by reducing our natality levels way below replacement, and by encouraging wars in other places.
If you include all sentient beings in your analysis there's no question that the world has gotten _much_ worse over the past 50+ years. The number of animals living lives of unending torture has gone up and up during that time period. Any gains made by humans are a blip in the statistics.
I'm somewhat hopeful that we are in the middle of the time when that start changing, but until it does, I think it's quite clear that things have gotten worse, not better.
My point exactly. We are not alone. We are surviving on top of a holocaust the like of which was never seen and never even imagined. And we're also poisoning the well and destroying the future for everyone, our own species included.
I wonder if they could quantify the human suffering and death that has happened as their proprietary surveillance operating system has betrayed it's users to totalitarian governments worldwide and just how vital it has been in eroding the constitutional protections of the fourth amendment by essentially backdooring everyone that uses it.
Bill Gates was never a good guy, and I don't really give a Fuck if most of you reading this don't like me saying this because you forgot what the word hacker really means because there are too many businesspeople here pretending to be hackers here instead of the other way around.
Well, you can use their OS, which has for years tried to undermine the free and open source communities, but you have to pay for it. And you have to agree for them to spy on you. And you're poor?? That is okay, just give up more of your privacy rights and we already sold all your data, so you will be a good consumer now.
You run Windows. Your mind belongs to us. Your ability to think beyond .NET and C# will soon diminish, and we will give you some mediocre job now based on your mediocre proprietary skills, and your role as a tech worker now be to spread your love for MS to everyone, because if you don't we will stop paying you, and you will have no food and no home. And you will not know how to use anything but Windows.
And you have to agree for them to spy on you. And you're poor?? That is okay, just give up more of your privacy rights and we already sold all your data, so you will be a good consumer now
This is hilarious. What OS do you think Google, Facebook and the NSA run?
At the end of the day Gates wanted to sell products for money, straight up cash transaction, take it or leave it. Google et al are sly and underhanded, you don’t know the price upfront, they try to turn you into the product...
You mean, like if I were to go buy a laptop pretty much anywhere, and they just include Windows in the laptop price??? I don't see how that is any different. I can go buy an unlocked Android phone at Costco for $199 that has Android 7.1.1. I know that I am paying for the hardware, and the OS is free.
So, you are basically trying to say that proprietary is better because we don't know what the open source version costs? Well, you have the source code... so I guess you may not be willing to look inside, but the other one you don't have the option to even look.
Compile it and run it, you are inventory of Google for compiling free source code that you can modify however you want? Where do you get the source code like that to compile for Windows?
@gaius: Now I'm blocked from responding to you. The only source code I could find for Microsoft, is for debugging, and doesn't give you access to all the source. You have to use a smart card that they send as well.
This is so stupid. I’ve used windows exclusively as my home desktop machine and I work with Linux boxes all day at work using a MacBook. You can run windows at home and also know how to use Linux.
I'm not going to argue that because Bill Gates has done so much good since leaving Microsoft he's a saint, if you don't argue that because of his history with Windows and MS he's the devil - deal?
How about we meet in the middle and agree that in terms of impact and spectrum he is a pretty amazing example of what you can experience in a single life?
As an aside, Microsoft's failure in the mobile world combined with the pervasiveness of both phones and their vector for surveillance suggests that others are far more responsible for the concerns you voice. I do agree with you that when we have one or a few players choking key points the system is rife for abuse, whether that's the device, the network provider or the OS manufacturer.
"I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero" - Bill Gates on Snowden. A question I'd love to hear any rich person answer explicitly: is it impossible for a criminal to be a hero?
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has a very different view on this than anyone reading this site. He would have doubtless been exposed to the realities of the US government for decades.
In press interviews, he's also expressed criticism toward Apple about the San Bernadino iPhone case and about the goal of deploying end-to-end encryption that nobody can break.
(I work on these issues on what's apparently the other side from him.)
A subsequent example on cryptocurrency anonymity (which is a topic that's often controversial here, but with relatively few people taking it as far as Gates did):
I think the implication is that he broke a law that Gates agreed with and thought was just. I imagine Gates worked with intelligence agencies a lot at MS and it makes sense he'd share some of their world views.
That answer is so silly that it's difficult to imagine that it isn't just very poorly phrased. Especially considering that Microsoft was found to have broken the law on Gates' watch (ok, sure, Gates probably wouldn't claim to be a hero).
