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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."
Putting any dough into research; something that can bring any lasting effects? NO WAY!
If your sole concern is getting as good PR as you want, you need to appease Joe Sixpacks. That is, throw the money to the poor who will use it for booze or, in the rare best case, at best eat it off.
Note that this kind of people actively do whatever they can to harm any kind of activity that can actually change the world. What they want, is conserving the current status quo. The scraps thrown to charity are just something to buy the hearts of the mindless crowd.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Fuck you.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Yeah, more Windows to starving Africans!
Table-ized A.I.
"Isn't good enough for you? The prize for abolishing disease, starvation, education and humanity isn't worthy? come on" If rich people were truly serious about abolishing that, they wouldn't live on anything more then $100,000 until these goals were accomplished.
the process of abolishing education has been going on for 3-4 decades and has been going on quite nicely. The others will be with us as long as humans exist. It's too bad that most charities don't recognise that the best way to address starvation is to let them die so they don't reproduce and create even more starving people.
And Warrenn Buffett is certainly NOT donating 'scraps', he is donating 85% of his net worth, in the form of stock in the company that he spent the last 30 years building.
Buffett is giving that money to Gates' foundation, not to any good cause.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Come back when you have thrown $37 billion ("scraps") at some school system
So:
* Bill&Melinda tossed $37 billion in Windows licenses into schools
* I did some minor contributions to the system of promoting programming in Poland's high schools
I admit that my contributions are close to 0; let's assume they're exactly 0 for the purposes of this post.
Still, I stand my claim that I have done more. Hell, Joe Sixpack or aunt May's hamster have done more. Neither me, Joe nor the hamster have pushed hapless kids into being prone to getting conned for the rest of their life.
Of course, this argument applies only to education. Feeding the poor has the arguable feel-good benefit. For, uhm, a day.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
What's that got to do with anything?
And the death tax is nothing but a money grab by politicians who want more money for their pet projects. If you work hard enough and earn enough to be concerned with the death tax, then it's YOUR money. You earned it. You should get to leave it where you want, not have your estate pillaged by politicians.
Politicians should learn to operate within a real budget like the rest of us.
Agile Artisans
Margaret Sanger was not a racist. Although she believed in eugenics(in the pre-Hitler days, a lot of people did) and Hitler's method of eugenics was quite racist, Sanger made clear statements against Nazi racism and clearly said that her eugenics(which is crap, but that was before we knew enough about DNA and such to know this) was not racist.
You wanna know who the real racists are? The ones who want abortion banned. Such beliefs are based on the stupid belief that women aren't smart enough to decide for themselves and a hatred for poor people, many of whom are minorities. Banning abortion makes the poor poorer(more mouths to feed for the poor, may not matter much for the rich to have 6 kids but feeding them does put a serious dent for the poor) and therefore decreases the quality of living for minorities in America even further. Adoption, you say? Adoption doesn't work unless the child is completely full of defects and white(the people who can afford to adopt usually don't want a black baby unless they need PR), yet again screwing minorities.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
he will be cutting the feds and state a check for the
lost estate tax right? After all he is totally opposed
to repealing the death tax... but apparently not opposed
to finding ways around it.
half your earnings? what the hell? i make about 50k a year (i'm only 23, so give me some time). with that said, my taxes aren't anywhere even remotely in the vicinity of 50%. they're not even 33%. i think you have some extraordinarily serious issues if you're giving 50% of your income to federal, state, and local governments (combined). like a pretty hefty case of bullshit followed by some pretty intense cockmongering idiocy.
"Anonymous Coward" was rarely so appropriate a title.
If you actually believe this crap, have the balls to sign your name and risk your karma.
If not, shut the fuck up.
I hope they spend some amounts for this project if they want to make some benefit for humanity.
This states that if they want to benefit humanity, then they must spend some amount on this project. Unless, of course, you count zero as "some amounts"
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity
His "winnings" represent an insignificant fraction of the financial, legal, and professional harm he's caused. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted supporting the Microsoft monopoly. Horrific laws have been passed in support of non free software which threaten America's core values. Finally, Microsoft has directly and indirectly harmed the reputation of the entire computing industry. We shall see if Gates gives away his billions or not, but the harm will linger long after he's gone and perhaps longer than his foundation.
Bill Gate's share of Microsoft's wealth is a fraction of the net earnings, which in turn are only a fraction of the revenues and those revenues represent only a fraction of the cost of the Microsoft Monopoly. His company, at his bidding, suppressed less costly software but purchase cost is only the beginning. There's also the cost of accounting for the crazy licenses his company created and maintaining sub par software. His software not only takes about five times the manpower to keep working, a whole industry has sprung up around it's flaws, anti-virus, backups, upgrades and so on. Under those circumstances, the efficiencies he promissed companies never materialized and the cost of paperwork at most companies remained flat. Bitten this way once, most of the "partner" companies never made the move to Windows XP. These same costs, due to vendor intimidation have been born and passed on by private and government agencies from power and light to public schools.
The money wasted on IT at many companies is only the beginning of the harm he's done to the reputation of the computing industry. Through tireless marketing and FUD, he has damaged the reputation of all computer professionals, even going so far as to smear the reputations of those who would point out even the most trivial of money saving alternatives such as Open Office on Microsoft instead of Office. Much of the public now thinks of M$'s "sharp" business practices as normal industry ethics. What's worse is they are encouraged to act the same way - to fink on their friends and employers, to make diabolical contracts that screw the other guy, to tell any lie you have to if it will make a sale and to harm your "competitor" aka your peers as a matter of normal business.
I don't need to say much about the DMCA and other nasty laws that have been passed. They are all part of valuing money above your neighbor.
It will take decades for the harm Mr. Gates has done to subside.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Any single charitable organization with lots of money is going to put the kids to shame when it comes to corruption, hookers, drugs, and graft.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Steal from the rich, give to the poor?
That wealth is stolen by the rich to begin with - from everyone else involved in making that wealth. I thought I made that point clear in my original post.
Property is theft.
Perfect PR. And that's all it is.
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That is precisely the feeling I had. I wonder how many of the whiners who've posted here actually gave even 5% of their incomes for charity? The world over, there are hundreds of thousands of filthy rich bastards who squirrel their money away in many investments all over the world so that they are not taxed one way or the other. Many of them have become rich overnight thanks to IT. How many of them donate to charity other than for taxation purposes? Heck, some foundations are created for the specific purpose of actually evading estate tax.
I am willing to bet he has done more in a single announcement than all of slashdot will do for charity for the next few generations. As for the people who want him to donate to the EFF? What are you smoking? I am sure malnourished starving children have things other than open source software on their minds. What a bunch of zealots. Ever heard of fundamentalism? Yeah, thats the stuff so many of us decry in Islam. Well perhaps we are all fundamentalists too. A bunch of zealots who believe nothing except OSS is the right way. Start thinking before posting.
Frankly, I abhor that estate tax the US has. It just isn't right. If someone has toiled all his life to generate vast reserves of wealth, I think he or she has a right to give it to whoever he or she wants. People work hard so that their children can live a better life. Why should the government interfere? This is graverobbery, in my opinion. The law deserves to be repealed. People like Buffet would still give their money away.