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Billions Donated to Charity
Anonymous Philanthropist writes " Warren Buffet , the world's second-richest man, announced over the weekend that he will soon donate 85% of his entire net worth, weighing in at around $37 Billion, to charities, with over 80% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This makes it the single largest monetary donation in history."
this is fucking awesome
.cig
Bravo, sir.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Regardless of any comments about the B&MG foundation or Buffet's motives... ...Jesus Christ, nice going Warren.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I sincerely applaud Both Bill and Warren for their recent contributions. This is SO important, because they will set an example for other wealthy individuals. When the rich (and that means most of us in the West) start to realize that giving(rather than flaunting) wealth garners the most prestige, the world will be a far better place. Bravo!
Jeremy
Mark 12: 41-44
41 And he sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.
42 And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny.
43 And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.
44 For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living."
Isn't good enough for you? The prize for abolishing disease, starvation, education and humanity isn't worthy?
come on
It's his right to do as he pleases. But donating to the Bill and Melinda show puts rather a lot of financial muscle in one place; with that kind of money he could have established his own foundation, for an independent view of things. Is the Bill and Melinda Foundation able to act in ways which might be other than in the interest of Microsoft ? For example, how would a funding request from Free Software Foundation, or Electronic Freedom Foundation, go down ?
This passage is not meant to deride those who have earned much and given generously (as the parent seems to intend for it to do); it is intended to countermand society's view (throughout history, in all of society) which respects those who have power (which in many cases == money) and looked down absolutely upon those of modest means despite whether they are persons of great honor, dignity, and heart.
Certainly if those who have attained great wealth have done so via exploiting others then those wealthy deserve derision. But merely to be successful and powerful is not an indictment. The old camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle quote is often misinterpreted in the same way. The meaning of that passage is to point out that with wealth comes great power and with great power comes great temptation. So if you don't have the wealth/power, it may be easier for you to live a clean/good life (i.e. to pass into heaven).
Gates isn't a nazi but he uses nazi tactics? Microsoft is evil? WTF??? My parents occasionally give me presents too. Nazi tactics? My boss runs a business that benefits 90% of people who uses her product, but has many unhappy customers due to a bad service ethic...is her company evil? Dude, get some perspective.
Good people do good things. And evil things. Bad people do bad things, and good things. It is not the result that assigns the morality, it is the approbation of the means, the intent, and total content of the person's character. I submit to you that you know basically none of these things about Bill Gates.
Oh, and p.s., Bill Gates, the person, is not isomorphic with Microsoft, the company; hasn't been since the halcyon days of, well, never. The company, if a company can be conceived as a group of people, was always more than him. I also take issue with the idea that a corporation, as an entity in itself, has a moral valence. People are good or evil; corporations are merely a mechanism for a group of people to do something efficiently in a capitalist system.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Godwin much? Microsoft never hurt anyone. They made crappy products and made those crappy products unfairly dominant in the marketplace, pointlessly annoying millions. Big deal. The Gates Foundation is already saving the lives of thousands of children a year though throwing millions at the "low hanging fruit" of easily preventable deaths from things like diarrhea (which kills more people than any disease but pneumonia and AIDS).
Convincing people to use an annoying product on the one hand, saving thousands of lives a year, proabably hundresed of thousands a year in a few decades on the other. None of the people who's lives are saved by the Foundations efforts give a crap about Windows.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Seriously, that's not funny. Maybe if their practices weren't so predatory then we wouldn't have to donate so much to charity because the original companies would still be around...
So, let's see here... the Gates foundation does things like fix up millions of kids with innoculations they wouldn't otherwise get, bringsd truckloads of networking infrastructure to places like New Orleans when the local government doesn't have a chance of procuring it on their own that fast, provides millions for scholarships, and so on. Are you actually suggesting that if Netscape had managed to make a real go at being a stand-alone business, or if BeOS had thrived, that there wouldn't be no place for the billions in philanthropy that Gates is doing?
Are are you certain that part of Netscape's plans included clinics in Africa? Or that despite Novell being largely annoying in so many ways, they would have somehow also gotten into fund raising if they'd pursuaded more people to stick with their NOS? You're trying to set up a false dichotomy just because you like demonizing Bill.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why is it the billionare philanthropists in the US don't finance prizes for objective criteria?
Because life is not some reality tv show where a conclusion is needed within 12 1 hour episodes with a final live show for that extra ratings hit.
Doing "good work" is a long and slow process and hard enough without quarterly process reports.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Microsoft is not evil. They engage in some unfair business practices, and make a lot of pretty mediocre products. To call that evil trivializes truly evil actions, like the ongoing genocide in Sudan. Do people on here even realize how fortunate they are to be able to devote their time to complaining about DRM or IE security holes? How many people have died because of Microsoft? Few, if any. How many people can be saved by things like vaccination programs? Millions. Gates is no saint, but what he's doing is good, and he deserves to be applauded for it.
memorably screwing over hundreds of thousands of homeless in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
Hello, Mr. Troll.
