Gates Foundation Plans To Invest $10B Into Vaccines

Endloser writes "Bill Gates is going to invest $10 billion to provide vaccines to people worldwide. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that vaccines are the way to a better future for the world. So they have decided to make 'the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause.' This 10-year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives."

Comments

Birth Control

[markdavis]

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources. I would hope this component would be very high on the list of any type of aid when addressing suffering and helping to stop the perpetuation of suffering.

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

A population of old people supported by a few young workers isn't going to be particularly viable either. It's a balancing act.

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

Melinda Gates spoke to Charlie Rose about this. She says that the foundation analyzed this question carefully, and came to the conclusion that it is just far far easier for a population to lift itself up out of a cycle of poverty if it doesn't have to deal with disease (both personal and of family members) all the time. It's hard to get an education when you're taking care of a household of polio victims.

Re:Birth Control

[cwiegmann24]

Well, this has the potential to help that. The places with the most human suffering have a high rate of infant mortality. In order to combat this, people have lots of children. By helping more of their children survive, they may decide to have less. Of course, the healthcare will need to be available to give them condoms or perform vasectomies.

Re:Birth Control

[cptdondo]

The problem is actually worse.... The British found this out in India. Fix the disease and infant death through better medicine and clean water, without birth control and massive outreach and education, and people will continue to have 12 babies.

Before modern medicine only 2 or 3 might survive to adult hood. With good medicine, all 12 survive, and the result is mass starvation and poverty.

So I certainly hope that B & M are well aware of history and know that they will have to educate as well as heal.

Re:Birth Control

[gad_zuki!]

>The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation

Many, many parts of the US are overpopulated and poor. Should we not allow vaccines, food stamps, welfare, etc in Detroit, Chicago, or LA inner-city areas for the sake of "a better future?" Its incredible the double standard we have for foreigners.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.

Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.

Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea.
P
Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.

Re:Birth Control

[Jeng]

Birth control doesn't mean no kids, it means planned kids.

Then there is also the issue that Yemen is having, 50% of their population is under the age of 18.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly come from a country with low infant mortality where putting your eggs in one basket still yields a high probability of having family around you in your old age. I wouldn't be surprised if the higher the infant mortality rate in an area, the greater the number of children the people are likely to have. It's called redundancy. Of course there are other factors such as social security for elderly people (or lack thereof) that could drive peoples desire for offspring.

Re:Birth Control

[mindbrane]

Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman a Yale uni online course speaks extensively to overpopulation. In the context of this thread the overriding message would be that women need most of all to be given control of their own bodies, especially in terms of birth control. In countries where poor education and overpopulation are prevalent problems most women will say they want as many children as possible, or, that children are a gift from God and therefore every child a gift; but, the same women when questioned in a different context wanted fewer children. The much joked about 2.1 children per couple is close to the replacement level for most populations. Giving women control over their own reproduction cycle will bring down population and likely along with it poverty, under nourishment, disease and lack of education. The lectures are very entertaining.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

Personally, I disagree. If you artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation, the problem becomes even more critical, and fast. When each person is having 2, 3, or 4 children, that is doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the population with just ONE generation, and it is exponential. If there were no resources for 1 person, no jobs for 1 person, no healthcare for 1 person, not enough food or land for 1 person, there certainly won't be for numerous soon after.

If you really think someone taking care of a household of polio victims is deprived of opportunity, how much opportunity will they have if that household suddenly became three times as large.

Of course, education and birth control are synergistic- both are needed (and birth control is partially education already, and partially having access to pills, condoms, etc).

Re:Birth Control

[Eukariote]

You touch on the core of the matter: as explained in this presentation, their support of vaccination programs is indeed aimed at population reduction.

Re:Birth Control

[Totenglocke]

A population of old people supported by a few young workers isn't going to be particularly viable either. It's a balancing act.

Hence why you're supposed to save and take care of yourself. If you didn't have a society built on taking from the young and giving to the old, it wouldn't be an issue at all.

Re:Birth Control

[TheRealMindChild]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit... it just isn't effective as is. If you could give them the experience of working 50+ hours a week to come home to a screaming brat, and have your money earned already spent before you even get it, just to take care of the child, the population growth would fall real fast.

Sure, you can't really do this for so many obvious reasons, but it is the way people are being educated, not the education idea itself.

Re:Birth Control

[Hurricane78]

That’s the horrible thing about it:
Why do you think most of the stuff we eat, comes from poor countries? Why do many resources come out of the ground of the poorest countries?How does that make sense to you?
The resources are not lacking. Usually, the resources in their ground are incredibly rich. Or there are countries that are basically jungle and fertile ground full of plants, animals, etc.
Not exactly resource-lacking.

But our standard of living is assured by us raping those nations’ resources. And by keeping them from thriving. The WTO plays a major role in this (ask the Yes Men).

Also, if “our economy is bad” (our, not that of the big companies with their record profits), are you going to suggest limiting births?
The reason they have so many children, is nature saying “Well, at least one of them has to survive... right?”
In Africa, many “leaders” are practically company employees...

Do something to help them fight being raped! Then you’re doing something good!
Somalia’s pirates are about the only thing I have seen, that actually fights this. (That’s why many see them as heroes.)
Also, very interesting: I recently found out, that china massively invests in Africa. I wonder how this will turn out. From what I heard, it’s actually pretty good until now.

But I 100% agree on education. But not the indoctrination kind that kids in the “civilized” world get. More a practical, free-thinking, leadership-teaching, high-tech-friendly approach. Because even with no resources left, you could then always learn a language and offer services to foreign countries. Because frankly, if a programmer offers a good service, I don’t care if he previously was a pirate or lived in a mud hut on a garbage dump.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

But people without education in such regions don't "decide" to have less. They continue to do what is natural- breed. Without some family planning education and available contraception, the population would continue to explode as infant mortality decreased.

Yes, with other types of education, over a long time period, perhaps that area will learn to value having less children. But that could take 50 or 100 years... meanwhile, the suffering continues, just in different ways. I think it is totally irresponsible to artificially help a region with life-prolonging or life-saving aid that doesn't also include some type of birth control education and contraception aid.

Re:Birth Control

[causality]

The idea is not to stop producing young workers. The idea is to limit how many you produce so they can be productive young workers. If you currently face a resource shortage, you need to either find a way to increase resources, or reduce the population, or a combination of both.

Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable, and rationing the mechanism of saving lives to those who are most productive (for some definition of "productive" -- the old may not contribute labor, but they might contribute knowledge and wisdom), only a bit less so.

Still, providing the tools so that such a population can have more options in combating their misery is a good idea. P Nevertheless, it is not clear that providing tools that can exacerbate one aspect of their misery (keeping people alive so they can breed more), without also providing tools to counter this problem (abstinence education (like that ever worked), and contraceptive technology (which. surprisingly, encounters cultural resistance)), is all that great.

If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.

Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.

Re:Birth Control

[rvw]

Many, many parts of the US are overpopulated and poor. Should we not allow vaccines, food stamps, welfare, etc in Detroit, Chicago, or LA inner-city areas for the sake of "a better future?" Its incredible the double standard we have for foreigners.

It's not incredible. It's the reality, and it has been the reality for a long time. The US has double standards on everything that doesn't support their interest. I believe that's official foreign policy. (And I know that many people in the US don't agree with this policy, although I wonder what they're willing to give up if they really could change it.)

Re:Birth Control

[camperdave]

Exactly. The human population didn't really start exploding until we started being able to control disease through basic sanitation and refridgeration. Disease is what kept the population down.

Re:Birth Control

[Attila Dimedici]

Improve the economic well being of a population and it will shrink.

Re:Birth Control

[Archangel Michael]

Renew at 30! (Logan's Run) ... problem solved!

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

I never said we shouldn't allow other types of aid, I just said that birth control SHOULD be high on the list of types of aid provided to such areas.

And yes, I think that absolutely includes areas in the US, too. It doesn't matter what the country or place.

Re:Birth Control

[TBone]

That would be a valid argument if you were talking about increasing lifespan from, say, 50 to 60. Vaccination affects things like, expanding life span from 3 or 4 into the point where they can become productive workers. When you're killing off a significant portion of your population before they ever reach a productive-to-society age, then they become nothing but resource sinks in resources to care for them and time to administer the care. A society that loses so many of its young will never reach the point where it can address work imbalances and the like, because it's stuck trying to grow up, not out.

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

Saving money isn't the answer. You still need young workers to produce whatever it is you'll need to buy. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how much you have in the bank.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

A population of old people supported by a few young workers isn't going to be particularly viable either. It's a balancing act.

There was a movie made in the '70s with Charlton Heston that had a solution for that. Soy-bean something or another...

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

And just look at the sorry state of affairs that India is in now when compared to most other impoverished nations. I have yet to hear about information technology jobs going to Congo . . .

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

Your personal disagreement doesn't count for squat. This foundation is not just shooting the shit on the internet to decide what to do. They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.

Furthermore, your comprehension of economics seems to be rather inadequate. It's not like there are X jobs in the world, and if you have more than X people the rest are unemployed. It's not like the number of jobs is directly bound by the amount of farmland. In the developed world, an insignificant fraction of the population works in farming these days.

The European economy did not boom during the plague. It's just daft that you are suggesting as much.

A healthy population can build an economy and become a wealthy population. A sick population can't. It's that simple.

Re:Birth Control

[MichaelSmith]

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education.

But spending billions of dollars on birth control won't get you there, unless you plan to use it to put the catholic church out of business. The problems are political. By all means promote education but without political change the education won't be promoting birth control.

Re:Birth Control

[maxume]

What the fuck are you eating? Or are the U.S. and Canada poor countries now?

(See, I mostly eat corn, whether it is still corn, or if it has been processed into sugar or meat, most of my calories come from corn, and then most of the rest come from wheat; a few more come from various fruits and vegetables, but hey, those are mostly grown here too, with the notable exception of bananas).

Re:Birth Control

[praksys]

It's also a lot easier to sell people on birth control if the long term survival prospects of their children are better.

Suppose each pair of parents wants at least a 95% chance that one of their children will survive to adulthood. If the mortality rate for children is 5% then many parents will settle for one child. On average there may be as few as 0.95 children surviving to adulthood per family, in which case the total population will decline rapidly. If the mortality rate is 50% then most parents will plan to have around 5 children (the probability of all five dying being 0.5^5 = 3%). On average half of all children will still survive to adulthood, so around 2.5 children will survive for each family and the population will grow steadily.

Obviously I've simplified a bit, but it is quite clear that the reduction of infant and child mortality rates is crucial to long term population control.

Re:Birth Control

[Duradin]

The only thing those Somalian pirates are fighting against is their own personal poverty.

You rail about foreign countries raping poor countries then praise China? Why do you think they are putting infrastructure in? It's not for the benefit of the locals. China is there to get what they can.

And it's not like we're taking the food out of their mouths. They are selling the food out of their mouths. But only evil white men try to get rich at the expense of others so they must not be selling of their own free will.

Re:Birth Control

[ColdWetDog]

If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.

They have. It's called a vasectomy. Totally OT - the history of vasectomy section is truly hilarious. The oldest condom ... but I won't ruin the surprise.

Re:Birth Control

[bezenek]

Here is some information from the CIA's web site: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

I picked the four countries with the highest birth rate and the four with the lowest. Countries not on the list of major infectious diseases are assumed to be at low risk.

Country, Children Born Per Woman, Life Expectancy, Risk of Major Infectious Diseases

For the countries with the highest birth rates:
Niger, 7.75, 52.6, very high risk
Uganda, 6.77, 52.72, very high risk
Mali, 6.62, 51.78, very high risk
Somalia, 6.52, 49.63, high risk

For the countries with the lowest birth rates:
Macau, 0.91, 84.36, low risk (not on the list)
Hong Kong, 1.02, 81.86, low risk (not on the list)
Singapore, 1.09, 81.98, low risk (not on the list)
Taiwan, 1.14, 77.96, low risk (not on the list)

I think the data speaks for itself. There is a very high correlation between a low birth rate and longevity/low risk of infectious diseases.

Perhaps spending money on birth control to keep the population small so the land can provide the people with clean water and resources to handle sewage is a good way to limit disease.
Of course, the fewer people who are born, the lower the cost of vaccinating them.

-Todd

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, what? Obama?

Take your meds.

Re:Birth Control

[eihab]

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources.

Dr. Hans Rosling debunked that theory a while ago. I'd highly recommend watching this (10 minutes) video. He uses his gapminder.org tool and backs the points he makes with real data.

The tl;dr version of the video:

"My students, they tell me population growth destroys the environment, so poor children may as well die ... Now, the problem with that thinking, with this thought, is not that it's not moral, it's that it's wrong. And I will show you why..."

If you have more free time on your hand after watching this, I'd highly recommend looking up his TED talks, specially the one titled "Let my dataset change your mindset".

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

Good point. If you can drop child mortality, arguably you don't even need to sell people on birth control - they'll get to it on their own.

Re:Birth Control

[ColdWetDog]

In the context of this thread the overriding message would be that women need most of all to be given control of their own bodies

Mod up.... One of the most important take home messages from years of studying this problem. Get the guys out of the loop, we fuck it up every time.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.

This is also true for "social security" Ponzi schemes when there is a population bubble that ages (think "baby boomers"): to be viable, they require two things: (a) the ratio of recipients to contributors remains relatively small, and (b) recipients collect for a known fraction of their expected life.

We do not know when an individual will die, but we do know what the average life expectancy is, so statistically, payouts can begin at "expected death minus some number of years".

The problem is that the system requires forcing new contributors to participate to provide for current recipients. Besides striking me as unethical (just because A coerced B, does not mean B can coerce C), if investing for one's own retirement were cheaper, people would balk at participating. Seeing a boomer bubble age reinforces this unease, and could lead to revolt. Advancing the payout age is only a partial solution. Only increasing the birth rate can cover current anticipated recipients, but this will only compound the problem for them and runs counter to limited resource allocation.

Re:Birth Control

[MichaelSmith]

The human population is only exploding in places where a lot of children die before they can reproduce.

Re:Birth Control

[Jherico]

I think you underestimate the compulsion to accept hardship as a consequence of reproduction.

Re:Birth Control

[Dalambertian]

It's not quite that simple either. People have 12 babies because they assume that the majority of them are going to die before the age of 5. However, if you lower the infant mortality rate and the expectation of infant mortality, you actually reduce the number of children born because you can reasonably assume you'll be able to raise each child to adulthood. At least, that's what they argue in this recent TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives.html

Re:Birth Control

[Nadaka]

That arguement does not make sense. The young who provide services to the old will be gainfully employed by the wealth saved earlier in life, effectively increasing the investment in the wealth of the young. The alternative is to not save and provide for the old by high taxes or onerous social obligations, effectively robbing the youth of their wealth. Unless of course you are suggesting the Logans Run method for reducing the burden of the elderly?

Re:Birth Control

[maxwell demon]

I think the data speaks for itself. There is a very high correlation between a low birth rate and longevity/low risk of infectious diseases.

However, the data doesn't tell you the causality. It would be an equally reasonable theory that in countries where illnesses are common, people get more children because many children die early. Also note that nothing decreases the life expectancy more than high infant mortality.
A more informative statistics would look at the life expectancy of those who already reached a certain age, say 18, and correlate it with the number of children per woman reaching that age.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

> A healthy population can build an economy and become a wealthy population. A sick population can't. It's that simple.

No, it really isn't that simple (nor am I implying population control is simple, nor that it will simply cause all other problems to disappear).

A healthy but OVER population in a given area can't necessarily EVER build an economy and become a wealthy population. There are some hard limitations to what a region might be able to support. Growable land and usable water are two such factors. In many, many such overpopulated areas, there simply isn't enough of either. The only reason existing, established economies can get away with population that outstrips such resources (example: Japan) is because they have OTHER resources they can use (example: building/engineering expertise) to buy what they need (raw materials, food) from other areas/economies.

I am not saying that reducing the population will automatically boon the economy. All I originally said is that controlling population would help REDUCE SUFFERING. And I don't think that JUST controlling population is enough, it has to be combined with other education. They play off each other synergistically. And if the area is lucky enough to have enough natural resources to support that new population, THEN there is a chance for a stable or growing economy.

Re:Birth Control

[Jherico]

Personally, I disagree. If you artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation, the problem becomes even more critical, and fast.

I initially agreed, but on consideration I think the GP poster has a point (or rather Melinda Gates and Charlie Rose have a point). Resources spent on raising a child and having them die before reaching an age where they can contribute to society are basically completely wasted resources. If you look at both sides of the equation, you have to decide, will spending this $10 billion on some sort of birth control measure (which realistically is just going to be some sort of education program) conserve more resources than the ones being wasted on children who die. It doesn't take much to convince me that it won't and that improving vaccination coverage, which directly saves lives, will have a positive impact.

Re:Birth Control

[geekoid]

except you are wrong.

You might want to read up.

Here is a fine example you how stupid you look to people who study this:
"If you really think someone taking care of a household of polio victims is deprived of opportunity, how much opportunity will they have if that household suddenly became three times as large."

Except many polio victims already have children. The effects of vaccines on the population won't even be measurable.
However, get them past dealing with disease and they have more opportunity.
Other disease that hit mostly hildren are a burden on society. remove them. A village constantly fights a disease which has a low mortality rate still take a hit to its ability to improve itself.

It's not the solution, only a part of the solution.
EDucation is next. Educated people have more tools to help solve the local problems. either by creating a business the brings in revenue, or building a cheap device the get power or clean water.

Educated people tend to have fewer kids. We do now that it is DAMN HARD to get an ignorant populace to teaks and practice birth control. You are fighting years of entrenched emotional thinking, and entrenched religious brainwashing.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you can easily stop taking the pill and become fertile again.

Re:Birth Control

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Come up with a version of "the pill" for men.

That's not as easy as you make it sound. To paraphrase a human sexuality teacher I know:

It's a lot easier to control one single egg that comes on a fairly regular and predictable schedule than it is to control millions of sperm that can be produced on demand.

Re:Birth Control

[The Wild Norseman]

Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources.

"You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don't send them another bite, send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it's gonna be 100 years from now? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don't live in them, assholes!""
-Sam Kinison

Re:Birth Control

[MrNaz]

Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources.

BS. Overpopulation is a myth invented by rich western "thinkers" who can't face the wanton wastefulness and idiocy of their own society.
- How many resources does it take to maintain an average African or Asian in their current lifestyle?
- How many resources does it take to maintain an average American in their current lifestyle?

The problem isn't overpopulation; the world has enough resources to feed, clothe, shelter and provide advanced social infrastructure for everyone currently alive many times over. The problem is a tiny minority of the world's population soaking up a disproportionately large amount of resources for the sake of maintaining a profligate, consumption-based society. *You* are the problem, not the few million African kids who would need under $2 / day extra to prosper as oppose to die.

If we were to live like Americans, yes, the world can only support a fraction of the current poplation. If we lived like Africans on a cup of rice a week, the world could support more people than could fit on its non-arable surface. There is a happy medium in which the Earth could still sustain far more people than it can today while providing social infrastructure that can sustain a healthy, prosperous, rewarding social outcome.

"Overpopulation" is code for "we're now fat and lazy we can't afford to share any of our ridiculous excess with anyone".

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

I agree that private savings are better than taxation. My point is that neither would be sufficient unless you have a certain number of workers per retiree or more.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

>Just say what you mean. You think 10 billion should go towards sterilization and baby murdering (abortion) instead of towards saving lives through vaccination.

You are totally whacked. Birth control (which is proactive planning and using contraception) has *NOTHING* to do with sterilization and abortion. Nobody ANYWHERE in the threads has even MENTIONED sterilization or abortion until you crawled out and spewed a bunch of nonsense.

Please go back and crawl under the rock from whence you came.

Re:Birth Control

[badboy_tw2002]

The point is to stop babies, not sex. Sex is going to happen no matter how many times you quote the bible or make them carry around egg shells or whatever. Hormones > Religion.

Re:Birth Control

[khallow]

If you artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation, the problem becomes even more critical, and fast. When each person is having 2, 3, or 4 children, that is doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the population with just ONE generation, and it is exponential. If there were no resources for 1 person, no jobs for 1 person, no healthcare for 1 person, not enough food or land for 1 person, there certainly won't be for numerous soon after.

Two things here. First, population growth is not a given. We have solid evidence that better off societies have fewer kids per person (BTW a fertility of two children is actually declining population in the long term). The end of exponential growth means the end of your logic above. Second, we don't have a resource problem as severe as you claim or there would be mass die-offs. I think there's plenty of evidence that a healthier society will actually increase the resources, jobs, healthcare, food, etc per person simply because less of these resources are wasted due to inefficiencies introduced by sickness.

Re:Birth Control

[TheRaven64]

The British left India in 1947. It took rather a long time for them to become a offshoring destination of choice. You also don't seem quite so many IT jobs being sent to Pakistan, which was granted independence at the same time...

Re:Birth Control

[Sycraft-fu]

"Why do you think most of the stuff we eat, comes from poor countries?"

What are you on about? The US is by far the biggest produce of foodstuffs in the world. They've been a net exporter for food for a long time. I know it is fashionable in some circles to think everything comes from exploited people elsewhere but that simply isn't the case. Food comes from high tech, efficient, agriculture. The US produces mass amounts.

For that matter, the much predicted starvation catastrophe scenario in the developing countries was averted by an American scientist, Norman Borlaug, by introducing American methods and plant strains from other parts of the world, including America.

You also might want to do a bit more learning about where other resources come from. Africa certainly produces some, but there are many more that isn't the case. For example copper, very important to modern society, is dominated by Chile, followed by the US, Peru, China, and Australia. Then of course there's the current grad daddy, oil, which is dominated by the Middle East, but also Russia, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, and so on.

Your conceptions and reality do not seem to match up.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, except it does take a generation or two for the population to switch, during which they're still having a lot of kids. It may take longer, or not even happen at all, if there are additional cultural/religious pushes towards having lots of kids.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

There is no sufficiently effective method of separating sex from babies.