Anyway, plenty of heros broke the law. Revolutionaries, civil rights activists etc. I'm sure Gates and many other rich people would agree that many such figures qualify as heroes.
That of course doesn't mean that everyone who breaks the law, every revolutionary, every civil rights activist is a hero, far from it, and crucially does not get us any closer to deciding whether Snowden is a hero.
Then he should say the same thing about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all the other founders of this country. Compared to Snowden, they were much bigger criminals and their movement and war were extremely violent with many deaths. While they were far from perfect, I do think the leaders who formed this country were heroes. It's also a fact that they were criminals. So, I don't know. Is it impossible for a criminal to be a hero? I'd like to talk to any person who answers 'no,' yet reveres the founding fathers as heroes.
>We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply.
The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster.
Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.
It should take a lot of nerve to open this way. Sympathy, or I guess we call it empathy, who knows, cannot be achieved through optimism alone. The unfettered optimism in this intro seems tone-deaf. I think it undermines the effort they make to the contrary.
I'd argue the exact opposite. It is all too easy to just throw up your hands and say "The world is fucked; there isn't anything to do about it". Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.
HN readers are quick to be enthusiastic in celebrating urgent acknowledgement and critical response in the case of server outages and security breaches. Why limit this regard to that?
Sure, saying there isn’t anything we can do about it is irresponsible, and so is the lack of nuance of “the world is fucked”.
Is this the only alternative you can imagine?
>Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.
That is not what optimism is.
If you can not identify problems, you are multitudes more unlikely to solve them. My critique is as basic as that.
They're optimistic, but not brashly so. Bill and Melinda Gates have literally saved millions of children. If that doesn't give them a reason to be optimistic, I don't see what would.
Just because Americans are shooting up schools doesn't mean that the lives of people in some other parts of this planet haven't improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years alone.
That may be a contrast with a widespread negative view. Much of current media are dominated by negative stories. For instance, every time I’ve tuened on local news the top stories are murders or rapes. Everytime he can Trump says the people are worse off and etc. anything that doesn’t fit the “wallpaper” stands out.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if Bill Gates and say Warren Buffet spent a ridiculous amound of money on lobbying, in order to drastically change the political landscape.
The first 2 questions remind me of the (fantastic) book I'm reading Doing Good Better. This is basically effective altruism.
This book argues that a dollar goes a lot farther in the third world. (Obviously.)
It also has a great story about how money spent on educational resources can have almost no effect while money spent on deworming (yes, worms) can greatly increase educational results. (Not so obvious.) This is a third world example but its fairly obvious the problems with US education aren't' resource or efficiency based.
I can't be the only one who wishes they spent nothing in the US on Education and direct it all to homelessness, so they can stop screwing up Education. Common Core is horrendous.
I am irked to no end how off the mark their entire foundation is. It's like the person with the least imagination on earth, got handed billions of dollars.
What is the lowest hanging fruit of all time? Right, the night-time ads on TV with poor children in a foreign country.
What is the least imaginative way of helping a developed nation? 'Better education'. Sigh.
Really? We just need to stop children from dying, educate the parents, and everything will be fine?
It's not that people are pessimistic - they are just REALISTIC, about what a crock of shit they're being handed, and Bill and Melinda's answer is to meet Steven Pinker and go 'hey, statistics show that everything's better than it ever was!' My god... We're talking billionaires, having no ideas, no imagination, and no idea that they have neither, and wondering why things kind of suck?
Because people with no ideas, no imagination, are the ones who get to make billions of dollars in our society? Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with it Bill...
If you had cancer and didn't know it, and someone named Melinda came and gave you a nice bed, some pain-pills and told you she cared, you'd feel a bit better.
Except you'd still have cancer.
When someone got you to a doctor, who operated on you quickly and saved your life, you'd not only consider the person who got you to the doctor insightful, but far more helpful than Melinda, and be rightfully outraged at Melinda's well-meaning but clueless efforts to help you.
I am the person getting you to the doctor, Melinda is Melinda Gates, and the insightful bit is figuring out what cancer is, and what a doctor would be, in this metaphor.
Melinda and Gates think it's lack of education in the USA. You tell me.
alexashka- pity you were downvoted. I upvoted you. I agree with all that you said. What you stated are uncomfortable truths that not many want to confront.