Please try a little bit of reality in there, somewhere. B-H does not provide insurance to homeowners, or own companies that do. They re-insured insurance companies so that those had anything like the financial backing to even be in the insurance business at all. If you think you can raise the capital to start offering insurance to people who live below sea level in a hurricane zone, only charge them a few dollars a month because that's all they can afford, and then pay out enormous amounts to the residents of thousands of square miles while staying solvent enough to continue to cover the cars, businesses, and other customers you have all around the country... go for it.
Oh, and just in case you forgot: private insurace never covers floods. That's the government flood insurance program you're thinking about. Warren Buffet has absolutely nothing to do with that, never did, and never could. Just relax, have a nice cold Coke, and cool down before you post again.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So were you joking with the Bill Parish article? Was that a joke. I'm just not getting it. (If it was, Huzzah, deliciously ironic.) I read the article and he doesn't say a single way Microsoft is creating a "pyramid", he just says a lot of conspiratorial allegations and never backs them up. He even goes as far as to pull some numbers out of his ass for the barchart up top. It's a prime example of propaganda technique and poor critical thinking. He even bothers to chide the company for talking up it's own stock. It's a true Michael Moore meets Microsoft, story at 11.
This is a hilarious article. I'm liking it more the further I read. This is BRILLIANT! Check out the pie chart titled "Microsoft is a Cash Machine" there's a 36% chunk labeled "Tax Loophole/Corporate Welfare". No references are provided, no method of calculation given. This has to be a parody.
I love this article!
Cheers.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Sadly this sums up why a lot of the rich Barons give away their wealth when they get old. They know that they have screwed over people to get where they are. They know they can't take it with them. They try to pay penance before they die. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt all did the same thing. Now add Buffet and Gates to the list.
Too bad old man Walton wasn't so generous, he could have left a lot of (real) smiley faces behind.
Incredibly enough, some people have higher priorities than space hotels or a moon base, things like not starving to death today, having children without passing HIV to them, or learning how to read. I know it's tough to empathize with such ignorant and short-sighted people but they are out there...
Do you think he had a Scrooge McDuck-style vault filled with gold doubloons? He's an investor for Pete's sake, which by definition means that his money has been out circulating through the world to finance other peoples' dreams. When you say that such a man is worth $n dollars, you really mean that his outstanding loans are approximately worth $n dollars.
Have you ever read about how well such societies tend to do historically?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Here's ingratitude for you.
Rich people hoard all their people and they're labelled greedy.
A man works all his life, and finally, nearing retirement gives away almost all his fortunes and he is also looked down upon.
You just can't win in this world...
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
You could say the same thing about any tax. And yes, there is a lot of pork out there, but there are also things that are genuinely necessary and useful to fund via taxes (I'm sure you can think of a few). If you want to live in a society without taxes, try Afghanistan or Sudan... of course you will still end up paying taxes, only to the local warlord instead of any kind of representative government.
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
Indeed they should. But that doesn't have any bearing on whether there should be an estate tax, or even taxes in general.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...little pathetic, hate filled lives you people lead. A man gives away a vast fortune and all you people can do is complain about how that's not really all that much. $37,000,000,000 is going to help a lot of people in third world countries. Oh, I'm sorry, you're bitter that he didn't donate the money to the EFF or the FSF to fund your little pet projects.
A wild guess: you are healthy and non of your children have died of starvation?
Look, the entitlement class (i.e. trust-fund babies) doesn't challenge the ruling party, they are the ruling party. How can you not see that? Don't you know who our President is?
Your last comment notwithstanding (because I mostly agree with it, except in situations of dire depression), the rest is an unfortunate simplification for something a little more complicated.
To me, the death tax, or in fact any tax that is levied more heavily towards those who are wealthier, is fair simply because wealthy people derive more benefit from each tax dollar spent proportionally than anyone else. Before you freak out and stop reading, consider:
A middle-class person who pays taxes to go to public school earns an education; a rich person who pays taxes to support a school gains...an educated and skilled workforce.
A middle-class person who pays car and gas taxes earns a road they may drive on; a rich person who pays those taxes gains...a transportation system that allows them to transport their company's goods to far-flung locations and markets.
And so forth. Any person who uses wealth to produce wealth (i.e. true Capitalists) are using the benefits of an infrastructure that most taxpayers can barely fathom. So, yeah, they get to pay a little more.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
First, it's an estate tax. Death isn't taxed. Second, it does a nice job of impeeding dynastic accumulations of wealth.
As for politicians and their pet projects. Whatever. I'm sure you've benefited in lots of ways from government programs. So its really just a question of the best way to pay for them. A tax on substantial estates seems like one good way to raise some of that money. Better than taxing working & living people at an even higher rate.