Most temporary (barrier or hormonal) methods of contraception carry 1% failure rates when used correctly (that is, 1% of all women will become pregnant in each year of relying on them). Method failure rates are much higher (as much as 33% cited for condom method failure). Sterilization spontaneously reverses about 0.3% of the time in women and 0.6% of the time in men.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

I reversed the meaning of "use" and "method" failure above... my bad.

Re:Birth Control

[thetoadwarrior]

If the youth didn't have the support the elderly then things would be fine.

Re:Birth Control

[khallow]

Of course, you will encounter resistance from what may seem like unlikely sources. Namely, an economic system based on debt and fiat currency cannot continue to expand and remain viable unless the population is increasing.

Nonsense. The thing that depends on new blood (and hence, population growth) are Ponzi schemes like Social Security and overly generous pensions. Debt and fiat currencies are not inherently Ponzi schemes.

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

In case of doubt, ask for evidence.

Where in history was advances in health care enough to greatly improve the living standards of a population?

I can recall a good number of cases where the reverse was true, that increasing standards of living made better healthcare possible and affordable, but at least I don't know of a single case where the other way around ever worked.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

I will address your post by saying this (since it seemed directed at me):

Just *living* isn't necessary ending suffering. Standards of living *are* important. I don't think that just saving lives is the objective, it is to increase the quality of life for *everyone* while not damaging the environment in the process. Population control as a PART of aid can work wonders to help improve standards of living while at the same time saving lives.

Do I think that many "Westerners" are wasteful, selfish, materialistic, and damaging to the environment? Absolutely yes.

But I also don't think just living on a cup of rice a week would be a target goal for a decent standard of living, either. And further, I think there is no one "right" level of "standard of living" that can or will make people happy (some of the most unhappy people I know have the highest so-called standard of living).

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

This foundation is not just shooting the shit on the internet to decide what to do. They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.

Having lots of money and spending it on the right things is not the same. The Gates Foundation is very focussed on health and especially diseases, it has made very few investments in other areas.

I doubt that they have done the analysis that you allude to. I really do. They wouldn't be the first. Especially the west is often a victim of hubris. Look how much money we've poured into Afghanistan and Iraq and what the result is so far. Burning it would probably have had a better net effect, at least it would've heated a number of homes.

I'm afraid the same phenomenon is at work here. The Gates Foundation "knows" that disease is the major problem, just like our warlords "know" that forcing democracy on a foreign population will magically fix all their problems.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

OVER population

OVER what, exactly?

There are some hard limitations to what a region might be able to support.

Which limits are those, exactly?

help REDUCE SUFFERING.

Wow! I bet Bill Gates and Warren Buffett never even thought of that! You should tell them your brilliant idea. Clearly, some internet guy has the answers, and the researchers employed by the foundation have no idea what they are doing, with all their silly studies and numbers and such.

Re:Birth Control

[Belial6]

It is going to be as viable as what these people have now, and the next generation will be in a far better position than they will be if the population isn't reduced.

Re:Birth Control

[epee1221]

From what I remember from geography class...
Civilizations typically start out with high birth rate and high death rate. Population can increase, but it normally goes slowly. After a while, technological improvements dampen the causes of death by making their world cleaner, safer, etc. Birth rates do not decrease at the same time, so this fosters a population rise, which can go on (at non-constant magnitude) for some time, possibly centuries. During this time, raising children satisfactorily becomes more expensive, so people make an effort to produce fewer children, and birth rates fall like death rates did.

So if this description is accurate, then yes, it would suggest that there is a causal link in the other direction -- improvements in standard of living promote lower birth rates.

Re:Birth Control

[mindstrm]

Curing disease is not "artifiically increasing the lifespan of overpopulation".

A cure would take time to take effect... and I think you underestimate the effect of diseaseon the poorest nations. Not only do people not work, but the fact that they feel doomed to die means they don't even *try*.

The human population is exploding in nations where disease is rampant and living conditions, and the economy, sucks.

In nations where healthcare is under control (yes, even the US) - it's not. There is proven cause and effect here - it's basic survival.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

So...does that mean that you stopped doing it for fear of having more children? Or did you adopt effective birth control practices that they didn't teach you about beforehand?

Re:Birth Control

[ShieldW0lf]

If all you pansies want to geld yourselves, please do. I will be happy to impregnate all your women for you. I'd have no problem with this guys life:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7547148.stm

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

A possibility: if vaccines are more freely available, and parents can thus be more confident that some of their children will survive into health adults, perhaps they won't feel compelled to have so many of them? They still need contraception, of course, but it might give them more reason to use it.

Re:Birth Control

[TheWizardTim]

It's more about rights of women. When women have equal rights, they tend to have less kids. Having birth control available is worthless if a husband does not allow his wife to use it. We first need to push equal rights along with education. Birth control and population control will follow.

Re:Birth Control

[mindstrm]

That all may be valid - but the point from the Foundation is that health will have the single largest impact on improving things in the long run - not population control.

Re:Birth Control

[Idiomatick]

I think you underestimate the effectiveness of raping someone who has been given abstinence classes.

Also I'm amused that you think the ideas and problems of north americans transfer so easily to africa. Unless you are being sarcastic ... Africans often work 60hours+ weeks at ~6cents an hour. Their children are often dying or at work with them. With this money they can survive week to week without saving any money for the future.

Your view shows how ignorant you are of a 3rd world situation. To the point of being offensive. Screaming brat haha, I think they worry more about hearing the screams of their family being slaughtered in yet another ethnic cleansing.

Re:Birth Control

[Goldberg's Pants]

Then there is also the issue that Yemen is having, 50% of their population is under the age of 18.

Sounds like my definition of hell.

Re:Birth Control

[Rakarra]

Most temporary (barrier or hormonal) methods of contraception carry 1% failure rates when used correctly (that is, 1% of all women will become pregnant in each year of relying on them). Method failure rates are much higher (as much as 33% cited for condom method failure). Sterilization spontaneously reverses about 0.3% of the time in women and 0.6% of the time in men.

That's fine, but I wouldn't say we need a 100% effective solution. When we're looking at a serious overpopulation/explosively-growing-population problem, then a 1% failure rate is better than.. oh... 50% pregnancy success (a number I'm totally pulling out of my ass) when no contraception is used.

But again, it's not a complete solution. I would favor (and mostly-religious reasons are used to shoot all of these down) as a comprehensive solution:
1) Abstinence education (abstinence education is fine... abstinence-only education is useless).
2) Contraceptives.
3) Abortion. (This one is the trickiest, especially in countries where women are considered subservient or inferior. No woman should be forced to get an abortion, but I feel it should be an option if she wishes it).

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

the golden gooze here is a pill that men can take regularly.
to protect against aids ( ingress and egress ) and kill spermatozoia.
 

Re:Birth Control

[mindstrm]

The Gates foundation is quite open that they are after getting the most bang for their buck - how can they have the largest impact on the human condition for their money.

For example, their work towards Malaria research. Malaria is a 3rd world disease. Nobody else is interested in curing it. The 3rd world doesn't have the resources to fight it. I'm willing to bet Gates' money ends up finding that cure (or vaccine) , and that would have a HUGE impact on a global scale.

I have no firsthand knowledge, obviously, of what's going on - but these are not stupid people we're talking about here - they put *HUGE* amounts of money into fighting fights nobody else was interested in - and it's not just a tax dodge or a money-making scheme... the more I look into it, the more legitimate it looks.

Re:Birth Control

[Nimey]

You can expect the Pope to forbid his followers from using any Pill-for-men, too.

Pity, because the most over-populated 3rd-world countries (outside of China & India) tend to be Catholic.

Re:Birth Control

[sl149q]

Which is actually part of the problem. not withstanding the complete lack of understanding by the person who thinks we ARE raping the third world for all their food...

Most of the Western world has huge tariff barriers to protect local farmers making it difficult for third world farmers to sell their crops into our markets (and thereby make a living.)

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Earlier:

(...)but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources.

You really seem like an asshole. And I'll bet that the shit you say has racist connotations, even if you aren't spelling them out.

Re:Birth Control

[TheWizardTim]

Social Security is an insurance program that everyone in the US has to buy in to. This program pays out not only in old age, but in death to the worker's family, disabling injury, and in the case of my 35 year old brother terminal cancer care. This program helps keep you from having to take care of your parents and your kids at the same time. Only the first $90,000 is taxed. If we remove the cap, we will have no issues paying for it. Yes, people making millions of dollars would never get all their money back, but we don't have hundreds of thousands of old people begging for food on the street. We don't have millions of old people burdening their kids for food, shelter etc. We don't just write off the guy who broke his neck and is stuck in a wheel-chair the rest of his life. We don't let a mother and her kids live on the street when her husband is killed in an accident.

Social Security is an insurance program.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it up with the Catholic church then.

Re:Birth Control

[DaveGod]

If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.

No this technological problem is already solved with the female pill. The remaining problem in this regard is distribution, i.e. it (nor other forms of contraception) is not available/wanted/accepted in developing nations. There are numerous other problems in addition to this. Secondly condoms are preferable in any case since the spread of HIV is frankly astonishing in many developing nations.

All other points aside, never forget that a death prevented by a vaccine is a human life saved. Nothing is more sacred than any human life.

Re:Birth Control

[maxume]

I have some pretty strong doubts that it would be profitable to try to sell grain into the U.S., even if subsidies and tariffs were wiped right out (on both ends of the trip, I read Tim Harford quite a bit, and he repeatedly makes the point that one of the problems third world farmers face is the red tape and bribes required to get their product onto a boat).

The stable political climate and mechanization are pretty strong factors, as is less shipping.

(and that is leaving aside the fact that it probably makes sense for the government to spend money to ensure that a certain level of food production is maintained)

Re:Birth Control

[Idiomatick]

I'd be happy to see Africa turn out like India.

Re:Birth Control

[camperdave]

Maybe because sex is the only pleasurable experience that people in these regions have access to?

Re:Birth Control

[couchslug]

"I think you underestimate the compulsion to accept hardship as a consequence of reproduction."

Fixed it for you:

"I think you underestimate the willingness to impose hardship as a consequence of reproduction."

Re:Birth Control

[martin-boundary]

Debt and fiat currencies are not inherently Ponzi schemes.

Of course they are. Like any Ponzi scheme they are unsustainable accounting tricks, because there comes a point where the demands outweigh the capacity to fill it within the chosen system.

It is perfectly obvious that beyond a certain amount, personal debt cannot be repaid and must be partially written off by the creditors. An average person can only earn so much money in a lifetime. At that point, the system implodes. See the GFC.

It is also perfectly obvious that fiat money is unsustainable. See the Weimar Republic.

Both debt and fiat money are short term "solutions", which depend on real continuous growth of the economy to work. But in a mature economy, there is no growth to sustain these methods.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Saddam. Saddam's life is not sacred.

Re:Birth Control

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

Social Security is coercion, and a failure. If people want insurance for the ailments you mentioned they should choose to buy it from private businesses who understand how to turn a profit, not the government who only knows how to steal, spend and lose money.

If the government gives me back the near 50% of my life's work they've stolen from me, I would gladly donate to charities that I felt were of benefit to the needy.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you can't really do this for so many obvious reasons, but it is the way people are being educated, not the education idea itself.

It's not so much the idea of unicorns that's the issue, it's the existence of them. All sex-ed incorporates Abstinence as an option, where they vary on is the emphasis on Abstinence being the BEST option, and the ONLY option.

Re:Birth Control

[m93]

BillG is ten steps ahead of you. I heard him being interviewed by someone on TV (Larry King?) about his foundation a few years ago. He was talking about vaccines in the third world and was questioned why he was not addressing excessive childbirth in poverty-stricken countries. He pointed out that his foundation had researched this and had come to the conclusion that if you reduce human misery and high infant mortality rates, then quality of life goes up all across the board, and as a result of this, people reproduce more sensibly. I would say this is why he chooses to invest in vaccines instead of condoms.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Impoverished areas typically have many children per mother precisely because the chance of survival of any one of them is low.

Re:Birth Control

[MrNaz]

"But I also don't think just living on a cup of rice a week would be a target goal for a decent standard of living, either."

I never said that, but being from Africa, and traveling extensively in the third world, I can tell you that for the price of a large Big Mac meal, you can feed an entire family well for a week. The price of a single wide screen TV will feed that same family for a year. The price difference between an SUV and a smaller, cheaper, more practical vehicle will feed, clothe and provide sanitation for a village.

If the whole first world gave up unnecessary excess in their car purchases alone, the savings could bring Africa's poorest up to a reasonable standard of living which, at the moment, is light years beyond their reach.

To further illustrate this point, the food that the US throws in the bin (that is, the food scraps off your plate) has enough caloric value (according to the WHO average need per person) to feed all of Africa.

Re:Birth Control

[Cassius Corodes]

steal, spend and lose money

Sorta like them banks eh? Lucky those weren't run by the govt!

Re:Birth Control

[harlows_monkeys]

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education

The Gates Foundation grants a large amount to family planning groups.

Also, when things like child mortality go down, population growth actually tends to slow down. When people can be reasonably sure that their kids have a good chance of making it through childhood, they don't need to make as many of them--the overpopulation to a significant extent comes from people having to breed like rabbits just to get some kids to make it to adulthood.

Re:Birth Control

[izomiac]

The correct solution, but the wrong reasoning. Before western meddling many of these people were farmers and produced enough food to feed their population, even in the desert. Farming is difficult, and droughts are deadly, so birth rates were very high to generate more field hands and replace them as they died. Enter food handouts and medicine. Suddenly the population explodes and the ratio of food to person drops. Furthermore, farmers can't compete with free, so they can't sell their excess crops to buy the stuff they can't grow, thus making farming non-viable. So you have a bunch of unemployed people that are pretty pissed off. Enter a tyrannical government or militant group that sells the donated food, and you have a bad situation.

OTOH, these populations are now dependent on that food, and stopping it would kill a lot of people, both in the short term, and the long term by increasing mortality to what it used to be. Of course, the occasional genocide and mass starvation is also bad. I can't really say which would cause fewer people to die overall... My personal opinion is that trying to bring the whole world up to first world standards is impossible for the foreseeable future, so we shouldn't disrupt societies with half-way measures that create more problems than they solve. The problem is figuring out how to close Pandora's Box now that we've opened it.

Re:Birth Control

[hviniciusg]

Do you really believe United States of America went to Iraq and Afghanistan to institute democracy on those countries?

Wake up dude. nobody does war if there isn't some kind of "vespene gas" on it

Re:Birth Control

[Cruciform]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit... it just isn't effective as is.

Isn't effective as is? Abstinence education isn't even education. It's indoctrination. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives people have.

You might as well try and teach Breathing Abstinence.

Before the Slashdot virgin jokes kick in, let's consider how many people here would forego sex if it was offered to them by a person they found attractive.

And how many will resort to masturbation and porn in the event that a suitable partner isn't available. Factor in those who will resort to masturbation even if they do have a regular sex partner but the sex isn't keeping up to their sex drive.

Now tell them "It's better to wait. Because Jesus will love you more." Good luck with that. The abstinence movement is just another attempt by religion to dictate your life. And it's laughable.

Teach people safe sex and birth control methods. Additionally, undo the damage done by adults teaching people that sex is dirty and something that you must feel guilty about and engage in furtively.

And that's just in the US.

In the third world countries you also have to deal with the mortality rate in children. People don't just have a lot of kids out of sheer ignorance of how children are made. If you have four kids and three of them die before they are five years old because of disease, then it's a matter of having enough children to ensure that some survive to adulthood. This common in species throughout the animal kingdom.

Make life better for people by educating them and they'll start to have less children on their own.

But teaching abstinence is about as constructive as bringing 'intelligent design' into the classroom.

Re:Birth Control

[dbIII]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit

More pregnant girls and a higher proportion of sexually transmitted diseases among those that took "the pledge" says that it is of very little merit if that is all you are relying on. It doesn't even work at home so it's not worth exporting the idea.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

Actually, you are the one that is both terms. Nothing could have been further from my mind when I wrote the post. But go ahead and throw out curse words when something you THINK someone MIGHT have IMPLIED but didn't is something you disagree with.

Re:Birth Control

[Khashishi]

Some people have a strong compulsion to have babies (especially women). It's not all about sex.

Re:Birth Control

[MagusSlurpy]

Then there is also the issue that Yemen is having, 50% of their population is under the age of 18.

Sounds like my definition of hell.

Only if the other half is retired and still driving on the highway.

Re:Birth Control

[khallow]

Of course they are. Like any Ponzi scheme they are unsustainable accounting tricks

For debt to be a Ponzi scheme there has to be a bonus to being an early participant at the expense of later participants (that's the incentive for growth, to generate later participants). How does a late borrower or lender get penalized? And we have a number of fiat currencies that work pretty well. The Euro, for example. While the dollar is on the rocks right now, it remains that it was a pretty stable currency for several decades. Remember the Weimar Republic was deliberately sabotaging the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. My view is that a history of debt and fiat currencies (even with respect to the US) does not support your assertion.

Re:Birth Control

[Khashishi]

Come now, we can't expect one foundation to solve all the world's problems. There has to be some focus. I think you just can't seem to accept that Gates is not the devil.

Re:Birth Control

[Dan541]

The problem is we have a senile old man in a pointy hat encouraging poorly educated people who don't know any better to keep reproducing.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

You either read too much Larry Niven or too little.

Re:Birth Control

[BitZtream]

...

Keep your dick in your pants, or if you don't have pants, at least don't spooge in a vagina.

Its not hard, they have faces you know, aim for that.

The problem is that the common thread here requires them to give a shit about not getting someone pregnant. Since they don't care, nothing short of sterilization will fix the problem.

The know how it works, they know what another mouth to feed means, they know how to prevent it, they do it anyway.

Re:Birth Control

[Khashishi]

What are you smoking? People live in deserts in USA. They even build golf courses in them. Go visit Scottsdale. It's crazy.

Re:Birth Control

[Helen O'Boyle]

I had the same thought after doing similar math. Saving that many more lives == that many more mouths to feed. People die of starvation every day, particularly in the kind of under-developed countries that might be most deficient in their vaccination programs. I'd like to know what the plan is to keep the people saved from death-by-disease, from dying of starvation when villages of 150 become villages of 250 due to the increased life expectancy of residents. Reducing the expected population increase rate through birth control seems one way to do it.

Still, it's an impressive goal. I can think of many worse uses for that level of financial commitment, can't you?

Re:Birth Control

[Dan541]

Or we could start another world war.

Re:Birth Control

[symbolset]

They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.

And of course they have their multi-billion dollar Campus of Serene Giving in the heart of downtown Seattle to ponder the question in a tranquil collegiate environment well defended from the homeless people who used to live there by armed security guards.

The European economy did not boom during the plague.

During the Black Plague the world lost about 1/5th of its people. Immediately thereafter came the Renaissance. Perhaps this was a coincidence. Perhaps not. If someone were to suppose that there were a causal relationship, he would not be alone. We may as well blame the end of the Mideival Warm Period for both of them I think, but I'm not going to bash anybody for having a contrary opinion.

It's cool the guy is trying to get rid of the mass of coin he's piled up before it turns his offspring into the next generation of Paris Hilton and Casey Johnson. But let's not have any illusions here: he's doing it this way not because it's maximizing the benefit, but because it reduces the number of people killed in the dissipation of his cash. He's come to grips with the fact that you can't even give away a billion dollars without killing somebody somewhere, and he's got a lot of billions to be rid of. Hopefully more good than ill will come of it. Certainly I'm not doing anything to banish the evil that is Cholera, so I wish him luck in this endeavor.

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

I doubt that they have done the analysis that you allude to. I really do.

Per Melinda Gates' own words, they HAVE done the analysis I mentioned. Your doubts, which are completely unfounded and lack any evidencary support, directly contradict the words of the woman who runs the foundation and has intimate personal knowledge of it.

You're talking out your ass to get karma. I've been on slashdot for ten years, so this shouldn't surprise me. But in this case, in does bother me. These people are making a careful effort to improve the human race, and you shit all over them out of your own ignorance. Shame on you.

Re:Birth Control

[mindstrm]

No.
They went to Iraq for oil and insanity.

The went to Afghanistan because the taliban were harbouring and supporting Bin Laden, who openly declared war on the US, and took credit for 9/11.

The first had no global support, the second, surely did.

Re:Birth Control

[oztiks]

Mark, not sure if you have actually visited a 3rd world country or not.

You have only a little bit of validity in these points but its a much deeper situation than you may think.

Poverty just like wealth it has many different shades it too it (perhaps even more than wealth) and isn't as clean cut as Place A is poor and Place B isn't.

Re:Birth Control

[Chris Burke]

If you really think someone taking care of a household of polio victims is deprived of opportunity, how much opportunity will they have if that household suddenly became three times as large.

A lot more if they don't have polio, genius!

Re:Birth Control

[mr exploiter]

You're right they are better death than alive not? And we can keep they natural resources that they won't need anymore... good plan. /sarcasm

Re:Birth Control

[wjc_25]

Active population reduction is generally politically unacceptable...

One of the more jarring sentences I've read recently. I hate to think anyone finds "active population reduction" unacceptable only politically.

Re:Birth Control

[Mongoose Disciple]

If people want insurance for the ailments you mentioned they should choose to buy it from private businesses who understand how to turn a profit, not the government who only knows how to steal, spend and lose money.

The problem with that theory (and I don't disagree that Social Security is a mess) is that your private businesses will turn a profit, and the best way for them to do is to deny your claims if at all possible. This includes, for example, denying a perfectly valid claim that you can't afford to fight in court (or won't live long enough to fight in court.)

Government takeover of health insurance may not be the answer, but I'm positive (having spent several years working in the health insurance industry and having seen things I can't ever forget) that having poorly regulated profit-driven companies handle it is even more surely not the answer.

Re:Birth Control

[Mongoose Disciple]

Id like to comment on your bit about abstinence education. I don't think it is totally without merit...

