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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."
Every time there is a discussion about the Gates foundation, someone will predictably stand up and say that Gates is not a philanthropist because his actions as Microsoft CEO were not consistently philanthropic.
I don't look to commercial corporations to be philanthropists. A commercial corporation is a voluntary collective of investors who want to maximize their financial investment. That's OK with me. If that investment is maximized then some of the individual investors will see a personal calling to use that money for philanthropy. This is what you see happening to Gates today. That is genuine and real. Corporate philanthropy, on the other hand, is most often a flim flam exercise in repairing ill will so the corporation will restore its ability to generate lots of revenue.
So, give Gates a break. He's hugely rich. Now he's getting older and perhaps he has become more reflective about making a difference in the lives of people less fortunate than him. I'm not going to bust his balls for that.
Yeah, so let's get access to some of that text.
Project: Open Source System for automatic user-initiated translation of blogs/articles/etc. Add a "Read this in:" which is autotranslated to location (GeoIP, etc) and a "Translate this". Basic idea being ad-sharing as payment for translating blogs. Open Source project, because I mainly just want to see more content out there, and translated content is great. Wiki-based.
From the user's point of view: You enter a page, and see it in English. You're quite good at English in addition to Chinese, so you write a quick translation.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I've had to correct memos written by people with "degrees", not just that mythical 8th grade education. Know what? I've met 8th graders from that evil third world where they supposedly can't get by on a dollar a day. Strangely, they also can write coherent sentences... they even know the difference between "they're" and "their". Something most college grads seem to not know. Too bad you can't fire people (lovely government interventions) for having been too stupid to get value for their money when they shopped for "education".
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
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.
I certainly agree with your sentiments, but the truth is that we can't afford to. There are simply too many people and there isn't enough wealth in the world. Capitalism's main problem is that it doesn't distribute wealth equitably. But it IS great at generating wealth. This was a main point Gates made in the article. But it isn't enough. We aren't wealthy enough, and the growth of wealth in our global economy is not enough to keep pace - even in theory - with past or present population growth to carry everyone forward adequately (i.e. with a standard of living acceptable by modern western standards) even if all wealth was distributed evenly. The easiest proof of this comes from the well-known study that showed if everyone one Earth consumed the same resources as the average American, we would need 3 Earths to generate the basic inputs of materials and energy - clearly an impossibility.
My field of expertise happens to be international development, and one of the issues that has recently become impolitic to mention is population growth. We used to more openly recognize population growth as a major problem. Not so much now - you can conjecture why if you like. Regardless, population is and will continue to be the major obstacle standing in the way of broad-scale socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. There are just too many people.
As one quick example, I worked in the Middle East for a number of years in several countries that were really close to an ideal development scenario: the governments had tons of money thanks to oil and low initial populations. It was basically a blank slate with a blank check - fantastic! Build roads here, power plants there, schools here, hospitals there. And things have gone really very well. But rather than enjoy a GDP per capita of something like $20,000, those countries now have GDP/c of something under $5,000. Why? Because Islam forbids birth control just like Catholicism, and the populations are growing at 15-25% annually.
A-Bomb
And what if they already have a roof and enough food? Or do you think that there are only two groups of people, starving people and people who have plenty and can easily pay for a new PC every year.
This is basicaly the stage of 'learning a man to fish' instead of giving him a fish.
Here a smaple of a multi seat solution which still requires multiple monitors and costs 50% of what they would pay normaly. Now imagine removing 50% of the monitors, so that students have to work together on one monitor.
Not only will this cause a drop in price, it will cause kids to work together and learn social skills at the same time and will learn what they need to learn better, because of the interaction with other kids.
So this could benefit kids in shools everywhere, including the rich kids.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
Indeed, this is related to text-based computing in a very direct way. Shell scripting (like all programming) is the practice of describing to the computer exactly what you want it to do—word for word, so to speak. Graphic UIs, for all their advantages, don't let the user give such specific instructions, forcing them to perform the individual steps themselves: click that file, move it here, click that file, move it there, executing the algorithm yourself instead of describing to the computer. Like the summary says, "illiterate computing" pretty much nails it on the head.
Not that I'm bashing GUIs or saying that anyone who uses one is non-metaphorically "illiterate". Good GUIs are obviously indispensable in modern software, and with good reason. But they can never fully replace the expressive abilities of the command line. To swing back on-topic, a fully graphical UI for people who really are fully illiterate is a noble idea, but considering the limitations of a normal GUI, it would suffer serious drawbacks, to say the least.
The literacy metaphor in comparing text-based and graphical interfaces is explored very nicely in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.