Bill is not really a smart guy in my standing. May be one could argue that he is smart in a narrow band - that of making money. I certainly can think of a few of my acquaintances who can be more creative than him in ways to "help" others.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadNo you won't. You will select some questions you like, and answer them. They will not necessarily be the "best" (whatever that means... according to what criteria??) or the ones most people would like to see answered. Just the ones you feel like answering.
A more democratic system would be to let people vote for questions, and promise to answer the ones with the most upvotes. Or maybe (why not) offer to answer ALL questions.
Internet "democratic voting" sounds great in theory but history has shown that in practice, it just gets hijacked.[1]
Basically, the top most upvoted question would end up being, "What is Bill and Melinda's favorite sex position?" ... or something similar.
[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/52524/15-polls-hijacked-inter...
That said, while those questions are close to the big tough question, I don't think their answers really addressed them in an adequately thoughtful way.
(I think the Gates Foundation is mostly making good choices with their philanthropy, but maybe we just got lucky. How about [Soros|Koch] (pick whichever you like least)?)
If one doesn't like the idea of Internet voting or answering all questions, then let them hold a press conference with real journalists. But this is not it; this is nothing; this is a show with pictures of the couple laughing and showing a serious face in front of poor people; this is just marketing.
An interesting question would be, how do you justify speciesism[1].
When they describe how they're "optimists" and how the world is getting "better", they're obviously only talking about humans. The world is getting much much worse for every species of living things, except (some) humans, so the only way to consider that the world is indeed getting better in general is to consider that humans are so superior to any other living thing that any amount of suffering / extinction of other species is more than offset by the marginal utility we get out of it.
If you're religious, maybe your religion offers a way to accept that (depending on the religion).
But if, like the Gates (or me), you're atheists, how does this work exactly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism
On a side note, please don't make people ask for essential information, just state it right away.
Just last week, Gates himself was arguing that he and other billionaires need to be paying significantly more taxes.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires-significant...
There's a huge number of examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_compa...).
Essentially, if you think of government subsidies to private companies as assistance in making profit (which happens often when a government wants to promote a certain industry, even if it's only in form of a tax cut), having commercial companies to take care of common utilities is a way to assist the government paying for those utilities.
That was the key point of the original discussion about Gates' money and rising inequality, so the example is very valid.
Most of the time it's because these companies are government-approved monopoly (no other company can enter the market) or because they're heavily subsidised using taxes (no other company can enter the market practically because competing against someone who you fund at the same time is impossible and because the prices are below the actual expenses) and are actually losing huge amounts of money. Typically railways all around Europe are not profitable at all.
Volkswagen is a very special case, but you're partially right. I'd say it's an exception to the rule though.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "social needs" here. you could be referring to a specific level on the mazlow hierarchy, if so, I'd like to know why you pick this specific level as the benchmark. or you might be referring to some more vague concept of societal needs.
the particular definition of "needs" is very important to the validity of the quoted claim. if basic or "social" needs are defined as some absolute standard of living, this will be increasingly easy to fulfill as society grows richer.
I very rarely see anyone talking about needs this way though. instead, the definition of needs seems to move as people at the top grow more wealthy. it seems more likely to me that, as long as billionaires exist and live lavish lifestyles, people will never agree that their needs are being met.
If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.
Meaning when people start voting in policies that "tax the rich", you will probably be considered one of "them" by the average working class American.
Look no further than the new tax code that basically hurt the "rich" in places like CA and NY.
2) We impose many restrictions on use of money. Some things can't be bought at any price; others already have restrictions (e.g. campaign contribution limits). Are all of these inadmissible?
I'm not saying this is the case I Bill Gates but I'm not sure of any other way to encourage risk taking at the bottom except the promise of obscene wealth.
The problem with relying on philanthropy to fund the public good is that we the people are counting on the philanthropist to have goals that align with our goals. Imagine a world where the top two richest guys, instead of deciding to use their wealth to fund vaccines and education, used it to fund warlords and dictators. We could have just as easily gotten that dice roll instead of the Warren Buffet and Bill Gates world.
This is ostensibly one of the reasons "we" choose to democratically organize a government to fund the public good: So that we're not so reliant on the whims of a few rich people. It's to avoid the nightmare scenario where the worlds richest person decides instead to use his money for evil. Not saying that government can't use their power for evil, just that, at least in theory, we can vote in new government. We can't vote for different World's Richest People.
Actually, you did get that dice roll too. Look up the house of Saud.