I don't know, man. Even the proverbial screen door on a submarine might be a good idea as long as the submarine never dives, but abstinence (only) education has never been shown to produce better results than doing nothing at all. It's pretty bad when you make what's supposed to be an incredibly stupid/comical idea seem good by comparison.

Re:Birth Control

[dasunt]

What are you on about? The US is by far the biggest produce of foodstuffs in the world. They've been a net exporter for food for a long time. I know it is fashionable in some circles to think everything comes from exploited people elsewhere but that simply isn't the case. Food comes from high tech, efficient, agriculture. The US produces mass amounts.

Assuming that America dedicated all its cropland for food for human production (instead of growing most of its food as animal feed) America produces enough food to feed the entire world.

Re:Birth Control

[Sycraft-fu]

It could produce more too, if there were a call for it. America has tons of area for production and extremely advanced methods and technologies.

Of course there's the problem that shipping food around the entire world is not necessarily economical. Fortunately, America isn't the only location that can grow food like this. There are plenty of places all over the world that can grow massive amounts of food. Unfortunately, many of these places do not do so for political reasons. They are run by despots or rife with civil war and so on.

Zimbabwe is such a place. At one time it was called the bread basket of Africa and provided food export to a lot of countries. Today, it could provide many times more thanks to better technology. However Mugwabe has no interest in that and has decimated the farming system to such a degree that Zimbabwe relies on food aid to feed its people.

Currently, hunger is not a problem of growth resources. We are not in a situation where we cannot grow enough food for everyone if we tried. The problem is politics. Africa could likely be food independent as a continent. However that cannot happen with the current political climate of dictators, warlords and civil wars.

Re:Birth Control

[jhol13]

The children are "had" because they support you when you are old. Your pill would help absolutely nothing, unless it is forcefully given to the men.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well Gates is spending mostly his own money. The government is simply spending other people's money.

Who do you think is going to spend more wisely?

Re:Birth Control

[unitron]

Social Security is an insurance program.

Exactly. Specifically, it it death insurance.

Just as life insurance pays off if you fail to live when you're supposed to, i.e., when you're young and able to bring home a paycheck, death insurance pays off when you fail to be dead when you're supposed to, i.e., when you are too old or too disabled to bring home a paycheck.

Anyone who starts in about how some other retirement savings program should be substituted for Social Security isn't worth listening to, because they don't understand the issue, which is an insurance program, not a retirement program.

Re:Birth Control

[vertinox]

A population of old people supported by a few young workers isn't going to be particularly viable either. It's a balancing act.

Japan isn't doing that bad. In fact, they are a prime example of why a shrinking under-population is better than an growing over-population.

Re:Birth Control

[TheWizardTim]

The Fire Departments are a coercion. If I ever get trapped in my burning house, a privet company that knows how to turn a profit should be called out. And if I don't have the money to pay, well, tough luck, I should have bought coverage for that.

Social Security is not a failure. The only problem with it is that millionaires don't contribute the same % as the rest of us. Take off the cap and everything will be fine.

I don't want my medical insurance company worried about a profit. What do they do? They don't run one test. They don't check one temperature, they don't sew one stitch. They just take your money, take 30% for themselves for the hard work of taking your money, then deny paying it back to you when you need it. In every other industrialized country, for profit primary health insurance is a CRIME.

Re:Birth Control

[drsquare]

Unfortunately, modern capitalism requires endless consumerism to thrive. Economies stagnate when people save.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production

The U.S. is the third largest oil producer, producing more then twice as much as the fourth largest.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I disagree. If you artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation, the problem becomes even more critical, and fast. When each person is having 2, 3, or 4 children, that is doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the population with just ONE generation, and it is exponential. If there were no resources for 1 person, no jobs for 1 person, no healthcare for 1 person, not enough food or land for 1 person, there certainly won't be for numerous soon after.

If you really think someone taking care of a household of polio victims is deprived of opportunity, how much opportunity will they have if that household suddenly became three times as large.

Of course, education and birth control are synergistic- both are needed (and birth control is partially education already, and partially having access to pills, condoms, etc).

shhh...its a secret

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

Yes, well Gates is spending mostly his own money. The government is simply spending other people's money.

Who do you think is going to spend more wisely?

I fail to see a correlation between those two. Some people spend their own money carefully, and squander others'. Some people are careless with their own money, and very responsible with that of others. It depends on the people doing the spending, and "the government" is a lot of people, some leaning this way, some leaning that.

Re:Birth Control

[martin-boundary]

For debt to be a Ponzi scheme there has to be a bonus to being an early participant at the expense of later participants (that's the incentive for growth, to generate later participants).

Indeed, the time value of money implies that debt becomes more expensive to repay over time. It also favours early investment as opposed to later investment. When one's investments are debt financed, an early debt in a growing market is likely to pay off.

And we have a number of fiat currencies that work pretty well.

It's easy to work well enough when the economy is growing. The (social) problems occur when the economy is not growing fast enough or at all, as it must eventually due to resource limits. Then the lack of growth can be hidden for some time by increasing debt levels. That is not sustainable, either.

How do you propose to stabilize such a society with fiat money and debt indefinitely?

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

Per Melinda Gates' own words, they HAVE done the analysis I mentioned.

Per my words with a limited focus.

I'm sure the first foreign aid had done an analysis, too. Feeding that people so they don't starve certainly turned out to be the top priority. They just didn't realize that more survivors == more ressource usage == worsening of the food and water situation.

Call me ignorant in 10 years, when the Gates Foundation has saved 8 million lives, thus condemning 20 million people (their children) to suffering and early death.

You can't interfere with exponential processes (population growth) unless you're able to raise your investment exponentially.

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

Gates isn't the devil, simply because I'm pretty sure Gates exists. :-)

No, one foundation can't solve all the problems. But it should think of the consequences of its actions. If they save 8 million lives, that means 8 million more "customers" for the work of all the other foundations, foreign aid institutions, etc. who support the rest of the lives of those people.

I say it again: None of us wants to personally suffer or die from disease. Nevertheless, underpopulation is not exactly on the list of problems this planet has to solve. Saving lives without improving the amount of life that a region can support is a stupid thing to do.

Re:Birth Control

[Tom]

The Gates foundation is quite open that they are after getting the most bang for their buck - how can they have the largest impact on the human condition for their money.

The largest visible impact. A foundation needs publicity and good image. There's a lot of other things that would greatly improve the human condition. And I still think it is wrong to save people and then leave them in their state of misery. Either go the whole nine yards, or don't do it at all.

Re:Birth Control

[inflamed]

That's a weak point. I work 70 hours a week and come home to screaming brats most of the time. I wouldn't have life otherwise, though. Maybe it's not relevant, but I had my first child at 19.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as the US and oil goes Canada is it's chief supplier. There are alot of misconceptions coming from people who consider themselves educated. The problem with this thread is that stupidity and education dont really follow the same line. People have been deceiving themselves since man got too 'smart' for his own good. I admire animals, they let nature do the job for them.

Everything in life is a trade off, more govt. more control, more education, more people that think they know something. I think those 'Gates' people need to start in their own back yards before they go overseas to help 'control' 'other populations.' The history of this world is replete with douche bags that thought making the world better meant controlling it. Self regulation is like a free economy, and the one most likely to be diverse enough and most flexible enough to handle catastrophe.

Remember most people reading this thread have a comfortable life style, one that stands on the backs of those less fortunate. It should be no surprise that the majority would wish to see a continuance in the control mechanisms placed in less-advantaged regions of the world in order to keep said fortune.

If Bill and Melinda really wanted to help they would start a public awareness campaign to aid in deconstructing the US's intervention in to other countries affairs. Public participation is weak in this country, its politicians are bought, and hypocrisy is accepted by the masses. What's wrong with self-determination?

As it stands now, their foundation is just another cog in the intervention and manipulation of other countries probably akin to USAID and the NED.

Re:Birth Control

[inflamed]

Lower the first-world's standard, starting with luxuries and working your way down to necessities if necessary (it's not).

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how Catholicism is the problem, even though the most overpopulated countries in the world are not Catholic. Also, given the high birth-out-of-wedlock in the rest of them, if they don't listen to the Pope about that, what makes you think they're not using condoms on religious grounds?

You are right that they'd ban it. They're way ahead of you. You're not supposed to use any contraception except the rhythm method (and they do have modern variants of it that work somewhat better, though it's still quite unreliable).

Re:Birth Control

[Hitto]

The "blacks can't keep it in their pants" story is actually about having a high enough ratio of children who make it to adulthood before disease kills them. In the countries where the death rates from disease significantly decreased, guess what happened? Birth rates significantly slowing down.

But I think both of you guys should set foot in Africa at least once before you talk the whole "it's ethnic cleansings everywhere!!!ONE" garbage.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Birth control we need... that's not tackling the problem, but only the symptom.

Matt Groening envisioned a solution a decade ago in a cartoon known as Futurama. 40% of the population walks around in misery, and older people don't walk at all. What we need is a Suicide Booth and the mental attitude of the Klingons. Problem solved.

Re:Birth Control

[jez9999]

They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.

And the US Military has over $500bn/year going into making the US safer (ostensibly).

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

If we remove the cap, we will have no issues paying for it.

You do not refer to yourself paying for it. Easy enough when you seek to take the wealth of others?

Looter.

Re:Birth Control

[phoenix321]

Birth rates should be significantly slowing down when medicine and food supply are good enough to assure that most children reach adulthood.

They should and they do in some countries and/or cultures. In others, the population count suddenly explodes, with 8-10% increase per year, sustained for decades. The health and food supply then drops of course as infrastructure and resources are stretched above and beyond. But the population level usually remains stable after that, until another WHO or other rich benefactor throws in another round of vaccination, food supply, affordable emergency housing.

Example:
Gaza Strip, Westbank, Palestine: during events that Palestinians love to call "2nd Holocaust", the population increased from 500.000 to 7.000.000 in less than 40 years. The population still increases by 8% each year with no slowing in sight, as Arab neighbors and of course the ever-benevolent EU continue to give millions in aid, food and medicine. They still call it Holocaust, though.

___
Food, medicine, wealth and the chance of children to reach adulthood are only some factors in the decision or non-decision to have offspring. Of equal or higher importance are
- access to contraceptives
- the willingness to use them
- the cultural status of the number of children among adults,
- prevalence of adultery,
- risk-seeking behavior
- men's and women's rights in relation to each other
- religious affiliation
- strength of religious beliefs

While shortages of food, medicine, housing and access to contraceptives "simply" need an amount of X million Dollars or Euros to improve, all the other factors are inherent in each and every culture. They can change and they can be changed, but it will take decades and money alone will not help much there.

Food, medicine and housing shortage will reduce the population growth only indirectly, but with a vengeance: by children dying en masse. Foreign aid, oil booms etc. will not alleviate much when the Average Joe thinks that the a lot of children are a symbol of wealth, if all the priests or imams or holy books tell them that having more children is the will of god or all men and women willfully or habitually engage in risk-seeking sex, or sex while under the influence or anything like that.

When all of Joes friends awe at his virile manliness for fathering 10 kids, and Joe's wife (and everyone else's) is subdued, veiled, imprisoned by other Joes, the mob rule in Joe's country or Joe's favorite religion's Gestapo - then no amount of wealth or poverty is going to stop him using his god-given tools of manliness without the god-forbidden sins of rubbery latex.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem with it is that millionaires don't contribute the same % as the rest of us. Take off the cap and everything will be fine.

Looter! Even with the cap these people contribute far more then they will ever draw, subsidising the rest of you. Why should they pay more?

If you believe in "from each according to his ability" and other nonsenses why not put your morals where your mouth is and move to a Socialist state? We are a Republic founded on respect for property rights.

You may find this allegory interesting: 20th Century Motor Company

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong, the standard of living got much better for the farmers because of the plague.
But the nobility got hurt, they got much less profit from the remaining fewer farmers. They also lost the grip over the farmers, that was close to slavery. The mythical Robin Hood is also a part of the plauge period.

Re:Birth Control

[Yvanhoe]

The current political way of doing is by having new generations more populous than the older ones. A famous scientist said about this that one had to ignore what an exponential curve is to find this position sane.

Re:Birth Control

[eman1961]

World wars are a remarkably ineffective way to control population. Best estimates are that 50M people died in WWII. This is only 1/3 of the people born in India since 2001, when they passed 1B.

Re:Birth Control

[paving-slab]

That is the biggest load of bollocks I have seen in a long time!

It's just laughable, the old man couldn't buy phonographs so he turned to drink and was constantly drunk? how about spending the money he bought the drink with on records?

The whole piece is complaining about other people getting stuff, even trivial stuff, and yet he couldn't?

And then they all become alcoholics? Where did they get the money?

Not to mention the premise was each according to his ability, so if productivity went down it means there were slackers. The idea is to root out the slackers, not make others compensate for them. Were people afraid to tell others to pull their weight?

The whole thing is a big joke, for fucks sake grow up!

Re:Birth Control

[Dan541]

Ok then, genocide...

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

Sarcasm or no, never did I say someone was better dead than not. People who are not born never existed... Birth control should be PART of aid, not the only aid.

Re:Birth Control

[khallow]

Indeed, the time value of money implies that debt becomes more expensive to repay over time.

You have that exactly reversed. A dollar now is worth more than a dollar later. The time value of money favors the borrower.

How do you propose to stabilize such a society with fiat money and debt indefinitely?

The solution is a combination of a market in both debt and fiat currency combined with frequent economic shocks that test the fitness of market participants. I think bank regulation and deposit insurance (such as is found in the US) is ok, though the insurance is too generous. The insurance should be incomplete (say 80% of deposit covered) to encourage depositors to consider the fitness of the banks they choose (with the side effect of improving the liquidity of the insurance). As a side effect, this will encourage bank runs which are an excellent test of bank fitness (that is, they're an "economic shock"). Fiat currencies would work in a similar way. Any bank or other institution should be able to issue its own currency. Currencies that are inflated, will rapidly fall in value compared to those that are sounder. This already works to an extend with government currencies. The problem though is that virtually all governments owe massive amounts of debt and other obligations. Hence, there is considerable pressure to inflate the currency so as to reduce these obligations' future cost. Most private currency issuers would not have this sort of pressure.

Re:Birth Control

[dimeglio]

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources. I would hope this component would be very high on the list of any type of aid when addressing suffering and helping to stop the perpetuation of suffering.

I see a reverse correlation between birth rates and quality of life. For example, I recently read Israel's Jewish population is declining but Muslim population is increasing. There was even a secret memorandum looking at the threat of non-Jewish population increase. This is mainly due to the higher birth rate in the Arab population.

This might also apply in other parts of the world.

In my opinion, increasing the quality of life, strangely, seems to have a direct effect of birth rates. Disease prevention and better health care is part of this increase in quality of life but also education, economic development, disposable income, etc. I don't see an incompatibility here. Birth rates will decrease with the higher quality of life.

Re:Birth Control

[markdavis]

I see, so you think one or two people trying to take care of 12 non-polio children have more "opportunity" (education, time, resources, money) than one or two people trying to take care of 2? Doesn't take a genius... I never said birth control should be the ONLY aid, I said it should be high on the list of aid given.

Re:Birth Control

[Hurricane78]

WTF, guys?? I’m not flaming! Would you have cared to read my comment, and to understand it, then you would have noticed that it’s intelligent and does even partially agree with parent commenter. A sign of an educated discussion.

But hey, what does someone who mods comments as flamebait, before even fully reading them, instead saying where he disagrees in his own comment, know about a proper discussion...

Look at the guys who answered. They did it right.
I hate troll-moderators!

Re:Birth Control

[Hurricane78]

Financially? Well, if you pay back your debts? Oh hell yeah!
Mentally? The US? With that behavior? Definitely! ^^
Your point is what? ^^

Lol, you still speak of “calories”. The 60s called! They want their level of knowledge about nutrition back!
Short carbohydrates are the reason people become fat pigs, AND the reason they become retards (because that stuff eats all their B-vitamins, which their brain needs, and does not bring its own... as opposed to e.g. whole grain food.)

Re:Birth Control

[maxume]

So you pillage your B vitamins from the third world?

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

That's fine, but I wouldn't say we need a 100% effective solution. When we're looking at a serious overpopulation/explosively-growing-population problem, then a 1% failure rate is better than.. oh... 50% pregnancy success (a number I'm totally pulling out of my ass) when no contraception is used.

Well, among fertile couples, the pregnancy rate is 90% after one year of regular copulation.

While 1% is better on the whole societally when dealing with overpopulation, it does little good for the man who fathers a third child and increases his brood 50%. It could be the difference between starting to save a little and a return to poverty.

And, with a return to poverty he will decry contraception "a failure anyway" so "why bother". This would be espescially true if the contraceptive method encouraged is condom use (one of the cheapest and least reliable).

So, to be effective, insurance must be available against contraceptive failure. But, short of sterilization, how would you guarantee it would be used all the time?

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bring out your old! Bring out your old!"

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

> Pity, because the most over-populated 3rd-world countries (outside of China & India) tend to be Catholic.

IMHO you are spreading FUD about RC. Top 5 countires ordered by fertitlity rate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate

Niger - 90% muslim
Guinea-Bissau - muslim
Afghanistan - muslim
Burundi - RC
Liberia - local beliefs+protestant

Most overpopulated places (exculding China and India) IMHO are Bangladesh and North Africa - both muslim..

Re:Birth Control

[Pictish Prince]

Since when is a simple statement of truth and an expression of the resultant outrage "flamebait"?

Re:Birth Control

[Pictish Prince]

Saddam's life is non-existent you moron.

Re:Birth Control

[thickdiick]

At first thought, i would also say that birth control and education are key. They are indeed important. But Africa is not poor in resources — it's poor in property rights and their enforcement. People don't invest in infrastructure over there because of poor property rights. Consider a farmer who builds irrigation for his field. When some guerrillas run through town or another dictator ascends to power, they may take his hard invesment in his land from him. Another thing is that people are resources: they can improve the land and produce goods. So birth control, in the current state of affairs, would help lots. But the most benefit would come from strong property rights in poor areas so people can invest in infrastructure and their land without fear of losing it through force.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't project the image you want to think you do.

Re:Birth Control

[Idiomatick]

GP came off as "wahh wahh my western lifestyle is so hard, if those sub-Saharan Africans knew how hard life was in an american 'nuclear' family they definitely wouldn't have kids".

Clearly that is fucking bullshit.

And I realize that ethnic cleansings aren't everywhere, Africa is a huge place. But I imagine the FEAR of it is quite widespread. And I know that kids whining because they are spoiled is not a top concern in most/all of Africa. To say it is belittles the problems they face day to day.

Re:Birth Control

[schreiend]

Or give away free TV sets: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/08/13/sex.or.tv/index.html

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

you seem to be missing the extremely easy to understand point.
*any* reduction is good.
Abstinence only tends to be a spectacular failure everywhere it's tried as is handing out bibles.
So lets go with a method which actually works almost all of the time under real life conditions.

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Masturbation isn't just about sex. People who have fulfilling sex lives still masturbate.

Re:Birth Control

[Genda]

Looking at population per se', is looking at the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is global poverty and culture. Everywhere in the emerging nations of the world where women get access to contraception, education, and some semblance of personal freedom and civil rights, there is an immediate and significant reduction in the birth rate. The religions cultures of the world that teach that women are nothing more than delivery mechanisms for sons of men, must be addresses and made to take responsibility for the damage they do and the cost they have to human society on the planet.

A recent analysis of the complex state of global affairs, strongly suggests that by eliminating poverty in the world, and having all people be actively contributing members to global enterprise, we would all enjoy the fruits of global peace, the end of famine, plague, and mass suffering for over a third of the human population. As well, by helping the third world leapfrog the first and second world in the area of sustainable technologies, and environmentally sound business, we could powerfully impact the future of all people, and begin designing a future vs. coping with the one that simply lands on us like a house.

Re:Birth Control

[qbzzt]

This will become true once technological progress stops looking exponential. Hopefully, that will take a while. Malthus will prove right at some point. But he hasn't proven right yet. It's quite likely we're centuries away from that point.

Re:Birth Control

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Your view shows how ignorant you are of a 3rd world situation.

3rd world?

Re:Birth Control

[Chris Burke]

I see, so you think one or two people trying to take care of 12 non-polio children have more "opportunity" (education, time, resources, money) than one or two people trying to take care of 2?

Almost certainly, yes -- you have any idea the amount of extra effort that goes into taking care of a sick child, versus one who above a certain age does not require constant care? And the children themselves will have more opportunities.

Doesn't take a genius...

Nope, just someone with a clue as to the consequences of serious but preventable disease.

I never said birth control should be the ONLY aid, I said it should be high on the list of aid given.

No, you just said that if you "artificially increase the life span of the overpopulation" it only exacerbates the problem, implying you think curing disease shouldn't be high on the aid priority because its detrimental.

Nobody (outside of fundamentalists and catholics) thinks birth control aid shouldn't be given. And, in fact, it is being given. However to truly impact population growth you have to affect the economic realities that create the incentives to have more children, and that includes the burden and cost of disease! People are having many children to help them on their farms, but some of those children are then tasked with caring for the sick ones, necessitating even more family laborers.

Vaccines will have more real effect on their situation and on the subsequent population growth than crates full of condoms. Does it take a genius to figure this out, or am I just wasting my time?

Re:Birth Control

[Idiomatick]

Yep, I've seen that video (loved it). And that's why I said 'often'. I know not all people are in the same situation. But! The people dying of diseases that are easily avoidable, they fit into the lower tiers of african 3rd world.

Re:Birth Control

[Yvanhoe]

Well that is one of my other criticisms as well : we are currently wasting our exponential technological progress and efforts at making more people live on Earth instead of using it to make our lives exponentially better. Just imagine what could be done in a world with a constant population. It is bewildering...

Re:Birth Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly.

1. We are living exponentially better, at least as far as the standard of living is concerned. Compare the 50s to today.

2. The exponential technological progress may depend on having exponential growth in the number of people who produce said technology.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

No, I didn't miss the point. I am replying to "the point is to stop babies..." not, reduce babies, but stop them being produced. Only abstinence achieves this, but, of course, abstinence is hard to achieve.