Great, then please go ahead and do that: earn your own billions to spend on your own monumental projects.
To impress future generations, make sure to engrave your achievements. Something along the lines of:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
While you're doing that, I'm glad someone is humble enough to spend resources on mundane problems like world pandemics, disaster prevention and recovery, ineffective education systems, and other issues that cripple long term development (economic and otherwise).
You know, the kind whose solutions will be required to make the achievements you propose into sustainable contributions to the advancement of humankind, instead of an excercise in the comparative studies of metaphorical male genitalia.
But maybe that's just my own foolish priorities; I'd prefer to have those space colonies self-sustaining and bubbling with life, trade and commerce rather than live and die in the span of a sudden monetary intervention.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
That's very ill-informed.
The really *great* thing about estate taxes, especially as they used to be formulated in the US, is that they encourage bequests to eligible organisations. As a result, many public institutions and charities in the US have required far less money from the government than they otherwise would.
As for this:
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
In a capitalist republic, politicians only have one source of income: taxes. If they don't keep to a reasonable budget, it isn't their fault, it's the fault of the people who voted for them.
No one with that kind of money EVER loses influence by disposing of SOME of it. When you have that kind of money you can get rid of 90% of it and still be extremely wealthy. It's self generating after a certain point...as long as you don't spend like Michael Jackson. If anything he will gain more influence. That kind of philanthropy opens all kinds of doors...want an example? Check for opinions on Bill Clinton and Bush Sr. after the fundraising they've done for the big Tsunami and Katrina. They didn't even have to personally donate huge amounts and they both look better than they ever did when they were in office. Buffet and the Gates' will probably go down in history as the biggest philanthropists of the 2000's. Hell, depending on what the Gates' do in the next 20 years, Microsoft might only be a footnote in the history books compared to their philanthropy...same for Buffet.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
From the interview:
Despite my yammerings against the rich folk types, I've always been impressed with Buffett, both for his humility and his social conscience.
Those who are trying to achieve a meritocracy should be foresquare against huge transfers of capital to the next generation. It should be enough that they have access to the best education, the best health care, etc. Those who talk smack about welfare, saying how we're depriving people of the feeling of independence that comes from earning your own way in society, never seem to have an unkind word to say about somebody getting billions for the "hard work" of having the right parents.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I was thinking more along the lines of his influence on the stock market. He will be free to do things without worrying so much about how other people react to what he does. So maybe he gets a little bit of room to breathe in his old age. Maybe.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Geez, look beyond your pay-stub, junior.
If your income is in the $50K range you're already paying around 20% of it to Uncle Sugar in income tax alone. Now add 6.2% for Social Security. Then add 5.8% for the Social Security that is your "employer's matching contribution", as your employer already files it under the common heading of "cost of employing you". Add 2.9% for Medicare. State and local taxes nationally average a hair above 10%. We're nearly up to 45% already and I haven't even gotten into the various communications taxes, vehicle registration fees, and assorted other "non tax" levies. 50% is not at all that unreasonable an estimate.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Are you trying to argue that preventing a class-based society is a bad thing?
He might not, but I will, although I don't know about "class-based," if you mean like a caste system. The idea of society without classes is called communism. It's not bad in theory, but in practice it removes most positive incentive for people to work hard and causes society to flounder and ultimately collapse on itself. Even communism had classes; they just operated behind closed doors. Classes are unavoidable. What we want to do is make the least common denominator acceptable to the point where it's not inhumane, but there's still opportunity and incentive to achieve more, and keep the highest classes from abusing their power.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Hey, I'm just making a point. I agree mostly. The good SHOULD be emphasized over the bad as long as the good outweighs the bad, but from a historical standpoint the whole story needs to be included. You can say "He saved the world!" all you want but just don't forget to say "He did it by being a dick." too.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
If I had a magic wand, and could remove Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviors, but at the expense of, say, halving the donations made by the Gates Foundation, I would no wave that wand.
That's a very hard to call to make however. You are weighing visible measurable gains (the product of all Gates' charity which we can see in action) against a whole lot of intangible "might have been". We simply don't know what would have happened had Microsoft not dominated the industry with its dubious business practices. Certainly they have left quite a trail of now crushed but once promising technology behind them. What might have happened had that tech flourished is, at this point, pure wild speculation. I mean there are all the little things - various small startups that were crushed by vapourware and marketing - that may have snowballed into completely revolutionising the entire industry had they actually come to fruition. Alterntively there are things like Netscape that may have simply ended up stagnating themselves anyway. With so much possible, and so many different little stories that you only rarely hear about, it's just not possible to have any real idea of what the world might have been like without MS anti-competitive practices. And given something we can't even imagine compared to something we can tangibly see - most people take the tangible choice every time.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You're looking through history with the rose colored glasses of the rich history book writers of the time. The early US government was pretty ineffectual and only managed because it didn't have any real challenges to stress the government. Also, we'd be the laughingstock of the world if we ditched Welfare, Social Security, the FDA, the Federal Highway System, the Department of Defense, Public Education, and all of the other things people expect from their government.