You can't get the tax deduction by donating money to organizations that haven't passed through this review process.
It is intellectually lazy and moot to say everybody is free to do what they want with what they have (be it money or not) because that's not how we live nor want to live.
A proposal to take from an inidivual for the greater good can be worth a discussion. Just crying out for extremist, reality-ignoring individualism is not an acceptable comment worthy of HN, in my eyes.
Please, let's discuss proposals, but reasonably and with thoughtful arguments, and not with "? It's his money that he actually decided to give away why should you or I have a say in it?".
AFAIK, France is currently collecting ownership tax.
The USSR and North Korea suck because they are autocratic, corrupted regimes, not because of single aspects of how they run their economies.
But even beside specific examples, if we decide that it is a good thing, then we can introduce new law.
http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ID/Netherlands-Individual-Income...
As an abstraction, I like to think of money as crystalized human effort. Society makes decisions by the power of individual behavior in aggregate.
A bunch of people buy a ~new thing~. Over time and at scale, society creates a river of money towards the ~new thing~. Its depth and breadth calibrated to reward other people for working towards bringing that ~new thing~ to society. Entrepreneurs gather marketing, sales and laborers to build a village by the river. This is society's intuitive understanding of business.
Society's intuitive understanding of competition between villages is that it occurs as an innovation arms race. Lower prices, better products are the result.
The experienced village builder learns that the best way to win is to divert the river into a cave and build a moat around the entrance.
Patent portfolios, information asynchrony, non compete employee contracts, vendor lock-in, yearly subscriptions, Byzantine government regulations and a hundred other things deepen your moat.
These kinds of moats improve your margin -- but in a different way than what society is used to. It isn't resulting in better products at lower prices, it's making competition more difficult.
Other experienced builders try to take a tiny drop from every river, for every transaction. They're starting to build their villages vertically and profit from the organically grown river network. Exploiting insider knowledge on the foreign exchange market, transaction fees, whatever.
These kinds of businesses intercept money that would normally return to society when the people in the villages go home.
The village builders have begun consolidating and moving upstream, getting closer to society. Society has BENEFITED. Their desires are now easier and faster to fulfill than ever before!
And yet.. society (remember, people in aggregate) is starting to get weary. Most people are restless and anxious, despite full employment, stock market blowing up, etc. Your average person can feel the reservoir getting lower, while other people are filling lakes.
"U.S. consumer spending rises; savings drop to 10-year low".
Money is power. Your average run of the mill person is slowly shifting from a belief in the Virtuousness of the American System, Land of Opportunity to one of Powerlessness within inevitability of whatever that system hands you.
Ultimate power is derived from a mandate from a masses, and most people on some level know that! They just feel like they're strapped in to a slow motion train wreck, and they're afraid of how it's all going to end.
Just my opinion on why people might have the audacity to discuss and critique how some billionaires spend their money.
This is my biggest critique about charities, but if there are transparent rules and processes that can be fixed. But in general, I think the govt would be a in a better position to serve their people than charities would.
On the other hand, they have funded studies that try to dispel that global warming is real, and they have been accused of having undue influence on colleges they give grants to.
There are also billionaires who use their fortune to actively influence politics (in a way that is probably mostly beneficial to themselves - such as the Koch family supporting Trump). There must also be lots of billionaires who, just by passively remaining billionaires and taking no broader responsibility, add to the problem.
I'm making no judgement - here at least - on whether Trump is an idiot or not.
In this case the cause they 'care about' is getting the most good out of each dollar. We have to ask why democratic/government giving does not have the same goal. Answering this question may very well lead to the conclusion that having some non-democratically controlled donors is better for everyone.
Instead of trying to tackle problems of wealth inequality in such a roundabout bureaucratic way, why not just start directly dividing income up more evenly with your employees to begin with?
Until he acts it's just marketing.
Buffet, Gates etc. always say they should be taxed more but I haven't heard of them actively supporting candidates and causes that will actually do this. If they really want it to change they have a lot of power (money) to influence politicans and help make it happen.
It's undemocratic, but is it actually worse? Looking at the results of democratic processes, I'm not so sure the answer is yes. Democracy optimizes for the popular, the sensational, the scandalous. The hard work on the ground that Bill & Melinda put in doesn't square with that model. The public has the attention span of a toddler; they just aren't captivated by a decades-long vaccination and prevention campaign against malaria or river blindness.