Had badboy_tw2002 written "reduce the production of babies", your argument would have merit.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Birth control is not effective, for a definition of "effective" that means "perfect". For all intents and purposes, I chose abstinence after my second child was born as I only wanted two children. My record in this regard isn't perfect, and when I relented, less than perfect (1% method failure) protection was still employed. Fortunately, I still only have the two children I desired.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

What the hell does abstinence have to do with religion? No one ever died from lack of sex. People have died engaging in sex, giving birth, being born, and being born into poverty.

Abstinence is about ensuring one does not procreate.

The fact that religion teaches this is a good idea outside of marriage is irrelevant.

Before the Slashdot virgin jokes kick in, let's consider how many people here would forego sex if it was offered to them by a person they found attractive.

I have. It was not difficult. Among other reasons, I would not do that with a friend on a bad rebound.

As for "drives", I have a pretty damn good "kill thieving liberals" drive. I haven't killed anyone.

Re:Birth Control

[Lord Ender]

You are ignorant and you will still be ignorant in ten years. You are claiming, based on a complete absence of evidence, that the foundation did not analyze the consequences of their actions before deciding what to do. The foundation has claimed otherwise, and they would actually know.

Furthermore, you are evil. You want to let people die to "decrease the surplus population?" Well, you better have actual analysis to back you up, not a line of bullshit, for championing such a position.

Full of shit. Evil. Tom (user 822).

Re:Birth Control

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

Social Security is a failure. It's broke! So is the US government. They can't afford anything. All they can do to make good on their social security obligation is print more dollars to pay people their benefits, which means those benefits will come at the expense of the rest of those naive enough to be holding dollars. Taking more from billionaires(a million isn't a lot these days due to perpetually incompetent government policy) won't do a thing because the obligations for social security are some $50 trillion. You could take every last dime from every billionaire in the US and it would still be broke!

Fire is different than Social Security. Fire is an unanticipated event, retirement is planned for. Of course we need the fire departments, but that's run poorly as well. In the state of California, we pay these guys $90k to work out at 24 hour fitness all day long. I'm sure in states like Texas that actually know how to balance a budget, it's fine.

Re:Birth Control

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

But if one company denies claims excessively, they will get a bad reputation and people will flee to other companies. I agree with you. Health insurance companies should be regulated, but by the consumer, not some crony in Washington.

Insurance for everything else works just fine. Auto, Fire, Homeowners, etc... These are the industries government isn't involved. It's only when government gets involved do things go south.

The government is the cause of the whole health care debacle starting with them driving up the cost of education, creating the HMO and limiting the choices of doctors for patients, creating Medicare, etc...

Re:Birth Control

[Rakarra]

And, with a return to poverty he will decry contraception "a failure anyway" so "why bother". This would be espescially true if the contraceptive method encouraged is condom use (one of the cheapest and least reliable).

So, to be effective, insurance must be available against contraceptive failure. But, short of sterilization, how would you guarantee it would be used all the time?

See, that's why I feel that abortion should be bundled with it. Takes care of any of the slipups. But of course... incredibly controversial.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Abortions are risky, expensive (if done safely) procedures. Insurance would be cheaper,

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

well given that a woman who avoids all sex like a robot factors can still be outside her control ie: she can still get raped and become pregnant so even abstinence fails to achieve that.
Unless you think that people who take abstinence pledges and then get raped have *broken* their pledges.
http://s539.photobucket.com/albums/ff359/blades420baby/christian%20sarcasm/?action=view&current=9.png

Now of course a lot of other forms of birth control don't do much about that situation but it's misleading to claim that your approach would be 100% effective.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

You're picking nits when you introduce crime: anything possible can be coerced.

There is no way an abstinent person can consensually produce offspring. I suppose they could do so accidentally, for example if a naked woman inadvertently sits on a puddle of fresh semen, but surely that can be avoided without too much difficulty as well.

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

Even ignoring the sitting in a puddle thing better make that consensually *and unintentionally* given how trivial artificial insemination is now days.

In any case it doesn't make for much of a practical solution for real world situations given that for the last billion years any of our potential ancestors with a talent for or natural tendency towards abstinence have gradually been selected out of the gene pool.

Better to accept that people are going to act like people and have sex and go with the approach which takes that into account.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

People who have sex without wanting children are irrational: they take on an unnecessary risk. Even if they are willing to accept children if contraception fails, this is cruel to the child: would you prefer to be "wanted" or merely "accepted"?

People who want to bring children into wretched circumstances are truly heinous.

What distinguishes people from animals is our capacity for restraint in consideration of potential consequences. Where such restraint is absent, I do not consider such animals "people".

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Actually, many people who practice abstinence do have children: we just chose when to have them and our lives are free of the worry if we have any "by accident".

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

*People are irrational*
We are not rational actors.
We like to think we are but rarely do people make anything close to rational choices.

People can want to have sex without wanting to have a child.
People extremely often *do* have sex without wanting to have a child no matter how much bibles are waved at them.
People *do* have sex whatever you do.

Better yet, thanks to the wonders of technology there are these wonderful inventions made out of latex which can dramatically lower the chances of you having a child as a result of sex.

So any rational actor who wanted to minimize the number of unwanted children born into these situations rather than fuck around moralizing ineffectively would accept that people have sex and hand out many examples of those wonderous inventions to anyone they could find.

But of course humans are not rational actors.

It's charming that you consider poor people living in the third world to be animals by the way.

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

well by definition as soon as you take the necessary actions to have children you stop practicing abstinence and start having sex with someone.
(assuming no puddles or turkey basters)

Anyone who consistently practices abstinence hasn't much chance to pass on the old genes.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Except, again, you are confusing the issue. AP (ancestral poster) talked about stopping the making of babies, and suggested contraception.

Contraception does not prevent the making of babies -- it merely reduces the chances of success (or failure, depending on your perspective).

Abstinence, absent coercion (though you could argue that a woman raped did not abstain, though she was not willing), does prevent the making of babies.

Of course, if you're only interested in reducing the chances of making babies, then, sure, contraception is very effective compared to nothing.

But, that is only useful in the aggregate. Poor Bozo Bazuzoo, who's family will starve if he has one more child can't risk any more children. If he cares about his family, he has to accept that his "glory days" are over. If he does not, then he is an animal.

Even sterilization can fail. Vasectomies spontaneously reverse at a rate of anywhere from 1/600 to 1/2000, depending who's statistics you cite. What "safety net" does Bozo have against such failure returning him and his family to semi-starvation?

If you're going to push contraception, then you must have a plan of what can be affordably done by the "climbing out of poverty" masses when it fails: saving for the cost of vasectomy while fertile, and then having enough income to insure against vasectomy failure.

It's not a matter of bibles. It's a matter of offering the means to stop producing children, guaranteed, when one wants to. Right now, only abstinence offers this, because no insurer offers insurance against sterilization failure. Further, in the U.S., for men, abstinence is also the only option since contracts to abort in the event of contraceptive failure are not recognized at law. (I'm presuming abortion is not available in poverty-stricken areas because relatively safe abortions are expensive to perform).

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

that's a fairly insane standard to go by.

If you take that view then vaccines are useless too since they only have something like a (picks number out of ass) 90% chance of actually confering immunity to a disease to any particular individual which is all well and good for that 90% but for the other 10% who can still catch the crippling/deadly disease it does no good.

Of course with vaccines there's also the aspect of herd immunity where once you get over a certain point diseases just don't spread.
Similarly once you get over a certain threshold with contraceptives then the whole society starts seeing benefits.

Poor Bozo, who's family will starve if he has one more child then has some sisters, brothers and friends etc who because they're part of that other 99% who didn't have children are not under the same strain.
They are generating more wealth and consuming less and are generally more able to help old Bozo out.

We could hand out condoms to actually help.

But no.
We should throw blindingly obvious common sense out the window and expect people to act like perfectly rational robots who don't have sex unless it's sensible to do so.
While we're at it lets provide electricity for people in the third world with generators powered by water flowing uphill and provide food products made from airborne organisms of the porcine persuasion.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Well, duh. Abstinence is a choice, not a religion, though religion usually proscribes when people should be abstinent.

I dislike sex for two reasons:

1. It can lead to children that I no longer wish to father: contraception is not perfect, and contracts to abort in the event of its failure are unenforceable at law.

2. It leads to changes in brain chemistry that can affect one's ability to act rationally -- the old maxim about women falling in love after a particularly good romp noted. I supposed men are also so affected, though to what degree is debatable. I've read that they become addicted to the sex partner.

I neither want children nor want an addiction to something that can be withheld on a whim,

At best, I liken sex to alcohol: moderation is best -- though a bit more dangerous.

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

"become addicted to the sex partner"
There's a less sinister way of describing that.

In any case, in my experience I'd liken it much more to air.
When you're getting regular sex then it's no big deal.
But if someone is deprived of it for a long time it consumes a lot more of their attention and gradually seems more important.
If anything I was most "addicted" before I first had sex at all.
(of course taking into account that it's lack is not lethal.)

Also you do realise that your viewpoint is not exactly a common one amongst normal people?
Most healthy non-traumatised adults aren't prone to utter the words "I dislike sex".

Comparing sex to alcohol would only work if 99% of the population was born preprogramed to develop moderate to strong alcoholism from about age 13 onwards no matter if they ever touch a drop.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

Harumph. I've essentially deprived myself of it from puberty to the time I could afford to raise children, and from the time I had the last child I wanted to now.

No great yearning or obsession. The thought of contraceptive failure and an unwanted child have a big chilling effect.

See, I never bought into the bullshit that its necessary for my survival or well-being. And, guess what? It isn't!

Another kid would sure be a damper, though. And, with me being 48, not fair to the kid.

Sex keeps people in abusive relationships, leads to unwanted children, makes one initially be in a "lovestruck fog" with someone new. No, thank you.

Surely a rational person can censor their impulses, no? That's what distinguishes us. There are plenty of people I think should be killed (liberals, mostly, but I digress). I don't go around killing them. A new car would be nice, and I could steal one, but I don't. Rich food tastes good, but a rational person does not overindulge. Sex might feel good, but it requires all these less than perfect mechanisms to avoid its natural consequences.

Crap, few things disgust me more than people living in inner-city squalor who can not support the families they already have, and continuing to breed, producing more children in misery. They lack self-control and do not strike me as human in the rational sense.

My opinions might be different if contracts to abort were legally enforceable, in the event of contraceptive failure, but they aren't.

As for "not normal", I think 99% of the population are little more than sheeple driven by what's pleasant in "the now", rather than using their brains to consider consequences.

The best ways to understand my views is to look at them from the perspective of asceticism: voluntary self-deprivation of comforts to build strength of will and remove the shackles of attraction to the unhealthy. Different ascetics deprive themselves of different things. Crap, if I did not like good food, comfortable surroundings, and technology, I'd likely be a Buddhist monk, though I am actually agnostic.

Re:Birth Control

[HungryHobo]

"See, I never bought into the bullshit that its necessary for my survival or well-being. And, guess what? It isn't!"

where did I say that?
I specifically said the opposite.

"No great yearning"

No offence intended but that makes you a significant oddity amongst normal humans.

"Sex keeps people in abusive relationships, leads to unwanted children, makes one initially be in a "lovestruck fog" with someone new. No, thank you."

Personally given the choice between the warm happy feeling of cuddling up with my girlfriend on a long evening or a brisk walk and a cold shower followed by eating rice cakes alone I'll take the former.

No matter how much you dislike the sheeple they're still what you've got to deal with.
You can get off on looking down on them all you want but it isn't going to help anyone.
99% of the sheeple aren't going to embrace your ascetic ideal no matter how much you talk about consequences.

And thus a solution needs to do more than complain about the actions of the sheeple.
For the sake of minimising the suffering of those not responsible (the progeny of the sheeple) any solution has to mitigate the consequences of the sheeples actions.

Re:Birth Control

[Rene S. Hollan]

I never wrote that I accused you of writing that I "bought into the bullshit...". I meant that in the context of great media pressure to buy into the bullshit -- namely, one must have an intense, active sex life.

I think people with biological drives that can't be suppressed because acting on them has negative personal consequences are weak. It's rather like gingerly touching a hot cup of liquid in the microwave and deciding that, despite the fact that it is hot, one can safely move it to the counter, before one gets burned, when the natural urge is "Hot! Avoid!". The analogy isn't perfect, but it's the first thing that comes to mind: suffering something unpleasant (unrelieved arousal) because the result is desirable (avoiding offspring at all costs).

One can enjoy physical affection without sexual activity, though it is true that few would accept abstinent relationships. Nevertheless, I would not consider the purchase of affection at the price of risking further progeny acceptable.

My point is not to insist that sheeple adopt something they can not master, namely abstinence. It never was. It was that the only way to prevent the production of babies, guaranteed, was abstinence. If reducing their production is adequate, then sure, contraception is advised, but in the context of "this can help, but it won't guarantee no more children, only abstinence will" (at least for men... a woman could always find herself raped).

Re:Birth Control

[VeNoM0619]

Except most parents do not plan on their child dieing when they are having them (some people want big families, little families, or no families regardless of the mortality). Reducing mortality will do nothing for this problem. It's when parents have 8 kids and expect the community to help them raise them, that we promote stupid behavior of unplanned parenting.

Simple answer: make abortions free, and either both parents have to agree, the government decides by a law (say 3+ children and you don't have the income), or let 1 parent decide (that's another debate topic in itself, the mother will have the baby just so the father pays the support - equating a child to a pay day).

While we're on the topic of vaccines

[TubeSteak]

I saw this in the news today
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/28/antivaxxer-movement-leader-found-to-have-acted-unethically/

Will this deter Wakefield [the founder of the modern antivaccination movement] and the antivax movement? Ha! Of course not. Note that supporters of Wakefield heckled the GMC members as they read their announcements.

I wonder if developing countries are as paranoid about vaccinations as the 1st world ones are.

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[gad_zuki!]

>I wonder if developing countries are as paranoid about vaccinations as the 1st world ones are.

Absolutely, partly because of lack of education and partly because religious groups and other Western groups with horrible agendas propagandize things like "Dont use condoms/birth control, its a western plot to control you." Im sure the anti-gay religious people, many of whom go to Africa to help fuel the hate of homosexuals, will dismiss the HIV vaccine as a plot also.

Not sure who will dismiss the malaria vaccine but Im sure humanity has no short of crazies willing to do so. Probably Jenny McCarthy, who gets quite a bit of free air time for her views on shows like Oprah and Tonight Show, but skeptics get almost zero airtime. Funny how that works.

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[Vinegar Joe]

I wonder if developing countries are as paranoid about vaccinations as the 1st world ones are.

Many African Americans believe that AIDS was created in a CIA lab and is spread thru the use of vaccinations.

http://www.avert.org/origin-aids-hiv.htm

Africans think this is BS.

"Dr Chris Ouma, head of health programmes for the charity ActionAid Kenya, said that the claims “fly in the face of experience on the ground”."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article884626.ece

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[Asclepius99]

Maybe all the fanatics will die out leaving only the sane among us alive? I know, I know, wishful thinking.

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[Hatta]

They're worse. Why let the white man inject something into your blood when you can just cure AIDS by raping an infant?

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[geekoid]

Yes, becasue the Cocksu^H^H^H^H^H^H anti-vaxxers pray on their ignorance..

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[geekoid]

Sadly, these crazy fucks are a vector for mutation which can endanger us all.

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[CohibaVancouver]

Maybe all the fanatics will die out leaving only the sane among us alive?

Tragically no... The herd immunity protects them.

"Measles shot? Why should I get my kid a measles shot? None of my kid's friends ever gets the measles."

Re:While we're on the topic of vaccines

[TheRaven64]

No, the fanatics don't believe in birth control, so they breed faster, even if they do insist on dying of curable diseases later.

Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all money earned with anti-competitive business practices that have set free software back decades. Bill Gates should be in penniless and in prison. He is no hero.

Re:Blood Money?

[not already in use]

Totally. You should go tell all the children that would benefit from these vaccinations that you don't support this cause because Microsoft was totally lame for requiring Internet Explorer be installed to properly run Windows.

Fucking OSS people. Seriously, go choke on your beard.

Re:Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blood money"? Seriously?

Get over yourself. Nobody died because IE got integrated into Windows.

Re:Blood Money?

[Jeng]

This is all money earned with anti-competitive business practices that have set free software back decades.

How exactly has Microsoft set back free software "decades"?

SCO may have set Linux back a few years at most, but more likely just raised awareness about free alternatives as well as setting legal precedent that Linux is indeed free.

Their bluff about patent infringement was called and Microsoft did nothing.

Probably the worst thing Microsoft did against free software was allowing XP to be pirated at an insane amount which lowered demand for free alternatives.

Microsoft may have set back some software decades, but it wasn't the free software movement, it was the companies it bought.

Re:Blood Money?

[Asclepius99]

Warren Buffett donated $30 billion dollars to the B&M Gates Foundation. So it's entirely possible that none of this money is Bill's.*



*Okay, not is not. B&M were getting the $30B in 5% annual increments starting in either 2006 or 2007, but can't we pretend for the sake of hundreds of thousands of live?

Re:Blood Money?

[TheKidWho]

But the Free Open Source Software movement has been strangled!!!!11

Re:Blood Money?

[jo_ham]

And people wonder why OSS software zealots are ignored at all the big parties.

Seriously, he is going to do an *incalculable* amount of good with that amount of investment into vaccine and disease research, but as long as you don't have to worry about polio or malaria or HIV while you recompile your kernel in your mom's basement you're going to begrudge the poorest members of humanity an improvement on their survival rate because you think MS is evil.

Re:Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking OSS people! Don't they know that the ENDS always justify the MEANS? Next thing you know, they'll be telling us to treat our neighbours as we would want to be treated. Fucktards!

Re:Blood Money?

[SBFCOblivion]

Fucking [insert your label here] people, go generalize more.

Re:Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. The proper expression is not "choke on your beard." It's "CHOKE ON A COCK YOU COCKGURGING LOVER OF THE COCK."

Re:Blood Money?

[sl149q]

Love him or hate, Bill doesn't care what you think.

But Gates has committed to getting rid of his fortune IN HIS LIFETIME. The B&M Gates Foundation will not continue forever. It is setup to ensure that all the money (at this point BGates personal fortune, plus $10B from Buffet) is spent quickly under the control and direction of Bill and Malinda Gates. Buffet gave them $10B because he thought they would be able to spend it on more worthwhile things than he (Buffet) could without doing the same amount of work (Buffet still runs various companies, Bill doesn't.)

Re:Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can totally see that as an exchange between Gabe and Tycho.

Re:Blood Money?

[Alex Belits]

How exactly has Microsoft set back free software "decades"?

By contaminating minds of people who write software with Windows design. To write anything for Windows, one has to internalize Microsoft design principles, so programmers exposed to it produce more stupidly designed software and become incapable of understanding non-Windows-based software.

The whole thing IS a war of ideologies. Microsoft uses specific interfaces for everything, generalizations are based on random choices of abstraction, interfaces are never generalized or inherited between technologies, except when such interface imposes completely inappropriate specific abstraction on a more general concept. It's great for giving work for large number of mediocre employees, so they are kept mediocre. It creates unnecessary complexity and confusion, so security suffers most and performance next. Ex: Win32, Windows events handling and I/O, OLE/DDE -< COM/DCOM -< ActiveX/SOAP saga, the whole evolution of VB.

Unix and later open source does the opposite -- generalized interfaces are designed to be useful for multiple unrelated applications as an underlying mechanism, so specific applications can have their own infrastructure based on the same foundation. Ex: Unix filesystem, file descriptors, IPC, TCP/IP, virtual memory, security and process model, Berkeley sockets, libc.

In my experience, a person exposed to one of those sides can't effectively work with the other, so people indoctrinated with inferior engineering ideology are only capable of producing more compromised technology, making any real progress more difficult.

Re:Blood Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

By contaminating minds of people who write software with Windows design.

Opinion. Irrelevant.

so programmers exposed to it produce more stupidly designed software and become incapable of understanding non-Windows-based software.

Troll and optionally flamebait. Ignored.

It's great for giving work for large number of mediocre employees, so they are kept mediocre.

Troll + Opinion, irrelevant.

It creates unnecessary complexity and confusion, so security suffers most and performance next.

Opinion. Irrlevant.

Unix and later open source does the opposite

Open source means the source code is distributed with the product or is optionally available for a modest fee. It doesn't do anything by itself. It doesn't imply anything else. It doesn't get you from point A to "awesome design". Cmon F/OSS cheerleaders, get your propaganda straight. A child and see through this.

so people indoctrinated with inferior engineering ideology are only capable of producing more compromised technology, making any real progress more difficult.

Yawn. Yet more opinion.

Lets recap.

opinion without any proof - check
0 facts - check
anti-ms hate - check
FOSS cheerleader - check
doesn't know what the fuck hes talking about - check

High score ! You're a good Slashdot citizen. Whose a good boy? Whose a good boy? You are ! Heres a cookie.

Re:Blood Money?

[Alex Belits]

Opinion. Irrelevant.

Because all opinions are equal, amirite?

Troll + Opinion, irrelevant.

No, actually it's the reality.

Open source means the source code is distributed with the product or is optionally available for a modest fee. It doesn't do anything by itself. It doesn't imply anything else. It doesn't get you from point A to "awesome design". Cmon F/OSS cheerleaders, get your propaganda straight. A child and see through this.

In a different universe it would be possible to have a community of open source developers that promotes bad engineering practices. In this one, most of developers who work on all noticeable open source projects, happen to do something that is WORTH sharing with others.

Incredible

[gad_zuki!]

This is really incredible. We're going to see a malaria and/or HIV vaccine in our lifetimes partly thanks to people like Gates.

I guess the larger issue is whether these poorer countries can handle having a much lower mortality rate. Probably. I imagine this initiative ties in with others and that these societies probably need more young people than old.