Despite what you might think, you wouldn't be any richer either. Not unless you were supremely lucky to latch onto some exploitable resource. Regular business would grind to a halt as the infastructure collapsed. Even the super expensive education system provides more money to businesses over the long term than any savings in taxes could ever provide. The highway system is the same way, and it's also monumentally expensive. A large mass of poor people with no hope of social mobility (can't afford education, can't afford to even drive on the roads) is not good for society.
I read the internet for the articles.
How do you measure the amount of Evil somebody has or has not created? One could argue that because of the way Bill did his business we might be 10 or even 15 years behind where we SHOULD be as a result of having a normal competitive landscape without the Intel/MS duopoly of the 90's.
What might have happened? Who knows, maybe somebody might of been able to invent the cure to Cancer 10 years ago instead of next year? How many lives might that have saved?
Of course you could invent anything when it comes to WHAT IF's. But my point is, we'll never know how much Evil or Good his biz practices were because you don't know what would of happened had he not been there.
That's the beauty of monopolistic behaviour. Those projects that never got off of the ground because of the monopoly can defend themselves..because they never got off the ground.
I'll bite. I consider your comment a troll. Calling Carnagie a fool must be a troll. By virtue of the fact of his success he is not a fool. His philanthropy afterwards can be considered either a moral good or a poor substitution for his actions in life. Either way he was no fool.
As far as the unions being benign this, this, this and this seem to say otherwise. Just using GM as an example.
Not only do unions cripple companies against competition, they do a poor job protecting workers. The best protection workers can have is high standards. If all you want to do in life is work in a coal mine or work a hydraulic press then you may get paid highly or poorly depending on how many other people also want those jobs. Even in the greatest of depressions there is always a way for an enterprising individual to avoid working a shit job. And the more people who do that, the higher the guy who does it gets paid.
Furthermore, there is an underlying undercurrent of Victorian philosophy behind a pro-union position. It presumes that some are born to be kings and some are peasants. Well, that's bullshit. In a free society any one of us can get a good job or even become a millionaire. There is nothing preventing a person from striking out on their own, with their own business. There never has been. Even with zero capital starting out (in a service based business.) The thing that has always kept people subservient is the rink associated with doing so. As long as people are fearful then they will remain the peasants they consider themselves.
Modern India, China and Brazil are perfect examples. Look at the number of people who are rising out of poverty by refusing to work the jobs their father's did. Their pay scale remains lower than some places but that is strictly contingent upon the risk they take in a chosen occupation or business. The business owners are the ones making the money because they are the ones taking all the risk. Just as Andrew Carnagie once did.
Read his Wikipedia entry. He had nothing handed to him. He started out making $1.20 a week and ended up the richest man in the world. So he was most certainly not a fool. The fools were the ones who decided to work for him for so little. If half of them had decided it wasn't worth it there would've been no need for unions and their jobs wouldv'e paid much better.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
It is an avoidable disease for the most part, don't have unprotected sex, don't share needles, you probably won't get it. That's as much a "cure" as you're supposing Diabetes II has. There are tragic cases where people who didn't make mistakes still got the disease, but don't suppose that those comprise any serious percentage of those afflicted. The Aids rate in Africa is truly stunning and disturbing, but with a rate that high it is obvious that more money needs to be spent on Aids EDUCATION than a blind search for a cure at this point.
If someone can "...think of no other human being who as/is going to change the world in such as positive way as Bill Gates" there are only three possibilities:
... Sheesh. Bill Gates is the son of a banker got lucky and took advantage of a mistake by IBM and then using illegal business practices increased his wealth exponentially. Later, feeling the typical nouveau rich class guilt, he donated money to a philanthropic foundation. Not enough to personally inconvenience himself, mind you, but enough that the ignorant start yelling "OMG BG is the roxor!"
1. Insanity
2. Alzheimer's
3. A paid MS shill
Hello, McFly? Ghandi, Clara Barton, Willam Booth, Mother Teresa, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Jefferson,
I've said this to the BG cultists over and over, but it bears repeating: BG's "philanthropy" is meaningless... to BG. Show me some single mom struggling to make it who give $10 to the United Way and I'm impressed. If there's a middle income family donating 10% of what they make to charity, I think that's noteworthy. When a man gives away a portion of his wealth, but it's so little that he never notices (except for the fawning news articles), that's meaningless. Think widow's mite here.
The mistaken hero worship in the parent is so smarmy it's sickening.
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