Now look at the top 10% (minus the top 1%). That's the income range of $100-350k. They have 25% of the U.S. income--$4 trillion. In Europe, these folks are taxed like rich people. In Germany, individual income above 52,000 Euro is taxed at 42% (the highest marginal rate is 45%). In the U.S., these people have been redefined as "middle class." The tax rate is just 24% up to $150,000. If you taxed these folks as the Germans do, you could raise maybe half a trillion dollars in extra revenue.
Talking about the tax rate of billionaires is a red herring. It's not tax cuts for billionaires that are keeping us from increasing NIH spending, etc. It's tax cuts for ordinary rich people.
This is just the federal tax rate. What about state taxes? What about cost of living? Healthcare?
But is it too much of an ask to think that some one who seem to be so dedicated to such causes, won't actually do everything that is in their powers (including giving on luxuries), to advance their cause?
I personally admire such people, but maybe that is not the right way for everyone. If you consider helping others as all-or-nothing choices in the end less people may be willing to help, so being a bit more lenient likely has overall beneficial effects.
[1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org
I wouldn't dispute that having enough skill/education to offer value to the global/US marketplace is critical, but I have some doubt about whether what we call "college education" is the way really large numbers of people (not just the elite) can obtain that skill/education.
Maybe we're over investing in an outdated, inefficient process and it will never be good enough.
1-Invest in bridging the last mile gap for broadband.
2-Clear headed planning to address the fundamental employment issues undermining labor/per capital wealth.
—-there aren’t enough jobs to employ everyone given current market conditions. Ie lower the full time/OT line to 20-30 hours or so and make better support systems (healthcare for all, housing projects for all that aren’t crimes dens)
—-make programs to help college students prepare, correctly for the labor force.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
Coming from a country where nearly everything that can be recycled gets recycled, and having seen this change take place in a span of less than 30 years, your assumption does seem a bit too pessimistic.
The same kind of pessimistic assumption underlines the ridiculously high death tolls that people often predict will be caused by global warming. Most of those deaths are attributed to infectious diseases such as malaria. This assumes that humanity will not find a way to prevent and/or cure such diseases on a large scale in the next 100 years.
The number of people who recycle a lot is quite small in relation to the total population. Is the increase in recycling enough to offset the increase in trash and toxins? I'm skeptical that this will happen soon enough.
Since you come from a country where nearly everything is recycled I'm going to assume you come from a wealthy country. If so then you, yes you, consume far more than most humans. You are a drain on the resources of the planet. Your consumption leads to strip mining, deforestation, and industrial pollution. This damage has been conveniently shipped off to poor regions of the world but the ultimate cause is consumers like you and I. Your recycling hardly makes up for the damage that is done for your consumption.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
From the above article:
“If the levels of consumption that...the most affluent people enjoy today were replicated across even half of the roughly 9 billion people projected to be on the planet in 2050, the impact on our water supply, air quality, forests, climate, biological diversity, and human health would be severe.”
I'm pointing out that both are assumptions pulled out of thin air, and that we should not be too quick to get all pessimistic (or optimistic) based on mere assumptions.
People 100 years ago could not have had imagined the kind of technological and sociopolitical changes that we take for granted now. What more right do we have to make assumptions about what we'll have 100 years from now? Heck, I can't even trust anyone who says what will happen 10 years from now, whether good or bad.
Let's stop pretending to be prophets and actually start working on the problems. Only then will we know which of the assumptions were correct.
A quarter century later, cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, averting the horse shit crisis. Not because people heeded the warning, but simply because cars were faster and sexier. Of course, we've just traded CO2 for horse shit, and now we've got a different problem.
If history is any indication of what will happen in the future, we'll probably trade some other type of pollution for CO2 this century, and then another type.
Also, I was talking about solely about CO2. I was talking about deforestation, massive dumping of toxins, plastics and other forms of waste. It is without a doubt that at current trends humanity’s future is dire,
I'm somewhat hopeful that we are in the middle of the time when that start changing, but until it does, I think it's quite clear that things have gotten worse, not better.
Bill Gates was never a good guy, and I don't really give a Fuck if most of you reading this don't like me saying this because you forgot what the word hacker really means because there are too many businesspeople here pretending to be hackers here instead of the other way around.