Re:Incredible

[Ifni]

Just looking at the number of expected lives saved, it kind of answers the question "what is left once you are the richest man in the world?". First, you are a billionaire in dollars, then you strive to become a billionaire in lives saved. If that isn't buying your way into Heaven, I don't know what is.

That of course ignores the validity of the estimates, but still, I wish more people in this world measured wealth in terms of "lives saved" or "lives improved" rather than just dollars. Hate on Bill all you like, but selfish or not, this is a noble deed.

Re:Incredible

[TheRaven64]

Noble? Depends on the strings. If it's like previous B&MGF 'donations' of medicines then it comes with the requirement that the receiving country enters into one-sided IP treaties with the USA. Not exactly my definition of noble.

Re:Incredible

[vbraga]

DDT is a effective way to control the malaria transmitting mosquitoes. Unfortunately, it's use has been banned.

link.

Re:Incredible

[AK Marc]

Unfortunately, it's use has been banned.

Banned? Your link states that DDT use is being funded by the US government. That's not "banned" in any sense I know. If the globe sprayed it universally as the US once did, then it would wipe out massive numbers of species of animals. So the US did go too far in completely banning its use here and pushing to ban it elsewhere. But they (long before your comment, and reflected even in the link you give that directly contradicts your words) did realize that ground spraying (not the aerial spray used in the US) is effective and reduces runoff, and when done only in densely populated areas has a great effect reducing mosquito transmissions while not impacting the environment. And they fund such use now, in direct contradiction to your "it's banned" comment. Did you even read your own link?

they still harmed more by promoting patents

[KiloByte]

That 10 billion dollars are nice, but they're still chump charge compared by the damage the foundation did by promoting patent enforcement. Who cares if you deliver X pieces of drug at the cost of $200 each if you could instead make the drug cost $1, its real manufacturing cost?

The argument about recouping research costs is no longer valid when most of the money goes into marketing instead of research.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[VoiceInTheDesert]

Really? You're going to pick on his desire to have his patent's enforced because people in a different industry abused the system to the neglect of human lives. I guess the Wright Brothers and Einstein should have an * next to their name too since their work lead to so much death as well.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Archangel Michael]

You forget to add in the R&D used to create said drug, the FDA Fees and costs to get the drug tested and approved. Now add in the Liability costs when shit happens to %.001 of the people taking the drug and are sued into oblivion by the likes of John Edwards and so on.

The real cost of a vaccine is probably closer to $200 per dose than the actual $1 cost to manufacture it.

Now, if you're suggesting we stop R&D, FDA approval process and torts against the vaccine manufacturer then we might be closer to getting your fictional $1/dose vaccine.

It just isn't as simple as you suggest.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Totenglocke]

If you knew anything about the pharmaceutical industry, you'd know that only a small number of the drugs they try to get approved are in fact approved (which means hundreds of billions lost) so yes, the few that get approved need to cost more to keep the company going. There's also the fact that those top notch scientists creating the drugs kind of like to get paid....

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical slashdot commie attitude. Creating drugs (like creating software) should be free! Wait no. Neither is free, which is why most serious FOSS developers are on some companies pay roll doing development for dollars. Food isn't free last I checked.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[kuzb]

I don't think I've ever read something so douchey on slashdot before. Really. When was the last time you even donated 1/1000th of that amount to a charity.

Only retards look a gift horse in the mouth like this.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[bmajik]

I knew this comment would appear.

You are disgusting. Does your irrational hate for Microsoft have no boundaries whatsoever?

If you are like 90% of people, you _would not be using a computer_ were it not for Microsoft.

But lets set Microsoft and software aside.

I encourage you to head to some disease infested rathole, pre-vaccination, and when people working with funds and medicine provided by the Gates foundation offer to give you an injection that gives you an order of magnitude improvement in survival over your ancestors and everyone in your peer group... I expect you to show them your printed out slashdot comment, [no doubt printed by a printer that Microsoft had some small role in bringing to market]... ...and I expect you to refuse the vaccine because you have principles that are beyond reproach.

I expect you to provide an eloquent lecture to the doctors [who will haved moved on to treating other people -- ones worth saving], extolling the evil of the foundation that makes it financially possible for them to help poverty stricken people without worrying about how _they_ are going to eat.

Before heading over, why don't you post it here? Why don't you explain for all of our benefit how Bill Gates created the patent system, and without it, free medicine would have invented itself, and subsequently sprouted wings and flown across the ocean to where it is needed; where doctors would materialize out of nothing riding in on glorious unicorns with silver manes, and then be well fed enough on all of the abundant free food in africa to gleefully risk their own lives to administer said drugs to the people that without such treatment would continue dying in mountainous heaps of human suffering.

I'm all ears, hot shot.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[TheSync]

The argument about recouping research costs is no longer valid when most of the money goes into marketing instead of research.

But without marketing, you wouldn't have enough sales to earn the profits needed for the research, or to be able to risk taking drugs (that may fail) through the expensive FDA approval process.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[KiloByte]

Did I say a word about stopping R&D? Hell no.
I said that bulk of the money goes to marketing instead of R&D. That, and in the case of US, rampant legal costs.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're suggesting that your excessively litigious society is the natural order of things, and the rest of the world should suffer as a result.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[geekoid]

Please take your arguments elsewhere. They are ignorant and factual incorrect.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[KiloByte]

Some marketing, sure. But not marketing that costs more than research and production together.

Have you ever worked with a doctor? It's absolutely sick. They spend a sizeable portion of their time talking to representatives of pharma companies. Drugs they prescribe are not drugs that work the best but drugs the doctors get incentives for.

I happen to work in a software company that, among other products, does some systems for doctors. This gives me mere glimpses of the pathology, but I've seen enough to be beyond disgusted. Another distant friend of mine actually works as a pharma representative, that's some more hearsay.

Perhaps someone here can enlighten us with some hard data?

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[CohibaVancouver]

Two thumbs up - You are so right!

People who oppose this altruistic venture should log off WoW for an hour or two and go read "Major Barbara."

"They would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara_(play)

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[TheRaven64]

Why did you bring up Microsoft? The comment that you are replying to has nothing to do with Microsoft. It has to do with the B&MGF's policy of requiring countries that benefit from their 'altruism' to sign IP treaties with the USA that prevent local production of the vaccines in question. Over the course of a decade, their 'donations' reduce the total amount of vaccines that will reach the people in the countries in question. Free vaccine now, but only if you make sure that the local company that could produce it for $1 never starts so when the donated vaccines run out you have to buy it for $200 from a US company. Sounds altruistic...

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

You also forgot to mention that the government is broke, and the FDA will gladly accept a bribe, err I mean few million dollars in processing fees, to 'fast-track' you through the approval process.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I say a word about stopping R&D? Hell no.
I said that bulk of the money goes to marketing instead of R&D. That, and in the case of US, rampant legal costs.

So wouldn't the problem then be a combination of a) insufficient restrictions on prescription pharmaceutical advertising and b) a screwed up tort system and not patents?

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Jiro]

You are basing this on several fallacies.

First of all, the fallacy that you can refuse the vaccine. You can refuse to take the vaccine, but if you think that the vaccine's bad effects outweigh its good effects, you can't refuse the whole package consisting of both the good and bad effects. It's not possible to say "I'm refusing to improve my health with this vaccine, but I also refuse to cause the damage caused by Microsoft's support of patent laws". Of course, if it was possible to say that, then you should refuse, but it's not, and the damage becomes a sunk cost, which you should logically ignore at the point you're choosing to take the vaccine.

Second, the fact that Microsoft does things while harming others floods the market and keeps out other people who might do it without harming others. That printer which Microsoft helped bring to market wasn't really helped by Microsoft--if Microsoft hadn't been there, someone else would have done so without hurting people as much. You can't refuse to use the printer and un-flood the market so that you can buy a non-Microsoft-influenced printer--once again, you can only refuse the good parts, not refuse the entire bad deal (consisting of both good and bad parts).

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

>> If you are like 90% of people, you _would not be using a computer_ were it not for Microsoft.

That's somewhat simplistic logic. Considering Microsoft's use of its monopoly power to squelch any real development in computer technology, a more logical conclusion is we, as a society, would most likely be much more advanced.

Oh, and as for your unwavering praise for the B & M Gates Foundation, keep in mind that a $10 billion donation will amount to very little -- Gates bypasses generics and focuses on big pharma contracts. Take away the obscenely massive mark-ups big pharma takes for itself and only a small percentage of that donation will be left for those recipients who actually need the aid.

Your blind reasoning putting everything is black and white terms is not realistic. Everything in life is much more complicated with layers of interrelated facets.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't be sued into oblivion for vaccines. There's a separate vaccine court set up to compensate that .001%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[KiloByte]

Your "gift horse" comes with a string attached. To get any drugs from the B&MGF, a country needs to sign an agreement they won't allow anyone to produce the drugs themselves.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

But but but tort reform is so necessary.

I was for tort reform until I took torts in law school. Changes your view when you see what really happens.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[izomiac]

Pharmaceuticals divvy up their revenue equally among research, marketing, and administration. Marketing obviously generates more revenue than it costs, so cutting that would increase vaccine costs (although there are still ethical issues with marketing). The administration costs can't be cut, because MBAs aren't going to work for free or less than they can get elsewhere.

Drugs are expensive, but what can you really do? It costs about a billion dollars and ten years to develop a single useful drug (this includes all the drug failures). Without patents there wouldn't be a hope to recoup the development costs, so drugs would need to be funded by grants from the government. Which would put you at ~$500 Million with research and administration costs and marginal drug manufacturing costs would be what you'd pay at the pharmacy. Of course, the expense wouldn't go away, so taxes would need to be increased, thus making Americans foot the bill for most of the drug research in the world, rather than those who actually take the drug.

I suppose the only real way to provide $1 vaccines to the developing world would be to give pharmaceutical companies a tax break for manufacturing them at cost for humanitarian causes. But they wouldn't do that if there was any potential for selling those vaccines above cost to humanitarian organizations.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[dbIII]

It isn't as simple as you suggest either. There is serious price gouging.
For example there's a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer developed in Australia with taxpayers money, and tested to full US standards approval with Australian taxpayers money. The right to manufacture it in the USA was sold at a very low price but people in the USA pay far more for it than anyone else. In that case a very tiny fraction of the R&D cost is added to the manufacturing cost. On top of that is a vast amount of profit.
It's not about getting back the R&D costs, sometimes it's about having a government enforced monopoly where you can charge whatever people will pay.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[BitZtream]

Contrary to popular belief, 'FDA Testing' is fucking trivial. Its not NEARLY as expensive as they'd like for you to think it is.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[repapetilto]

Ill say this... in medschool, at least the one I'm at (not a MD but Phd student but classes overlap) they only use the generic names in lectures (for the most part... its all you need for the test but the proprietary names might still be in parentheses because youll need to know those names eventually too in order to know what people are talking about) and the pros and cons of each drug are just stated outright. That being said, evaluating which drug is "best" is really subjective at this point, unless you have the money to get genotyped, and someone else got the money to do the genotyping research beforehand, the doctor cant really know which one is best , only which drug works most often for certain signs and symptoms (which is subjective) and certain ethnic groups at best. And thats if theyre up to date on the literature, which is sometimes wrong. So ultimately it is a decision being made that can be swayed by the fact that youre lmore likely to try the most common drug first. If the data is ambiguous you tend towards what is least likely to get you sued eventually.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to popular belief, 'FDA Testing' is fucking trivial. Its not NEARLY as expensive as they'd like for you to think it is.

You truly have no idea do you?

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? That MS invented the computer? or MS invented the OS?

They popularized DOS, Win3.1 and Windows 95 ( and other software products) while pushing expensive PC hardware into the commodity segment. This made the Intel+IBM Compatible computer extremely cheap.

If they wouldn't have done what the did, right now we'd have a few dozen operating systems working on a dozen different types of CPUs and software development would be a fucking nightmare.

Re:they still harmed more by promoting patents

[Anonymous Coward]

I have *some* idea, and I can tell you that there's a lot of incompetence in companies that submit to FDA's scrutiny. I'd say that most startups have some serious issue in that regard. But big pharma isn't so much better: the process may be worked out better, but there are still administrative/procedural inefficiencies involved. The process necessary to convince FDA that a drug is safe is relatively simple to follow, although I wouldn't call it 'fucking trivial'. The truth is that a lot of data submitted to FDA is crap.

Great news

[santax]

I find it hard to believe that people criticize this. What have you done for those people there is what I would like to know? As 'the' human race we should be ashamed that people still die of malaria. If Gates can fix that then Gates is a hero in my book. I don't like his software company and I might not even like the person Gates, but come on people... this is just awesome.

Re:Great news

[101010_or_0x2A]

You're an idiot, and theres nothing remotely sensible in your arguments.

Re:Great news

[bmsleight]

Have no mod points, but well said.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

You're enslaved because you have to pay for an OS on your computer, and you have some choice over the OS, and whether or not you have to pay at all? If I ever meet you I'll demand your wallet, which you'll hand over after shitting yourself out of fear of my rolled up wet newspaper.

Re:Great news

[swanzilla]

As 'the' human race we should be ashamed that people still die of malaria.

I see where you are going there, but the interplay between world socioeconomics and infectious desease is far from trivial matter. With over 350 million cases of malaria per year worldwide, the solution is not exactly a cake-walk, an by no means anything to be ashamed of.

Re:Great news

[stimpleton]

Gates can fix that then Gates is a hero in my book. I don't like his software company and I might not even like the person Gates, but come on people... this is just awesome.

And Gates dances a happy jig as he hears of the peoples reception to his plan.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

How would we all feel if the mafia donated this $10B? Would it be worth all the illegal and immoral things that generated the money?

Re:Great news

[johncadengo]

Yes, indeed. Curing malaria is awesome.

But allow me to borrow from Cornel West in his reaction to the Gates Foundation, "It's charity, it's not justice."

Re:Great news

[Rennt]

/facepalm. Okay, maybe if I included more information in my original post it wouldn't have been modded into oblivion - but the thing is I'm SURE we have discussed this extensively before.

Anyway, see my other post.

Re:Great news

[vivaelamor]

I can't believe hero status is bought so cheap these days. Perhaps if his kind weren't so greedy in the first place then average person might be in a better position to do something themselves.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

If you forgive me for not mincing words, Bill Gates is still a slimy little douche, no matter how much money he's spending, and here's why.

The gist of it is that the money he's spending is stolen, basically. He made it through illegal means, took it from people like you and me, and I don't give a fuck how much of it he's gonna spend on charity now: it's still stolen.

I mean, if somebody literally broke into your house, stole a thousand bucks, and then donated 500 to charity while keeping 500 for himself, would you cheer him on and call him a hero?

And don't forget that Gates isn't even going to any lengths: he's simply donating money he couldn't possibly spend, anyway. He's got everything he could ever want to buy, and he'll continue to be able to get everything he could ever want to buy. At least normal people who donate money will actually feel it, even if it's just a little bit; donating money you can't possibly miss in the first place is easy.

And let's not forget what he's doing here: he's not interested in charity, he merely figured out that there's something he wants that he can't outright buy, namely popularity. He's already famous, of course, but most people won't think of him as a "hero", so he's trying to change that. And it seems like it worked on you, too. Who says there's things money can't buy?

Of course, all that said, I won't deny that the money itself isn't bad: pecunia non olet. But make no mistake about Gates himself: he's no hero. He's a high-profile white-collar criminal who's stolen an insane amount of money and who's now using part of it to buy the hearts of the people he stole from, all the while still living a life of incredible luxury. I fail to see what's so heroic about that.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the classic "you're not entitled to criticize unless you're an activist" argument. You don't need to be involved to voice an opinion... you just need to be informed.

You're probably one of those people who think food donations and deferred-payment loans are helping to ease the suffering in third-world countries. Teach a man to fish...

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

The mafia: kills, steals taxpayer money, bribes elected officials, subverts labor unions, etc.
Bill Gates: used to run a company that makes a mediocre Operating System and sometimes abused their near-monopoly to sell more copies of said OS.

Yeah, those two are totally comparable. Idiot.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet armchair quarterbacks are the best. Most of these people will do nothing in their lives that approaches the amount of help and assistance Bill and Melinda Gates have given to people in need. Most of these people will give a MINUSCULE amount of money to charity compared to the 10 BILLION dollars they are spending (if they give to charity at all).

But they are more than happy to criticize and try to portray it as something negative.

You could combine all of the charity assistance these people have given (in monetary or nonmonetary forms) and you would not even come close to approaching a fraction of what Bill Gates has done.

Re:Great news

[jo_ham]

And you're posting AC - shows how ashamed you are of those comments, even in the practically anonymous /. userland - repost those comments under your actual user name if you really do believe it so strongly.

Re:Great news

[ignavus]

I find it hard to believe that people criticize this. What have you done for those people there is what I would like to know?

What he (the grandparent poster) has done is - like millions of other people around the world - contribute to the massive wealth of Microsoft and specifically Bill Gates, which enables the latter to do good works with "his money".

When the government spends money raised by taxing us, we say they are spending "our money". When Bill Gates spends money raised by taxing us, he says it is "his money". It would look better if he acknowledged that he was spending this money on behalf of all the Microsoft-taxed contributers to "his" wealth.

Wealth is wonderful. It enables you to buy anything you want, including a virtuous reputation. I could be giving proportionately more of my wealth to charity, and living in much more reduced circumstances than Bill Gates's, but I would go completely unnoticed.

Does Bill Gates experience any hardship as a result of his charity? It really seems more like his new hobby than a sacrifice. That doesn't make the results of this foundation wrong. I have no expertise on the relative merits of this project as opposed to other aid priorities, although Rennt made some pertinent observations about this.

Anyway, I can differentiate between the practical effects of a charitable act and its moral worth. Can't you?

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is curing malaria at the expense of mass starvation? If you're going to cure a disease that stymies population growth then you also must first ensure that the upcoming growth is resourced. Otherwise you're not only simply relocating the problem but extending it to other members of the population.

Re:Great news

[Flammon]

Well said. My feelings exactly.

Re:Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to believe that people criticize this. What have you done for those people there is what I would like to know?

As 'the' human race we should be ashamed that people still die of malaria. If Gates can fix that then Gates is a hero in my book.

I don't like his software company and I might not even like the person Gates, but come on people... this is just awesome.

Yes, I am ashamed that people still die from Malaria. And I don't want to take anything away from Mr. Gates. But I remember a time when we eradicated smallpox, and we all did it, because it was done with public money. I remember a time when we went to the Moon, and I had a piece of that, because a part of my taxes paid for that.
I guess what bothers me is your seeming hero worship of Bill Gates. Ah, yes, we should all get down and kill Bill Gates ass for this. This is a patronage system. And while I wouldn't deny that Mr. Gates is a hero for doing this, I don't trust this patronage system we seem to be intent on setting up.
Or maybe that's just the way this generation sees things - we are all so much into American Idol - we are just waiting around for the next hero. Waiting around to just bask in the glory of the next hero - maybe we can glom onto his success - and even if we can't, well, at least he's doing a good thing. That cute girl thinks so too, so I can make some points with her if I say I think so too.
But to get together as a community and actually accomplish something? well, that's too much work - and anyway, no one cares about doing something for the common anymore, now do they?

Re:Great news

[mrmeval]

If I come and defraud you and your family out of the money and give it to the puur is it good or evil. If I do this several million times and manage to avoid prosecution is it good or evil?

Even if the money was snow clean he's doing missionary work and missionaries are the greatest tool of evil ever devised.

The project is not neccessary

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Once you can shoot down mosquitos with lasers you might not need a vaccine for malaria. Like this we should find technological solutions that make vaccines unnecessary. I am wondering why Bill Gates is funding both initiatives.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Wyatt Earp]

Yes, the project is necessary.

Look at the map here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malaria_geographic_distribution_2003.png

How many tens of billions of your anti-mosquito lasers will it take to cover that range of the Earth?

Vaccines are a technological solution.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Hatta]

Why use lasers when you can use a mosquito net?

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Jeng]

A low cost alternative to the laser system would be the good old bug zapper. I'm sure the Gates could afford to throw a few of them in.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[bit9]

Wow. Who knew someone would actually try that? I thought of that idea 15 years ago, but figured it would be way too costly, not to mention potentially dangerous, even as a garage project.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[maxume]

It depends on how much they cost relative to treatment. If they lasers are relatively cheap, you can put them where there are lots of people (which should reduce the infection rate) and use treatment elsewhere, or if they are even cheaper, put them where people spend lots of time and use treatment on the people who still end up infected.

If doesn't have to be a perfect solution to have a massive impact on the problem (like the comment below yours says, nets are probably a better idea).

Re:The project is not neccessary

[roman_mir]

But if they attach wings to all those sharks, won't we have a problem even more severe than malaria spreading mosquitoes? Unless those are friendly sharks I fail to see the logic.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Wyatt Earp]

Lasers are LoS. Require power, fragile, etc.

Vaccinations and nets (which B&MG Foundation already funds) are better ideas.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Bug zappers don't do much on mosquitoes.

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you certainly blew your geek cred. "Why use lasers", indeed...

Re:The project is not neccessary

[Nick Number]

Once you can shoot down mosquitos with lasers you might not need a vaccine for malaria.

Wow. That sounds much easier than the old way.

Big Pharma won't like this...

[bfmorgan]

Big Pharma won't like this. They make money by providing medicines to treat diseases not prevent them.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[Duradin]

Actually more people living longer means more people will need drugs for their longer lifespan.

If "everyone" keels over during infancy there's not much of a window to sell them drugs. Get families that pop out 10+ kids and get them all living to be geriatric and you've got a pharmaceutical gold mine.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[oldhack]

Pharma milks treating rich world's chronic diseases, not the sorts afflicting developing world in subtropics because there is no money in it.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh who do you think is going to receive this so-called 'charitable donation'? Big Pharma wins either way...

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[bit9]

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to use the phrase "Big Pharma" . At least you didn't go off on the whole autism spiel. I'm getting really tired of hearing that one.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Capitalism was, profit now?

