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Gates Issues Call For "Creative Capitalism"
theodp writes "Bill Gates makes his case for Creative Capitalism in TIME, citing projects like a Text-Free UI for illiterate computing, the use of Multimouse technology to allow fifty kids to share one computer display, cell phone billing by the second, and Bono's RED campaign as examples of the type of corporate creativity that can make the world a better place for the billion or so people scraping by on less than a dollar a day. Michael Kinsley, a former Microsoft employee whose wife still advises the Gates Foundation, says it's hard to object to Gates' goals, but notes that creative capitalism does have its share of skeptics, and points out that there was not a whole lot of energy devoted to lifting up the world's poor during Bill's three decades at Microsoft."
There's prior art on that. It was invented in ancient Egypt.
Let's face it, text was invented for a purpose. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they may not be exactly *the* thousand words you need to convey your information.
That's a synonym for Open Source, Mr Gates.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
MS is obsessed with monetizing everything. Creative Capitalism is just their answer to Creative Commons, and Open Source. Public Domain they don't care much about because they can at least charge for access to the content or a conversion of the content depending on the platform.
"It is mainly corporations that have the skills to make technological innovations work for the poor. "
He means money, not skill, and if you are trying to help the poor, then you have to give them a way to survive despite not having money, not a way to keep depending on money and make that dependence even stronger. Who knows, maybe they are just interested on getting poor countries up to getting an economy going just so it's a new place to put up a toll booth or a new culture to start selling Windows to every hear, and if they develop these markets then they will start funneling money towards MS or at least not investing time/energy/mindshare in OSS.
The OLPC may not have succeeded with its goals but it at least had the right philosophy: Start making the third world independent and self sufficient, get people to discover and collaborate on their strengths, and to build themselves up without reliance on those who are already self sufficient. For developing countries it is very important to come up independent so others don't come in and take advantage of you whenever you have gained any amount of wealth. It's a lot harder to be taken advantage of, and you also have more bargaining power in the world forum, if you are independent.
Twinstiq, game news
People scraping by on less than a dollar a day aren't going to be interested in anything like this.
Ordinary priorities like eating, keeping a roof over their heads and trying not to get sick and die are likely to be far more important.
Also, with all due respect to his charitable efforts, for which, if for little else, I respect him, what does he, as one of the richest men in the world, think he's doing saying what people in abject poverty want?
I'd venture a guess that what they want is for a persons worth and entitlement to the basics of life to be unrelated to money.
If we can afford to pour billions into a shallow fight to control Oil, We can afford to make life's basics free for anyone who asks.
When you invest in solar, you can very likely get your money back and then some(if you invest in profitable solar companies). The key is solar is great to be corporate because corporations have a way to pushing things to their saturation point. Solar has no saturation point as long as there are stars in the universe. But for right now, we should at least be looking to capitalize on Earth's potential.
Once we have abundant energy on Earth through Solar, we can use it in electric or hydrogen vehicles. With electric vehicles, we can transport the energy from one plant or another with only using human labor or electric trains. Once you have "free energy" powering vehicles, the cost of transportation gets less. When the cost of transportation gets less, the cost of food and water gets less. Also "free energy" by the coast can turn salt water into drinking water then vehicles can transport them inland.
Right there, you just made an impact on many poor peoples' lives without actually donating any money. I think any geek who wants to use technology to solve the world's problems should look inward into conserving money so they can buy stock in profitable solar. I think you should do your research into different companies. I've found mine: nanosolar.com. The only problem is that they haven't gone public yet. So I save money. I'm pretty much broke, but at least I got the spirit of it all.
God spoke to me.