You run Windows. Your mind belongs to us. Your ability to think beyond .NET and C# will soon diminish, and we will give you some mediocre job now based on your mediocre proprietary skills, and your role as a tech worker now be to spread your love for MS to everyone, because if you don't we will stop paying you, and you will have no food and no home. And you will not know how to use anything but Windows.
This is hilarious. What OS do you think Google, Facebook and the NSA run?
At the end of the day Gates wanted to sell products for money, straight up cash transaction, take it or leave it. Google et al are sly and underhanded, you don’t know the price upfront, they try to turn you into the product...
So, you are basically trying to say that proprietary is better because we don't know what the open source version costs? Well, you have the source code... so I guess you may not be willing to look inside, but the other one you don't have the option to even look.
It is not free, unless you think Google is made of unpaid volunteers and all its shareholders are charities?
You are Gates’ customer, but you are Google’s inventory
https://source.android.com/
Or here:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/
Compile it and run it, you are inventory of Google for compiling free source code that you can modify however you want? Where do you get the source code like that to compile for Windows?
2) you have no assurance that that’s what running on the handset nor what’s in the firmware or the driver binary blobs
Here is the license for Android:
https://source.android.com/setup/licenses
Where is the license for Winblows?
How about we meet in the middle and agree that in terms of impact and spectrum he is a pretty amazing example of what you can experience in a single life?
As an aside, Microsoft's failure in the mobile world combined with the pervasiveness of both phones and their vector for surveillance suggests that others are far more responsible for the concerns you voice. I do agree with you that when we have one or a few players choking key points the system is rife for abuse, whether that's the device, the network provider or the OS manufacturer.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-roll...
(I work on these issues on what's apparently the other side from him.)
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-on-cryptocurrency-...
Anyway, plenty of heros broke the law. Revolutionaries, civil rights activists etc. I'm sure Gates and many other rich people would agree that many such figures qualify as heroes.
That of course doesn't mean that everyone who breaks the law, every revolutionary, every civil rights activist is a hero, far from it, and crucially does not get us any closer to deciding whether Snowden is a hero.
I think this is an awful question with awful answers.
http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html
It should take a lot of nerve to open this way. Sympathy, or I guess we call it empathy, who knows, cannot be achieved through optimism alone. The unfettered optimism in this intro seems tone-deaf. I think it undermines the effort they make to the contrary.
Sure, saying there isn’t anything we can do about it is irresponsible, and so is the lack of nuance of “the world is fucked”.
Is this the only alternative you can imagine?
>Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.
That is not what optimism is.
If you can not identify problems, you are multitudes more unlikely to solve them. My critique is as basic as that.
Just because Americans are shooting up schools doesn't mean that the lives of people in some other parts of this planet haven't improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years alone.
This book argues that a dollar goes a lot farther in the third world. (Obviously.)
It also has a great story about how money spent on educational resources can have almost no effect while money spent on deworming (yes, worms) can greatly increase educational results. (Not so obvious.) This is a third world example but its fairly obvious the problems with US education aren't' resource or efficiency based.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168483-the-most-good-y...
It's clear that Bill and Melinda Gates are practicing effective altruism in an effort to do the most good with their money.
What is the lowest hanging fruit of all time? Right, the night-time ads on TV with poor children in a foreign country.
What is the least imaginative way of helping a developed nation? 'Better education'. Sigh.
Really? We just need to stop children from dying, educate the parents, and everything will be fine?
It's not that people are pessimistic - they are just REALISTIC, about what a crock of shit they're being handed, and Bill and Melinda's answer is to meet Steven Pinker and go 'hey, statistics show that everything's better than it ever was!' My god... We're talking billionaires, having no ideas, no imagination, and no idea that they have neither, and wondering why things kind of suck?
Because people with no ideas, no imagination, are the ones who get to make billions of dollars in our society? Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with it Bill...
Except you'd still have cancer.
When someone got you to a doctor, who operated on you quickly and saved your life, you'd not only consider the person who got you to the doctor insightful, but far more helpful than Melinda, and be rightfully outraged at Melinda's well-meaning but clueless efforts to help you.
I am the person getting you to the doctor, Melinda is Melinda Gates, and the insightful bit is figuring out what cancer is, and what a doctor would be, in this metaphor.
Melinda and Gates think it's lack of education in the USA. You tell me.
Bill is not really a smart guy in my standing. May be one could argue that he is smart in a narrow band - that of making money. I certainly can think of a few of my acquaintances who can be more creative than him in ways to "help" others.