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[Jeng]

Dead men don't pay.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[phantomfive]

"Big Pharma" doesn't exist except in people's imaginations. What exists is a bunch of competing companies, not some uniform group out to screw the rest of us.

Whatever company comes up with the pill that removes all disease from people will make that company billions of dollars. Every other pharmaceutical company will go out of business? Would you really worry about that if you were going to make billions of dollars?

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[TheRaven64]

Big Pharma will love it. Bill buys $10bn of vaccines from them. They get the money. Then, he gives the vaccines to people in other countries on the condition that their government signs a treaty with the USA to enforce patents, like the ones on the vaccines. When the vaccines run out, the people in these countries start demanding that their government keeps supplying them. Unfortunately, they've just signed a treaty that prevents them from producing them locally, so now they have to go to Big Pharma and buy them. What's not to like?

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[mrsteele]

While the Pharm companies aren't likely in collusion, they certainly aren't in classic competition with each other, either. They compete for our dollars, but it's not like each company produces a car, and consumers just choose which car to purchase. Each company spends huge amounts of money to discover drugs that will sell. They then make huge amounts of money on that drug while they have a patent on it, and only they can sell it.

If one drug company finds a way to raise their prices, every other company will adopt the same practice. None of them are looking to undercut the others, because almost none of their products are identical enough to consumers. You take the one that works best for you, not the cheapest one.

Re:Big Pharma won't like this...

[phantomfive]

What you say is basically true, but it doesn't really provide support for the massive paranoia surrounding "Big Pharma." They aren't some industry that is out to destroy the rest of the world. It isn't some giant conspiracy that needs to be punished. Blaming "Big Pharma" for the problems of the world is as silly as thinking corporations 'own' the world.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[genghisjahn]

If they come up with a vaccine that cures curmudgeonly-pointless-cynicism, I hope you'll be one of the first in line.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Anonymous Coward]

Vaccinating the worlds poor is diametricly opposite:

Giving away their software, causes (computer) viruses, and could be contrued as a cruel lock in. Vaccinating is preventing (real world) viruses, and the cruel and debilitating effects.

I'm not waiting for the troll joke:
They can't prevent Viruses on their OS, so they're deciding to fight a battle they have a hope of winning.

$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Anonymous Coward]

I think $1149 worth of primary care medicine or even plain old sanitation in underdeveloped places could save a hell of a lot more lives than that.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[TheSync]

I think $1149 worth of primary care medicine or even plain old sanitation in underdeveloped places could save a hell of a lot more lives than that.

Yes, but you can't actually provide medicine or sanitation to underdeveloped places. Corruption would mean the medicine would go back on the international market to richer people looking for a deal, and the sanitation building would have to pay off all kinds of government officials to get permits, etc. Then it would have to be maintained in that environment.

Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.

On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to deride what is a very nice gesture by the Gates family, but I have to admit I would have thought vaccine initiatives would have yielded a more favorable lives saved per dollar that that.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.

On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.

And feel extremely smug and self-righteous about it, while having fixed none of the problems that really matter. The country is still poor, its institutions still bad, and its government still corrupt. A few people will live a year longer, create one more child than they would've otherwise, then die of a different disease, or starve, or be shot by death squad or whatever else.

What a contribution.

Philosophical question: If you save someone who would've otherwise died, and that someone lives a life of suffering, have you lessened, or added to, the amount of suffering in the world?

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Anonymous Coward]

$1149 seems like a pretty solid number to me. Consider that the $/person is likely much lower than that, as certainly not everyone getting a vaccine would have otherwise died from preventable disease.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[mr exploiter]

Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.

On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.

And feel extremely smug and self-righteous about it, while having fixed none of the problems that really matter. The country is still poor, its institutions still bad, and its government still corrupt. A few people will live a year longer, create one more child than they would've otherwise, then die of a different disease, or starve, or be shot by death squad or whatever else.

What a contribution.

Philosophical question: If you save someone who would've otherwise died, and that someone lives a life of suffering, have you lessened, or added to, the amount of suffering in the world?

Philosophical question: are you nazi? I find your views disturbing and remind me strongly the third reich.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

Why? Because I don't subscribe to the religion that saving life is the most holy, unquestionable good thing in existence, no matter the consequences?

I think it is evil to promote or prolong suffering. Sure, letting someone die isn't exactly nice. But let's make it more personal and less abstract. Imagine your neighbours wife is being beaten by her husband. Every day. Seriously. To the point where being beaten is roughly what her life is all about.
What would you say when the Gates Foundation comes about, proclaiming that so many people die of blood loss every year and that it could all be prevented with some ointment and band aids. And they come to her house and patch her up. Real well, too. All the bruises and scratches get bandaged. And then they leave and in the evening, you hear her screams again.

Now I'm the one who says "they could've spent that money actually improving her life", and you call me a nazi?

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[drsquare]

I think that the third world is more capable of building its own sewers than it is developing its own malaria vaccines. Ancient civilisations managed sanitation.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

Why? Because I don't subscribe to the religion that saving life is the most holy, unquestionable good thing in existence, no matter the consequences?

No, becaust you are begging the question. You are assuming that the quality of life is such that saving people will create suffering. When you assume a life of suffering, then yes, saving it is questionable. However, if you don't assume that, and you assume the person saved had some chance, then the question becomes different. You are ignoring that option, presuming the only option that makes your opinion correct, and then basing your argument off an unproven premise.

Back up and prove that no one saved has a chance of living a comfortable life, and then you will be 100% correct. Without that proof, you are guilty of that which you are accused of, by the person that posted to you that you responded to here and elsewhere in this thread where others said similar things.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

You are assuming that the quality of life is such that saving people will create suffering.

Not quite. I am saying that these people are already suffering. Saving their life is what is easy and lets you feel really good and righteous. But actually improving their life is the hard thing. Which is why not many people really do it, including the Gates Foundation.

They're doing a half-assed job if they come in, vaccinate people, and then leave. Especially if, contrary to many other programs, they actually do have enough money at their disposal that they could make a difference.

But, as Melinda Gates admitted, they're interested in getting the most bang for the buck.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

Not quite. I am saying that these people are already suffering. Saving their life is what is easy and lets you feel really good and righteous. But actually improving their life is the hard thing. Which is why not many people really do it, including the Gates Foundation.

So the humane thing to do is to let them die?

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

So the humane thing to do is to let them die?

The humane thing is to either go the whole nine yards, or not do what mostly makes you feel better, not them.

Yes, sometimes that includes letting them die. Funny how we consider it humane to put a horse out of its misery when we know that due to its injuries there'll be nothing but suffering in its life, but for humans, other principles apply. Too much empathy?

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

The humane thing is to either go the whole nine yards, or not do what mostly makes you feel better, not them.

So it's inhumane to give a cold person warm shoes if you don't also give them a coat? I guess the whole problem is that your morality doesn't line up with mine. It sounds more like you look for excuses to hate specific people or classes of acts you don't like, and not evaluate them independently. I honestly can't even conceive of any reason it would be inhumane to give a cold person warm shoes. Sure, it may have been more cost effective to give them a coat instead (or half as many people a coat and boots), but that doesn't make helping someone, even selfishly, inhumane.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

So it's inhumane to give a cold person warm shoes if you don't also give them a coat?

Actually, that goes beyond inhumane. If we're talking about a person that's dying from cold, then giving them warm shoes, knowing full well that without a warm coat they'll be dying anyway certainly is an especially devious way to ridicule them, yes.

but that doesn't make helping someone, even selfishly, inhumane.

You are right, your and my ethics don't seem to line up. If I had 10 billion, and I could make a real difference for 100,000 people or a mockery out of a million, I'll choose the 100,000 because to me, with that amount of money, it better have a positive long-term effect.

And no, I don't have the "right" answer on what's the best way to spend it is. But I'm very certain that life on the larger scales is too complex and interdependent for those simple answers. I am very sure that any single-purpose investment is at best stupid and more likely dangerous or counter-productive.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

Actually, that goes beyond inhumane. If we're talking about a person that's dying from cold, then giving them warm shoes, knowing full well that without a warm coat they'll be dying anyway certainly is an especially devious way to ridicule them, yes.

Ah, I understand the disconnect. You've made up your mind and will chance the scenario to fit your preconceptions and manipulate it to get your desired results, no matter what's stipulated. Making an incorrect assumption that coats are available and the correct assumption that shoes are lacking and distributing shoes is somehow evil, even though the goal was to fix a confirmed problem and perhaps without complete awareness. Even when I accept all your assumptions (which aren't derived from my example, but from your own biases), I still find you wrong. So I guess we can never disagree. Making shoes available to those that need shoes is evil to you because they never asked if they needed coats. I see it as a positive move, even if ineffective.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

You miss the point. If shoes were what these people lacked, or even what they lacked most, I'd certainly be in favour of giving them shoes.

My point is that malaria is certainly a very serious problem. But it is not the only and not the major problem. If you are beset by a number of problems (say, malaria, starvation and war), each of which is individually deadly, then solving one of them while ignoring the others has zero net benefit. The only effect is that it changes the cause of death.

And then comes the interdependencies. How blind do you have to be to repeat the mistakes of the first foreign aid programs and ignore the unintended consequences?

These aren't shoes we're talking about, the real world is a good bit more complicated than shoes.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[danaris]

I dunno, I think you're oversimplifying here.

Isn't it possible that one of the reasons for the starvation and war is that so many people are sick of or die from malaria that they can't produce the food necessary to support the population? In other words, isn't it possible that addressing one part of the problem can at least lessen the severity of the other two parts?

Or—and now here's another interesting dilemma—if you give the malaria vaccine to one side of the war, so the war ends soon with that side clearly victorious, is that better to do than to give the vaccine to both sides?

Dan Aris

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

You miss the point. If shoes were what these people lacked, or even what they lacked most, I'd certainly be in favour of giving them shoes.

I don't understand. You start off with "If shoes were what these people lacked [...] I'd certainly be in favour of giving them shoes." And they do lack shoes. So you, in your opening statement, agree with what I've said. Then you go on to say:

If you are beset by a number of problems (say, malaria, starvation and war), each of which is individually deadly, then solving one of them while ignoring the others has zero net benefit.

Wait. So if they lack shoes, and you give them shoes, you are in favor of that. But if they are missing shoes and gloves and a coat, then a shoe maker donating shoes and expecting someone else to donate gloves and coats is somehow evil on the part of the shoe maker.

No US company can solve war. Do you really want Bill Gates to try to end war in Africa? And how do you propose he do so? Starvation? That's what caused many of the wars. The abundance of food sufficient to feed everyone was delivered in the 80s. The warlords swooped in, took some, burned the rest, and became rich selling food when enough was delivered to feed the entire country. So, from the history from that, I'd say it's best to send people over and administer the vaccines directly, and fly out, taking security and not leaving them for local distribution. That will prevent many of the problems seen before when distributing something of value for free, and preventing creating more problems, like the Feed Africa movement had. The last time starvation was addressed, it made the problem worse. And if you really want private US companies to start waging wars in Africa, then I think our premises are so incompatible that this discussion is moot.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

Wait. So if they lack shoes, and you give them shoes, you are in favor of that. But if they are missing shoes and gloves and a coat, then a shoe maker donating shoes and expecting someone else to donate gloves and coats is somehow evil on the part of the shoe maker.

It's a bit more complicated than that, is it not? The "shoemaker" in this example could invest his money into more than just shoes. Maybe not all of the problem, but at least a subset that actually makes a difference.

There's no point in vaccinating starving people is my point. Vaccinate and feed them and you're starting to get somewhere.

I'd say it's best to send people over and administer the vaccines directly, and fly out, taking security and not leaving them for local distribution.

Agree on that.

The last time starvation was addressed, it made the problem worse.

Exactly my point! I believe we're in for a repeat performance.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[AK Marc]

It's a bit more complicated than that, is it not?

Nope. It's that simple. Doing something good, even if not the most cost effective act, is still good. Period. That's as far as it gets. You can argue that it isn't good (like the food donations that trashed the local farmers, created surpluses and shortages in random areas, created violence, put warlords in charge through theft and violence of the food, etc.). But you seem to be arguing that it is good, but the wrong good, and thus bad. The only possible way of coming to that conclusion is falsely assuming that it's a zero sum game.

There's no point in vaccinating starving people is my point. Vaccinate and feed them and you're starting to get somewhere.

Feeding them didn't work. Giving them eyeglasses, clothes, vaccines, and such in a manner that can't be abused better helps them pick themselves up. Is it the best that could be done? Nope. But doing more would cause more problems. Dropping in, giving a shot, and disappearing is about the most we should get involved unless we go in with 100,000+ troops for a 5+ year period to end the warlords, install corruption-free democracy, and jump-start the local economy. You are claiming there is something in the middle. There may be, but the last time we tried for that, we made it worse. So we are going back for more simple and gentle nudges.

Re:$10B, 8.7M lives saved = $1149 per life

[Tom]

But you seem to be arguing that it is good, but the wrong good, and thus bad.

Not quite.
Imagine you are in a plane that is currently falling towards earth because the engines blew up. There's a pretty much 0% chance that you'll survive past the next 20 minutes. In addition, you have a terrible cold. If in that situation someone came along with a helicopter, and offered you a handkerchief and some Aspirin for the headache - would you thank him or tell him to either throw you a rope or go to hell?

Dropping in, giving a shot, and disappearing is about the most we should get involved unless we go in with 100,000+ troops for a 5+ year period to end the warlords, install corruption-free democracy, and jump-start the local economy. You are claiming there is something in the middle. There may be, but the last time we tried for that, we made it worse. So we are going back for more simple and gentle nudges.

Yes, good summary. Except that I'm not even claiming there is something in the middle - I said I don't know. What I am claiming is that I believe these specific "simple and gentle nudges" will backfire just like the feeding did before. I believe it is caused not by a serious and rationale analysis of the consequences, including unintended side-effects. I believe it is caused by too much empathy and the inability of certain people to watch others suffer and their desire to do something about it.

And yes, I'm "cold" enough to rather see people die - if the alternative is making it even worse.

And quite frankly, in countries with mortality rates as high as they are, anything that lets people live longer so they can have more children who then inherit said mortality rate is simply cruelty by proxy.

Bravo!

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the slagging that Windows and other MSFT products get here you have to admit that this man is generous and caring to the people at the other end of the spectrum.

Let's see some donations from Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer and Richard Stalman now!

Word to Rennt

[Anonymous Coward]

Rennt, your statement is asinine. You're simply an overweight bitter virgin living in your mother's basement. What you think doesn't matter, so why not go back to playing WoW, your Burger King shift starts in a few hours.

Re:Word to Rennt

[Rennt]

Congratulations AC, you really don't have a clue do you?

I'll just direct you to my response to Monkeedude1212 below.

why use that 10b to give all americans health care

[Joe The Dragon]

why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?

over $1000 per life saved?

[davidwr]

That's not much in the grand scheme of things, but

I didn't realize vaccines were so expensive.

Re:over $1000 per life saved?

[JedaFlain]

Most aren't. But transporting them to the middle of nowhere along with people to properly administer them is.

Re:over $1000 per life saved?

[harlows_monkeys]

You've overlooked a couple things. First, the $10 billion isn't all for vaccinating people. Much it is for research to develop the vaccines.

Second, when you do vaccinate people, you don't just vaccinate the people who would die if they didn't get the vaccine. Generally, we have no way of telling who those people are. So, you might have to vaccinate a million people to save a few thousand lives.

kdawson's version

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bill Gates is going to force $10 billion down poor people's throats, forcing them to get vaccines, some people believe are the cause of Autism and other diseases. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that forcing vaccines onto the poor is way to a better future for Microsoft. So they have decided to make 'the largest effort ever made by a clearly corporate steered foundation to a capture millions of new customers' This 10 year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to add 8.7 Million into Microsoft depenceny."

Re:kdawson's version

[maxwell demon]

You forgot about the secret plan on making the vaccines only effective for Windows users. :-)

Wow.

[CaptainJeff]

Wow, these comments. suck.

Bill Gates just gave a HUGE amount of money to tackeling diseases that kill thousands of people per year. Not potential people or some statistics on a population map, but alive, breathing, suffering people. This could potentially save thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of lives. And he just gave this ridiculous amount of money away to this end. And the people on /. are talking about patents, Microsoft money, etc.

This is a good, noble, and amazing act. Show some goddamn respect. What have you done that could change the lives of that many people? Acknowledge a noble and selfless act...the world would be a much better place if more people not only committed them, but acknowledged them and derive inspiration from them.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think /. was an intellectual haven from digg and reddit. Now I realize it is just filled with bitter old men.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said it wasn't a profoundly generous act, it's just misguided. He could make a greater impact by funding education and awareness. There really are millions of people who have no clue they can spread HIV by having unprotected sex... why spend billions of dollars on research to kill the weed when it would be more effective to kill the root?

For that matter, where in the hell is all this money going? $1100 per projected life saved? That's easily four years of high school education for a student in the US.

Re:Wow.

[QuietLagoon]

This is a good, noble, and amazing act.

It is typical for robber barons and organized crime leaders to give to charitable causes. Maybe (knowing the real cost of their ill-begotten gains) it helps them to sleep at night, maybe they hope it will make history look more kindly upon them. Regardless, while the end is good, let us not forget the illegal means used to obtain this money.

Re:Wow.

[strangelovian]

Excuse me sir, but despite your rhetoric, the Western do-gooder imperative to save lives is exactly why there are so many ecological and humanitarian disaster areas on this planet . Antibiotics, agricultural revolutions and global capitalism do not magically produce sustainable, modern cultures -- more often than not, it destroys them. When was the last time you visited Port au Prince or Bangladesh? Simply creating more humans is not an ethical imperative any longer; our planet is in rather obvious overshoot, and the idea of letting more people onto the lifeboat until we all drown is insane. The idea that we will be able to life billions of people in the third world to a Western standard of living in the face of climate change, ecocide, resource depletion, etc. seems rather fanciful. If this is your hope, all I can say is, I hope you have a plan B. If you want to know where this is probably headed, study the history of Easter Island and extrapolate to a global scale. If someone really wants to be a hero, a clever molecular biologist needs to find a way to humanely reduce the global population back to a sustainable level. It's either that or uncontrolled die-off, imo.

Re:Wow.

[vivaelamor]

Since when does a rich person giving away money qualify them for respect?

Re:Wow.

[Tom]

Not potential people or some statistics on a population map, but alive, breathing, suffering people.

And his gift will ensure that many of them can continue to be alive, breathe and suffer.

Lots of us don't mind the first part. We just call Gates shortsighted for ignoring the suffering part. And these people suffer from a lot of things that vaccination won't fix, but a bit of money could. Gates is so focussed on diseases, he ignores that health may be important, but its importance is dramatically reduced if you overcome the illness only to starve, or be shot to death, or gang raped in the next racial extermination campaign.

Re:Wow.

[Sycraft-fu]

Slashdot has always had lots of Malthus Jr's hanging around. Hell there were people hating on Norman Borlaug because even though he'd saved about a billion people (yes really) they said he'd only made it worse, or prolonged the inevitable and so on. As far as they are concerned we should more or less just write off any non-industrialized nation and let them die since that is what they say will happen anyhow.

I say technology has been proving them wrong for a long time, and I think it will continue to do so.

Re:Wow.

[cdrguru]

Reducing the population is an impossible task today. If you killed 1 million people a day, it would take 20 years to get the population down to a sustainable level. Actually, it would probably take longer than that because even killing a million people a day you would still have significant births.

The solution might be space exploration. Both to collect resources and to move people off planet. It is possible, but not with courageous individuals like our current president. I think this solution is off the table for good now. We have squandered the possibility that was opened up in the 1960s. In 50 years we could be seeing television pictures from a nearby star with everyone saying how nice it would be to go there, but we can't.

A really, really big war might be a solution as well. We could just make a deal with China to start throwing nukes back and forth until enough people died. A difficult point to determine, however - when would "enough" be and could it be stopped at that point? Probably not.

Humans aren't like other creatures and the chances of a real die-off are very, very remote. Worse yet, the good samaritans are likely to squander the resources to feed the survivers on the dying.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good, noble, and amazing act.

It is typical for robber barons and organized crime leaders to give to charitable causes. Maybe (knowing the real cost of their ill-begotten gains) it helps them to sleep at night, maybe they hope it will make history look more kindly upon them. Regardless, while the end is good, let us not forget the illegal means used to obtain this money.

Lets not forget that MILLIONS of people use software his company made, and it drove down hardware prices like crazy (unlike a certain vendor I can name who tries to keep their architecture secret).
So yeah, if it wasn't for cheap hardware (which was partly due to MS - and partly due to IBM for using off-the-shelf-components), most of FOSS would be worthless...

History will look at Gates as a man who played a key role in bringing a computer to every home - irrespective of what else he does. And I am glad for that. Because it has made my life so much easier, while I have trouble getting a decent video converter under Ubuntu for my camera.

Re:Wow.

[harlows_monkeys]

Nobody said it wasn't a profoundly generous act, it's just misguided. He could make a greater impact by funding education and awareness. There really are millions of people who have no clue they can spread HIV by having unprotected sex... why spend billions of dollars on research to kill the weed when it would be more effective to kill the root?

Uhm...the Gates Foundation does give billions to those kind of things. Maybe you should actually look into what they do sometime.

Re:Wow.

[ajlisows]

.....Or they are coming up with better things to do with that money. "Build sanitation", "Fund US Health care", "Administer IQ tests at birth, sterilize the stupid". Hey! Guess what? When you have $10 Billion that you want to give to society, you are free to choose the way in which you feel it would be best used.

I don't necessarily care for Bill Gates or some of his company's past (and present) practices. I'm guessing that if I spent an entire day with him, I'd feel compelled to punch him in the face on several occasions. Guess what? I still have to applaud him for doing something to try to change the world for the better. I have to wonder...this being Slashdot.....what would the comments be like if Linus Torvalds had donated a large sum of money to vaccinations?

Re:Wow.

[Racing_Turtles]

Good, noble, respectable, wonderfully humane and giving... yes. Absolutely yes. No question about it. But as far as I'm concerned, it's a pity and a disappointment that the Gates Foundation does not support causes related to environmental protection, endangered species, animal welfare and biodiversity. Flora, fauna, ecosystems... they can't protect themselves from us. We have all the weaponry and entitlement. Protecting these in substantial ways could make a much more important multi-generational contribution

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a hypocrite.
If one steals your money or simply sues you to get your money for using his crappy pirated software, then donates this money to charity, that doesn't make him a saint.
Get real, Gates is a criminal that is guilty of crimes against humanity.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a @#$%ing sedative ASAP. And, please add at least 14 colors to your "sky" palette.

Insightful? No, non-sequiter

[spun]

Another non-viable approach: an ever growing population of any sort, in an environment of limited resources.
You know what else wouldn't be viable? A population of old people supported by NINJA-PANDAS!!!

What does your comment have to do with markdavis's comment? He never said, 'we need to reduce the population through birth control' which is what you seem to be implying. As long as people have a little over a kid apiece on average, there's no problem. People die at every age, and so with replacement rate breeding, there will still be more young people than old people.

Besides, with more old people, there will be more old-people medicine for robots to use as fuel. The robots can support the old people, because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.

Re:Insightful? No, non-sequiter

[qbzzt]

As long as the average woman has about 2.1 children, there is no problem. However, if you look in the CIA world factbook, you'll see that 93 countries are not breeding at replacement levels. This includes most of the world's rich countries.

People consume resources. But people also work and produce resources. My point is that having less people doesn't necessarily translate to a richer society. The pie is not fixed in size.

Re:Insightful? No, non-sequiter

[Rakarra]

Besides, with more old people, there will be more old-people medicine for robots to use as fuel. The robots can support the old people, because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.

I really don't understand this. I don't even understand why the scientists make those robots. They're everywhere. :-(

Re:Insightful? No, non-sequiter

[ProppaT]

I agree, however we also need to take into account that there are only so many jobs in the world to support people and they don't grow in a 1:1 ratio with population. As we move forward with technology, these jobs and the need for unskilled or tradition skilled labor starts diminishing as the population will continue growing. We're getting to an odd turning point in civilization that I don't think anyone would have predicted we would be at 100 years ago. And I'm not sure that anyone really has a good solid plan of what we should do about it, especially now that we can avert many of these plagues that used to ravish and thin out our populations. Hopefully there's no huge new war in the horizon to take care of that one either. No longer will our genepools improve themselves through resistant people mating with resistant people. We're truely getting to the point where we have to create our own future if we want to succeed. It's all interesting to think about, if nothing else.

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, indeed.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Monkeedude1212]

And are you critisizing them for that? What point are you trying to make? Oh, the under-privileged schools are going to be locked into Microsoft's Business Model? Well if they couldn't afford it before than they won't be able to afford it later - so they're in the same spot as they did when they began. On the other hand - they have free proprietary commonly used software for education for as long as its not obsolete. Considering Microsoft Office is THE office productivity package a majority of the world uses, it makes sense that they would want to educate people in its usage.

Now, I know you'll say that they are just doing it to keep their products in the marketshare; and thats true. But that is just good business practice, it isn't underhanded or dirty in anyway. If the free alternatives want to make some ground, maybe they should be promoting their packages in under-privileged schools.

Now, I have been saying for a long time that if Gates just took all his money and spent it wisely he alone could get rid of ONE disease that plagues the Earth, like Malaria. I'm glad to see these initiatives taking place.

If Gates had imagination or vision...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

He would be pouring every dime he could into the development of human-like, scalable, artificial intelligence - solving all the problems that are solvable instead of this piecemeal nonsense. Moreover, Gates is in a better position than anyone on the planet to get this done.

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[RightSaidFred99]

He'll get right on that as soon as the teleporter and magic wand are finished being invented, I'm sure.

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[CaptainJeff]

Some folks value hundreds of thousands of human lives more than the dream of creating artificial intelligence. If you feel that the creation of an intelligent computer is more important than saving hundreds of thousands of human lives, people who live every day afraid of death due to a disease that does not exist in the US, then you're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to my opinion that your priorities are way out of whack.

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It's closer than you think. IBM already has a neural net that very closely mimics natural neural tissue (http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/bmc_modeling.index.html). The problem is that of scale in observational power (i.e. getting molecule level resolution fMRI to reverse engineer activity) and plain old computer capacity. There's nothing magic about the brain or anything else. It's not an "if," it's a "when."

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[geekoid]

Why do you think actual AI could do that? We are actually intelligent and we have a hard time doing it.
Fucking idiots that think AI is some sort of magical djinn

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

You misunderstand. I want to create AI as means to save billions of lives. At the moment, we're fumbling around trying to find cures for things and solutions to problems like global warming, energy supply and ecological decay that are frankly too complex for us. The *only* thing AI, or any machine is good for is to provide a service that helps humans. Finding a vaccine is laudable. Finding ALL the vaccines that you'll ever need is better.

Re:If Gates had imagination or vision...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

You missed the "Scalable" part. Yes, we're intelligent, however, not enough. The problems we're facing are simply too large, interconnected and difficult for humans to solve in a time frame that *matters."

No, AI won't be a magical djinn although it will look that way at points, just as computers looked when they first arrived. Moreover, some problems simply may not have solutions that can be implemented at a cost that would matter to us.

But if problems like energy depletion or illness *can* be solved, quickly, by artificial means, would you not elect to do so?

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Rennt]

You've got to look at the big picture. If he really wanted to make a difference he would spend the money on researching the drugs and give away the formula for free.

Gate's motivation is profit. He is a heavy supporter of and investor in medicine patents, and has actively fought against allowing struggling countries patent exemptions so they could produce their own vital and life-saving drugs at a locally affordable rate.

By giving away millions of vaccines he is locking the country into dependence on the expensive US market rather then giving them what they really need, cheap medicine.

So in other words...

[bit9]

You mean the United States, circa 2038?

Re:So in other words...

[qbzzt]

No, the Hispanic immigrants seem to be breeding enough to keep this problem at bay in the US.

Re:So in other words...

[clampolo]

Yes, dumb moderators, let's mod someone down for saying something that is supported by US Census Data. Politically correct ass clown.

Re:So in other words...

[Rakarra]

Someone modded this -1 Flamebait, but maybe it should be -1 Ugly Truth.

Different cultures have different views on the size of the family, and the USA is hardly the unified melting pot I was taught about when I was young.

Re:So in other words...

[bit9]

Speaking of ass clowns, you must not have even bothered to look closely at the census data you linked to. Yes, non-Hispanic whites will account for less than 50% of the population by 2042. However, that same census data shows that the growth of the Hispanic population will not keep the aging problem at bay. This is exactly why, no matter how much "breeding" is done by Hispanics, Social Security is expected to go broke by 2037.

Next time you start calling people politically correct ass clowns, make sure you've checked your facts and that you aren't being an ass-clown yourself.

Re:So in other words...

[qbzzt]

You're right, except that we can increase the number of young Hispanic workers coming in. Latin America is full of people who want to live in the US, so much that many of them cross the desert illegally to be here.

Re:So in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! A polically correct right wing conservative! He used "Hispanic"! Let's get him to educate the California Governer.
Anonymous Coward who doesn't feel like creating an account!

Re:So in other words...

[qbzzt]

I'd use "Mexican" if I was referring to people from Mexico. I was referring to people from all of the Americas from the US-Mexico border in the north to the "Tierra el Fuego" to the south.

Being conservative doesn't mean one shouldn't strive to be accurate.

And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

It's good that a portion of his ill-gotten gains will save some lives, but it's tragic that so many more people are dying because access to medicine is blocked by the TRIPS agreement that Gates and friends pushed through.

This donation mustn't be let overshadow the harm. If it's let, then more such harm will be accepted in the future.

(ACTA is the modern TRIPS. We can still stop it.)

Re:And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[kuzb]

Thank goodness you've done something so profound that it has changed the world. I mean, it definitely allows you to be critical of someone's philanthropy. Wait, you haven't? Oh..

Re:And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[phantomfive]

I don't know you at all, but one of the things that bugs me about people who criticize big companies for not giving free medicine to developing countries is that they very often do not give anything themselves. What have you done recently to help poor people (besides trying to force other people to give their hard work away for free).

Re:And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[vivaelamor]

So, we have to be rich before we can criticise them? How about no.

Re:And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[darkmeridian]

The TRIPS section Microsoft liked dealt with copyrights. And you can be sure that it would have been pushed through by Oracle/SUN/etc. Anyway, the TRIPS section dealing with life-saving drugs would have been pushed through by big pharma regardless of what the software industry did. In other words, Bill Gates had nothing to do with TRIPS stopping drugs from reaching third world countries.

Bill Gates took all this money and tossed it to save lives. Unlike TRIPS, this would not have happened except for his intervention. He deserves some respect instead of dismissive comments.

Re:And how many lives did his TRIPS cost?

[GF678]

Read the posters website (homepage link). He's trying to advocate Free Software and build awareness of it. Sure it's not as financially significant as the donation, but at least he's not sitting on his ass. He's trying to change the world for the better in his own way, and I say good for him. Better than some MS bashers who bash but don't do anything else.

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[Waffle Iron]

why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?

Because the current US healthcare system is a form of feudalism, where the serfs (workers with at least one family member not in perfect health) find it hard or impossible to leave the protection of their lords (large companies). This lack of mobility and reduced freedom of choice drives down prevailing wages in the job market, and it makes it much harder for potential competitors to start new small companies.

Few have benefited from this situation more than Mr. Gates, so I doubt that he's going to make any big moves to change the status quo.

This.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ran out of mod points, but I'd rather respond anyway. Hope they don't trace my IP after I logged out.

Anyway, donate to the SIAI if you can.

Morally good, but long term bad?

[jwhitener]

Saving lives is always a good thing, don't get me wrong. But I often wonder if 10 billion spent on infrastructure like irrigation, factories, schools, etc.. would save more lives in the long run for impoverished countries.

On one hand, if every 3rd person was dropping dead of an easily preventable disease in a country, it certainly wouldn't be a very stable society. Say you built schools, irrigation, factories, and then every other worker involved in them was sick. It just wouldn't work. The farms wouldn't produce, The factories would shut down, people would fear going to school and contracting something, etc..
On the other hand, education and birth control, infrastructure, etc.. will eventually allow a people to pull themselves up. If ever day is a constant struggle for survival, thinking long term (like building a road) is low on their priority list, and it just won't ever get done.

Perhaps there needs to be some regulation in place that dictates that aid must be spent equally between pure life saving and development of the interior? In the last decade, there have been several good books talking about why pure food aid in Africa, for instance, isn't very beneficial. It is only after seeing the results of multiple decades of food aid, that people are beginning to question pure life saving aid.

Morally, it is hard to say "some must die so that less may die next year", but it certainly doesn't seem like situations in impoverished countries are getting any better with the current model of aid.

Re:Morally good, but long term bad?

[geekoid]

Well, ;people getting sick has a heavy toll. You want to lessen that toll. it help enable people to build there own infrastructer.

There are a lot of ways to help people with this money, all of them good. Bill just decided to focus on vaccines.

Re:Morally good, but long term bad?

[nawitus]

The only true and long term solution to poverty is industrialisation. You simply can't "build factories" and think industrialisation happens magically. You need to think a way to make Africa a better place to invest than China/India. And that will be really difficult. The wage difference is not large, China has really good education system, and China is quite stable politically and has reasonable infrastructure. So, the more money is used to make investing more viable in the Africa, the less problems there will be. Luckily, every year as China is getting more wealthy, the wages are also increasing. That makes Africa a better place since it will have cheaper workers. Of course, to be precise, industrialisation is already happening in different places in Africa. But progress will take a long time.

Re:Morally good, but long term bad?

[strangelovian]

LOOOOL yes industrialization is the answer! This glorious form of civilization that is destroying the ecosystems we depend on for life must be spread to every corner of the globe! We must turn the planet into a landfill faster! We must burn more fossil fuels, spew more CO2, raze more forests, kill more sea life, deplete more soil and aquifers, and poison the oceans faster! Who still finds this kind of thinking rational? Does anyone really think this will end well? Are you expecting techno-miracles? Let's recall the wise words of that stone age primitive, Chief Seattle, who experienced the full glory of industrialization in a land where people had lived for more than ten thousand years without it:

"But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. Your destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say good bye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival...."

Re:Morally good, but long term bad?

[nawitus]

It's better to have slightly more global warming than to let billions suffer. We can adjust to global warming through technology, and ultimately control the climate easily through geoengineering etc. Global warming is one of the smallest existential risks, and technologies such as biotech, nanotech and (greater than human) AI will solve this problem quite easily.

Re:Morally good, but long term bad?

[cybernanga]

If you give people the opportunity to earn a reasonable living by working in a factory, instead of having to rely on a small piece of dry infertile land, they will have more of a disposable income, which they will spend on their own health.

Having live in Africa for more than 2 decades, I can honestly tell you that most people know, understand and desire the benefits of small families, education and good healthcare. Unfortunately, many are caught in a poverty trap.

People have several children as an insurance policy. Not only are they ensuring that their genes are passed on, but they want/need the children as a workforce for their unproductive land, and also in the hope that there will be someone to look after them when they are old and frail. There is also the hope that one or more of the children will beat all odds, and make a success of themselves by becoming a doctor or teacher etc. as having one of those in the family will drastically improve the lives of the whole family. This has the effect of keeping the majority of people below the poverty line.

Additionally, while it might sound silly, if either husband and wife is away at work all day, AND they have some form of entertainment for the evenings, they will generally have fewer children, as having an actual disposable income makes one think about what to spend it on, and that often influences the decisions one makes about how many children to have.

Oh no!

[HerculesMO]

Don't tell Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy!

US MSM are corporate sycophants

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill and Melinda aren't evil, as some might posit. I'm sure they truly believe they are doing the world good. Thing is, their motivations are more complicated than simply giving $10 billion away. Their foundation campaigns actively against the introduction of generic drugs into countries that accept their help. They do so believing that propping up the profits of the drug oligarchs will lead to better medicines, etc. (medicine for who, though?). It doesn't hurt that when the pharmaceutical industry profits, their shareholders profit. It's really the same strategy Bill has used his entire life. Completely annihilate all competition, using nationalistic pride to spur government sponsored protection of your monopoly. "They are so good, we must write and enforce intellectual property protections to help them." Does the MSM pick up on the rank profiteering at all? Not a chance, their corporate underwriters would have a fit. No one sees what is going on. Bill's "generosity" is a tax write off and a way to institute monopoly protections in developing nations that would otherwise have no need for his billions, because they would otherwise have ready access to drugs at cost. What MSM outlet will highlight Bill's greed and hypocrisy? The oligarchs already run the US, now they want to run the entire world. I hope somebody, some country, someone somehow fights back.

Re:US MSM are corporate sycophants

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Vaccines are a break even product for pharmacos.

Profits? Not likely.

Re:US MSM are corporate sycophants

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. The vaccines come with a price. The price is that countries acquiesce to US style IP law. This is not the "selfless" act the master propagandist makes it out to be.

We still need more birth control

[spun]

The pie is not fixed in size

Good point. However, it is also not an infinite pie. Mmmm, infinite pie...

While it's true that many richer nations are not breeding at replacement rate, they all have net population growth due to immigration. We aren't in any danger of your doomsday 'a half dozen four year olds supporting a billion ninety year olds,' scenario any time soon.

So, thanks for the warning, but I still think we need to do a better job of providing more birth control to developing nations, which is what markdavis was saying. Despite having a variably sized pie, more poor, uneducated people won't create more wealth.

I don't think anyone is claiming we need to tell Italy they should be using more birth control, do you?

The movie

[ClosedSource]

In the book it was 21.

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[TheSync]

why use that 10b to give all Americans health care?

Health care expenditures in the United States on health care surpassed $2.2 trillion in 2007. $10B would only last 40 hours.

Jesus H Christ, the Great Old Ones have returned!

[Xaedalus]

Have the stars finally aligned? There's two 4 UID'rs and two 5 digit UID'rs who've posted within one good scroll wheel spin on this thread. Never thought I'd see the day when THAT happened... who knew discussing reproduction control would bring you tentacled, frothy horrors out of the ravening deeps!

think I'm going to go run for the hills. If a 3 digit UID surfaces, Nyarlathotep can't be too far behind...

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[TheSync]

the current US healthcare system is a form of feudalism, where the serfs (workers with at least one family member not in perfect health) find it hard or impossible to leave the protection of their lords (large companies).

Health insurance in the US is linked to employers because of preferable tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance versus individual-provided health insurance. The tax law was changed in WWII to allow companies to have something else besides wages to compete for scarce workers, as wages were set by the government during the war. After the war, wages and prices were freed, but the tax law was never reverted to its original form.

Mind you, most economists feel the tax break still should be eradicated, but then people complain about "taxing their health benefits", missing the point that the law makes the market in individual health insurance (or other non-employer provided groups) nearly impossible.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[RightSaidFred99]

Ahaha. Yeah, he's in it for the money. Only... wouldn't he actually make more money if he...didn't donate $10 billion (and more) to charity? Your "logic", along with all the other irrational MS haters, is slightly askew. He's giving away a huge chunk of his wealth and you're retarded (I should just end the sentence here, btw) if you think he's ever actually going to earn more than he's given away by these evil plots you and your ilk accuse him of.

Are you sure you're in the right universe?

[ClosedSource]

Since when are liberals against vaccinations?

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Monkeedude1212]

Then that is an issue with the patent system - not with Microsoft. Microsoft did not put patent laws in place, but Microsoft being a corporation will use it to their benefit, just like any other corporation will use their patents to make money.

So Gates is putting 10B into the research of vaccines, or at least thats what the article has led me to believe. Thats research that WOULDN'T have been done so the struggling nations would not be any better off if it was never done, and never patented. However now the Vaccines WILL be created, and probably patented under Microsoft.

So - get rid of Medical patents, and that problem of expensive US grade stuff that could be produced locally is gone. Attack the virus, not the sympton. (an old adage that Windows products should apply)

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

...build more pylons?

Re:So...

[Goldberg's Pants]

Not enough Vespene Gas.

Re:So...

[PylonHead]

I'll get right on it.

Re:So...

[hviniciusg]

Not enough Vespene Gas.

Just:

showmethemoney

Gnah you haven't given this a lot of thought.

[gd23ka]

The way to a better world is freedom and liberty for all. people in areas with the worst "overcopulation" live under bad-ass military regimes
funded, aided and abetted by the United States and Europe. -> Real - education that actually empowers and doesn't compartmentalize
thought and perception is what is needed here in the West so that you, buddy, finally get to see the light as well.

As far as Bill Gates and his 10bn dollars in vaccines no one wants (don't exactly see people outside Walgreens lining up for their H1N1 shot),
I doubt he would himself take even one, not even the extra special vaccine GlaxoSmithKline made for the German government and
higher ranking German army personnel.

The best aid we can give right now to the world would be to make our govt and corporations fuck off and get the hell out of those countries,
everybody is so much better off without their "aid" which is pretty much just cementing the various regimes they put there into place. A good
example of that is what we can see in Haiti right now with the US army literally occupying Haiti - shooting
people with rubber bullets and now live ammo instead of providing food aid. And once things "normalize" again they will make sure the same
kind of scum that has been running the place will rule over the island again. In fact, we would be better off without those fuckers
ourselves but it might still take a short while until the gros of the population here figure that one out.

All things considered,

[idontusenumbers]

This is pretty expensive. $1,000 a life. How much does clean water cost? It has to be less than this.

$10B anti-virus

[hellsoldier]

Gates should invest this $10B on a anti-virus for Windows

Another factor

[Sycraft-fu]

It seems, contrary to what many thought, that as people get better off they have less kids. For a long time population catastrophe was predicted to happen worst and first in industrial nations. They more or less extrapolated from bacteria saying "The better the conditions for the individual, the more they reproduce, and thus the faster you use up resources and hit a wall."

Well turns out humans are more complex. The birth rate in wealthy nations gets very low, sometimes negative. Seems the more healthy and well off we are, the less kids we have. There are all kinds of reasons as to why that might be the case, doesn't really matter. What matters is that it is the case.

So, that means that part of solving over population is working to improve quality of life. Being disease free sure as hell goes a long way in that.

Re:Another factor

[Rene S. Hollan]

This tends to correlate with children being a net economic liability in non-agrarian societies, but an economic benefit in agrarian ones: more hands to work the fields, hence the ability to work a bigger field.

The trouble starts when there aren't enough fields to be worked.

It takes a while for a society in transition from agrarian to industrial to realize that children are a net liability, a luxury actually.

Re:Another factor

[Lars T.]

The funny thing is: never before have people in industrial nations spend so much money to get kids than today - sometimes years of artificial inseminations, costing a couple of hundred dollar each. Often resulting in multituplets.

Re:Another factor

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Seems the more healthy and well off we are, the less kids we have.

That's true. As soon as I could afford broadband my chances of having kids went waaay down.

Re:Another factor

[Khashishi]

Having a lot of kids is a higher guarantee that some of them will survive, when mortality is high.

Re:Another factor

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems, contrary to what many thought, that as people get better off they have less kids. For a long time population catastrophe was predicted to happen worst and first in industrial nations. They more or less extrapolated from bacteria saying "The better the conditions for the individual, the more they reproduce, and thus the faster you use up resources and hit a wall."

Well turns out humans are more complex. The birth rate in wealthy nations gets very low, sometimes negative. Seems the more healthy and well off we are, the less kids we have. There are all kinds of reasons as to why that might be the case, doesn't really matter. What matters is that it is the case.

So, that means that part of solving over population is working to improve quality of life. Being disease free sure as hell goes a long way in that.

Actually this one isn't as hard to understand as you would think.

You have more cash, you have more access to other things to do for entertainment and more stuff to occupy your time in general so you end up having less sex overall.
If you are broke, your typical entertainment you have is pretty lax overall and sex is (Semi)free.

Kinda follows the same reasons why most births are typically in July, August and September, cause 9 months ago it was cold and so people got stuck staying in more with less to do which led to more sex. FYI, this is why most carnies who guess your birthday choose these months.

Re:Another factor

[olau]

The birth rate in wealthy nations gets very low, sometimes negative.

Negative birth rate? Oh yes. Nothing like getting back to your mother's womb.

:P

Re:Another factor

[Pictish Prince]

Seems the more healthy and well off we are, the less kids we have.

That's true. As soon as I could afford broadband my chances of having kids went waaay down.

This is funny at first, but why the hell not? Provide universal high speed internet & see what happens to the birth rate.

Is this not misplaced money?

[mschuyler]

I've gone through about half the comments to see if this has been brought up. I didn't see it, so....Here's the Gates Foundation pledging $10 billion to vaccinate people. It will save lives, no doubt, but it will also place the majority of these millions of people into a life of poverty. (Don't jump at me yet.) So we increase the world's population with millions of more living on less than a dollar a day.

Even if you are Bill Gates, you have a limited amount of money. I just wonder if this is the most cost-effective use of $10 billion. Could this money not be spent on infrastructure issues that would improve the quality of life of people? Stuff like sustainable agriculture, clean water, pollution abatement, etc.? Wouldn't spending money on these things ALSO save lives? Would they save as many lives? (Serious question: I don't pretend to know the answer.)

I certainly agree that saving lives is a good thing, but I worry that injecting money into this part of the cycle (no pun intended) might wind up to be less efective in the long run to keep the greatest number of people alive an well fed. Spending money on vaccines is really kind of a no-brainer, it's so easy. It doesn't take much thought to think up or implement. I just suspect the harder questions re not being asked here and the Foundation is taking an easy path.

Re:Is this not misplaced money?

[cdrguru]

Sure it would, except there really isn't much of a solution today.

Most places on the planet where you can grow food have food growing there and people living there as well. And disposing of bodily wastes right there with the food and drinking water. You would like to tell them to walk "over there" to take a dump but wait ... there are now people there too. There just isn't anywhere left where someone can just walk off into the woods and take a dump.

So of course, they end up polluting someone's drinking water. How do you fix this? Build a sewage treatment plant in the middle of Bangledesh? There are no sewage pipes. There are no toilets. So you get to start from scratch, except most of the population doesn't understnd and has been doing things the way they are doing them for hundreds of years if not thousands. Why should they change now? Who is going to make them, anyway?

There isn't much of a solution for this today. There are just too many people living in primitive conditions with primitive beliefs to be able to introduce something as simple as plumbing to. They don't think they need it, don't want it and don't understand it.

What worked hundreds of years ago with 1/10th the population doesn't work today. And forcing change on these people isn't going to come easy or cheap.

Vaccines are a nice feel-good move that will do virtually nothing for most of the world.

saving for no future

[Tom]

Saving lifes - but for what? I hate to be so negative on something that people consider as holy as the virgin Mary, but fact is that of the estimated 8.7 mio. saved, about 8 mio. will then have a life, but no future. Or more correctly: A future of starvation, oppression, war and misery.

More importantly, a life where high birthrates and high child mortality are the norm, and where they will create another 20 or so million to experience the same misery.

Wouldn't it be much smarter to put this money into improving the future of those people, even at the price of less saved lifes? It's not exactly the case that underpopulation would be a rampant problem on this planet, you know? We have too few ressources too badly distributed among too many people way more often than we have too many people and don't know where to spread the wealth.

In short: How about giving people a life instead of just bodily existence?

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft didn't put the patent laws into place, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did. What, you thought those medicines were free? No, they came with the requirement that your country signs a trade treaty with the USA, bringing your patent system into line with theirs. You get the vaccines now, but you've just made it much harder to develop a native information economy, and you've probably just bought another decade or two of poverty for the majority of the population. Yay for altruism.

$1149 per life saved seems inefficient

[EMB Numbers]

$10B / 8.7M is $1,149 per life saved which seems inefficient for vaccines. I would think that $3 per person for personal mosquito nets and $9 per person for standard childhood vaccines would save more than 8.7M lives. Clean drinking water would help a lot. How much would that cost per person?

Re:$1149 per life saved seems inefficient

[compro01]

I would imagine the major cost would be people and equipment to get said vaccines and nets over there and distributed.

Re:$1149 per life saved seems inefficient

[cdrguru]

Clean drinking water is a real problem when most rural third-world people just use the great outdoors as their toilet. I believe it is commonly referred to as open defecation.

Basically, you aren't going to have clean water if you are taking a dump next to the pond where you get your drinking water. There isn't any way to fix this today because there are too many people for them to "properly" manage their wastes. Sanitation is something we take for granted but it doesn't exist in most of the world today. Fix that, and you have fixed the drinking water problem.

Unfortunately, fixing that is going to take a lot more than $10B. And you better start thinking about population reduction as well. The current number of people on the planet just do not have anywhere else to take a dump other than near by someone's water supply.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[badboy_tw2002]

WTF is this? -1 Troll? Fucking slashbot mods on crack. Since when does M$ get any love around here? I don't care what they do under the name of "good", those dollars are blood monies payed for by you and me to support crappy, non-Free OSs. Fuck M$ and Fuck you for modding me down.

- Rennt (posted anon for obvious reasons)

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Rennt]

I am humbled by your superior intellect. Thank you very much for sharing of your wisdom and making this site a better place.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Rennt]

Lets break this down:
1. The big money isn't in vaccines, its in things like AIDS treatment drugs. The sort of stuff that cost pennies to make and is sold for thousands. This is possible thanks to patents.
2. There is increasing pressure to do something about this - many (probably communists) consider this immoral and beneath the limits of a healthy society, especially with regards to countries like Africa, who could never afford the drugs anyway
3. Bill, (who makes a fuckton off medicine patents) personally lobbies to protect them, against the best interests of the world's poor
4. This makes him look Very Bad. Worse than he ever did at Microsoft in fact. His Capitol Hill buddies get nervous
5. He makes a grand gesture, reducing pressure on himself and his pet congress critters. This ensures that the bulk of the high profit market is unaffected.
6. Do it all again next year when some irresponsible journalist writes an op-ed on the whole scandal.
7. Profit!

How about just promoting vitamin D?

[Paul Fernhout]

Might save a trillion dollars a year in health care costs. Especially for indoors-mainly slashdoters:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Technology stock implications here:
    http://beforeitsnews.com/story/14046/What_Vitamin_D_Means_to_Your_Technology_Profits.html
"The scientific consensus that has held sway for four decades regarding both exposure to the sun and vitamin D has collapsed. What has emerged in place of the old settled science is the knowledge that most people in America are seriously vitamin D deficient or insufficient. The same is true for Canada and Europe, and the implications are staggering. Simply put, unless you are one of the few people with optimal serum D levels, such as lifeguards and roofers in South Florida, you can cut your risks from most major diseases by 50 to 80 percent. All you have to do is get enough D. This also means we can significantly reduce healthcare costs by taking a few simple steps. ... Behind the scenes even as I write today, the NIH is looking for a face-saving way to change positions on vitamin D without taking too much blame for having resisted those who have urged reassessment for decades."

Re:How about just promoting vitamin D?

[Khashishi]

Somehow, I don't think vitamin D is as big a problem in poorer nations, particularly those nearer to the equator. The sun is free.

It's entirely a byproduct of our sedentary office lifestyle that vitamin D deficiency is a problem.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Rennt]

HA! I'd mod you up, but I've already posted!

Borg logo

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't this get the Borg logo? Gates is putting money down for injecting stuff into people. That deserves the Borg logo!

How Unusual...

[Colourspace]

An article about Bill without the Borg icon in place..

Re:How Unusual...

[malakai]

I found this pretty funny as well. Apparently, some of the Slashdot editors are becoming more moderate as they age.

simply not enough, but..

[Weezul]

.. he could obviously start a non-profit health insurance provider like Blue Cross with minimal initial funding. If it's plans were comparatively simple, then it'll have less overhead and cost less than other health insurance providers, and thus force them to lower prices too. I'd say however his real reason for not doing this is simple though :

America is n
If the American people cannot vote themselves a healthcare plan, then let them suffer & die from lack of it.

Population, pollution and climate change

[cdrguru]

There are a lot of reasons why we should be focusing on reducing the population - and sick people are one way the population gets smaller. Even better with contagious diseases because the benefits are spread around (literally) by the sick people.

Vaccines are something that are of a benefit when there are too few people and we need to build up the labor pool. Sorry, in the US 20% of the people will never work again in their lives and will need to be supported one way or another by the other 80%. It is worse in Europe.

India has a million people with most of them living in rural areas on poor diets with no sanitation. If Bill Gates spent 10 billion dollars on toilets in India it would begin to make a difference there, but just barely.

The level of pollution is a direct result of the population. Pollution wasn't much of a problem in 1200 AD, now was it? There were maybe 2 million people in all of Europe at that time. The theory is that resource utilization is leading to climate change - reduce the population and this will reduce resource utilization.

According to some theories, we have maybe 50 years left of natual resources for 6 billion people on the planet. If tomorrow you woke up and there were 500 million people instead, this would mean that everything would last for 600 years instead of just 50. Since we aren't going to be going offplanet to get anything, we better start thinking about the current crop of children are going to survive in 50 years. If we don't, they maybe they won't and we are looking at the last generation of humans.

apple

[Anonymous Coward]

next thing you know Apple will be eradicating HIV

Except the big problem is a peak population crisis

[Paul Fernhout]

Populations are collapsing in industrialized countries, and there is room for quadrillions of people in space habitats, as I outline here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004174.html
"""
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age).
Sure, let's set a population target for some carrying capacity on Earth the same way the health and fire departments limit the maximum number of people in a restaurant. But, you don't limit the human population of a city (or the solar system) the same way you limit the number of people that can safely be in a restaurant (the Earth). That is ultimately the mistake that gloomsters like Catton make -- they confuse the two, mostly IMHO from lack of imagination, but also because some profit from artificial scarcity, as well, as in Catton's case, the hypocrisy of having four children while telling everyone else to have less.
"""

One of the reasons people want to have less children in industrialized countries is that they are family unfriendly. The US is rated the second to worst industrialized country to be a child, and the UK is worst:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

Although, as I say elsewhere, people not getting enough sunshine and vitamin D3 from being indoors a lot may have a role to play in that too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml

And here is a book outlining the social problems of industrialized countries and their mental health services and why much of industrialized populations are mentally ill:

Patents are relevant

[Weezul]

If his $10 billion buys way less thanks to TRIPS and/or ACTA.

A few other good causes : Invest money into the pharmaceutical industries in countries like Brazil that have shown their willingness to break intellectual property treaties when people's lives are at stake. A cheaper and more charitable approach might be endowing biotechnology professorships with this stated goal at the best medical schools in these countries. A more political approach might be lobbying the European Union to pass legislation saying that generic drug manufacturers may violate patents for exported drugs to third world countries when the number of lives saved would be significant. Just oppose ACTA and/or try to roll back TRIPS --- ACTA will kill people.

I suggest that you read about the history of the fight against AIDS. If Brazil had not stood up against the U.S. and said "We will make anti-retrovirals ourselves if you don't sell them at a fraction of the cost", then incredible numbers of Brazilians would have died, and millions more would have died in other developing countries that currently benefit from Brazil's hard nose negotiation.

p.s. I do think all the people criticizing how he earned his money are being disingenuous. Gate's only sins are : robbing other rich people of their smart employees, selling poor quality software, and lobbying for bad copyright laws. Do you even want to think about what Exxon does with your gas money? Federal government with your tax money? (Iraq) etc. You don't see Dick Channey out running charity organizations.

Re:Patents are relevant

[red_blue_yellow]

You don't see Dick Channey out running charity organizations.

Well, he's not running them, and it's at least somewhat dirty money in my book, but there is this

Index Mundi

[westlake]

It seems, contrary to what many thought, that as people get better off they have less kids. For a long time population catastrophe was predicted to happen worst and first in industrial nations

You'll find a very good and very revealing set of charts here: Index Mundi

Live long and prosper and birth rates go down.

Show me a single nation that innovated without IP

[George_Ou]

Show me a single nation that innovated in things like pharmaceuticals without Intellectual Property (IP) protection.

The problem with those who complain about IP protection is that if they actually had their way, there wouldn't be any life saving drugs to begin with. IP protections do limit the good that these drugs can do in the short term in the sense that it's only affordable to first-world nations (with the exception of some donations here and there), but those drugs eventually lose their patent protection and become cheap enough for everyone to buy them. Now the typical socialist will argue that those drugs have to be practically given away so that everyone can afford them the minute they're invented. The problem is that socialist policies means no one will spend the billions of dollars necessary to invent these drugs in the first place.

Moving beyond the legacy of colonialization

[Paul Fernhout]

Places with huge problems also tend to have legacies of intervention by foreign governments and foreign corporations. The Earth has no resource limitation problems in the long term:
"Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html

But, with robots on the way, it's easy to see why many think life is cheap because masses of human labor are no longer needed for the earlier exploitation:
"Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

That is the deeper problem we need to address as a society, how to move past the irony of having all these tools of abundance but people using them to make artificial scarcity. We need to stop using military robots to enforce a culture of work on humans and instead make robots to do the work. We need to stop building nuclear missiles to fight over oil wells on Earth and instead use the same basic technologies to produce power or make accessible resources in space (I'm a renewable energy fan more than nuclear though). Here are some other ways to move past that irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C (Surviving America's Depression Epidemic)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964:
http://educationanddemocra

Per Capita ?

[daveime]

10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives

So a mere $1149 dollars per person than ?

This is a problem when 99 cent injections + associated costs = $1149, wouldn't you say ?

Re:Per Capita ?

[harlows_monkeys]

To save 8.7 million lives by vaccination, you have to inject a lot more than 8.7 million people. Failing to take that into account has completely invalidated your calculations.

Re:Per Capita ?

[daveime]

So how many is "a lot more" ?

5 times, in which case the vaccination costs $1149/5 ?
50 times, in which case the vaccination costs $1149/50 ?
When we get to 500 times, then perhaps the cost per head is "reasonable".

I'm not quite sure the point you are trying to make ?

Are you saying that the vaccinations are not 100% effective, in which case saving 8.7 million lives costs another 8.7 lives where the vaccination failed ?

Or are you saying we are vaccinating a lot of people who don't actually NEED vaccinating, the net effect being we save 8.7 million lives out of 50 million vaccinations given ?

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[badboy_tw2002]

I love it that you get the troll mod for that, but my original reply hasn't.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

1149.4252873563218390804597701149 each.. why not just give everyone $1200.. surely that would help thier plight more

Not his job

[doesnothingwell]

.....Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.

Greed is the real problem! Bill Gates is the worst person on the planet for fixing greed and corruption. I for one would like him to give back all the profits he stole from small companies and go play with his trust fund. Stupid egotistical twit!

Will it be an antidote for Win Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that would generate revenue! Uncle Bill has a penchant for digesting things into games. How will this one work? If its truly a "donation" then he should expect to renumeration nor pin-action from his donation.

Chief Executive Office

[Major Blud]

Article states that he stepped down as CEO in mid-2008. Actually he quit being CEO in January, 2000. He resiged as chairman in 2008. Another fine piece of reporting incorrect facts from CNN.

Re:Jesus H Christ, the Great Old Ones have returne

[mister_playboy]

While other men fret over the length of their penises, Slashdotters worry about the brevity of their UIDs.

Even more unusual is Bill Gates stopping viruses.

[mattcsn]

Isn't he generally associated with the opposite situation?

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[BitZtream]

Theres also the fact that while Americans whine and moan and bitch about 'how bad it is', we have no idea what its like to live in truely bad places.

When you go somewhere and see the population living in lean-to's, drinking water from the same tiny little water hole that the animals (and some people) deficate in, pure black and often foamy because the rare times that water makes it down the river its filled with run off from farms a thousand miles away and all the pesticides and fertilizers that go with that. THEN you see how bad it can be.

1200 doesn't buy anything useful as far as health care in America because everyone here can get that level of care fairly easy with all the government programs we already have or the fact that regardless of how bad our 'recession' is, we still can find money for this stuff.

1200 in Ethiopia still may only buy the basics, but going from absolutely 0 health care in a horrible environment to even the most basic level of vaccination its infinitely better than what they have. Its unimaginable the amount of difference that money can make.

I saw it first hand when I was very young (4 or 5 years old) and while that may have tainted my view of it, even today I think back and its hard to visualize the difference that what is such a small amount of money to us does for someone with nothing to start with.

And if you want to be selfish about it, think about how much a man or woman with a child about to die of something trivial will do for you after you save their childs life. I can't think of a way to get better allies than to save someones life.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[BitZtream]

Yes, they could copy someone elses work and have an information economy. Long patents are bullshit as are patent trolls, there are lots of problems, but in general they are an acceptable thing to me, if they weren't so crazy.

However, forget the giving them medicine part. Pretend some random country gates was going to give money too builds up and creates their own info economy as you say ... we'll still come along and impose sanctions on them to make it so they stay in poverty. We're the second biggest bully on the block, like it or not, you're doing what we say unless you've got some clout to say no with.

At least this way they get some help.

And realistically, if this helps them get going, and they get a good government, with a viable economy, there isn't really anything to stop them from saying 'screw you and your IP laws'.

Yay for reality.

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[symbolset]

Hey! They donated $3M worth of software to the Library of Congress too! Fancy software that provides a really cool US Government website that people not using their tools can't use...

Anyone who has 1 child already knows :P

[Chris Burke]

If you could give them the experience of working 50+ hours a week to come home to a screaming brat, and have your money earned already spent before you even get it, just to take care of the child, the population growth would fall real fast.

For the problem of population growth in general, that's obviously nonsense. For the population to grow, people must be having on average more than 2 children, and guess what that means? Barring twins the first time out, they already have a kid and thus know exactly what kind of burden it is! So what exactly are you planning on teaching them?

For teen pregnancy, which isn't an issue of population growth but still, this is still not going to help. The problem has never been that teens want children, or don't know they don't want children, to any significant extent. The problem is that teens want to fuck. And you can't educate people out of their instinctual, hormonal urges.

The only thing teaching them about the burden of parenthood can accomplish is to make teenagers more likely to use proper birth control. But that's not "abstinence education" then is it?

Re:why use that 10b to give all americans health c

[mr exploiter]

Because they don't want free health care haven't you heard?

his money probably not helping much anyways:

[ghostunit]

I can't help but feel that a lot of the Gates Foundation's efforts are misguided feel good fixes.

"Save the children" rather than fixing some of the underlying problems. For example, Iodine deficiency is perhaps the most cost effective human capital fix there is. Yet the Gates foundation has only given a few million to that cause as far as I can tell. Vaccines are sexy, saving children is sexy, makes your altruism feel good. Iodine in salt - not so sexy, no discernible results for 20+ years, no great feel good effect.

Oh awesome - Nikolas Kristof wrote about it : here

Unfortunately, the most cost-effective aid interventions tend to be the kind that are incremental and save only a small proportion of lives—and are thus least satisfying to the giver. For instance, my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I have recently published a new book, Half the Sky, arguing that educating and empowering women is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. In the book we call on the U.S. government to adopt a program to help poor countries iodize their salt. Right now, about one-third of families in poor countries don't get enough iodine, and the result is not so much goiters as diminished intellectual capacity. Iodine is essential to brain formation for a fetus in the first trimester, and if a mother lacks iodine her child may end up mentally retarded. More commonly, children in such areas lose 10 to 15 IQ points, with girls particularly affected for reasons that aren't fully understood. This is a lifelong intelligence deficit and a significant burden on poor countries, and it can be resolved very cheaply; iodizing salt costs a couple of pennies per person per year.

Studies have suggested that iodizing salt brings real economic returns of nine times the cost—and yet we don't do it. The reason is, I think, that the results are statistical, not visible. You can never look at a child afterwards and say, "This girl would have been retarded if it weren't for iodized salt." All you can do is note that retardation rates fall and that, a decade later, school performance improves significantly.

Tagged "public health"?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! More like private wealth! It's all patented for the next 100 years or so. And the prices will be astronomical.

DEVELOPMENT

[aCC]

Guys/ Gals, GET THIS:

Development of countries is fucking hard! NOBODY knows a solution so far!

So, it is useless to go on and on about how he should spend his money on X, Y or Z "because that will solve all problems". No, it WON'T! It might improve something or it might not.

There are hundreds of thousands of people working in the development sector trying to find a solution to help the poorer world develop. And many things have been tried and will be tried, but it is like democracy: there is no clear way how to develop it in a country, so that it works long term. Lots of ideas around, but no proven solution anywhere.

Therefore people like Gates giving his money (however wrong you think he got it) to help in a certain way (small or big) is GOOD. Or would you prefer him to keep it in his bank account and accumulate stupidly high interest each year? He should spend it as much as he can to spread it around.

</rant>

Global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

1 vaccination = one saved child = tons of carbon, not to mention grandchildren => population explosion.

This vaccination program will doom us all.

Re:Jesus H Christ, the Great Old Ones have returne

[Jedi Alec]

While other men fret over the length of their penises, Slashdotters worry about the brevity of their UIDs.

You are aware of your assumption that the two are mutually exclusive, I take it? ;-)

Re:Bill is into Vaccine patents these days -

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

Not to be cynical, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

"This 10-year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives." (and cause thousands of new cases of Autism and Type 1 Diabetes)

Although its not yet proven, it is strange that the developed world has a much higher rate of these diseases.

Value of vitamin D to poor and sunny countries

[Paul Fernhout]

That's a good point. However, think about the consequences to materially poorer nations of industrialized nations armed with nuclear weapons controlled by people with widespread mental illness due to vitamin D deficiency. Or, what about depressed and unbalanced world bankers making crazy financial policies effecting poor countries?
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml

And what of people from poor countries who go live abroad in the North to send back money, but then get vitamin D deficient?

And what of health care researchers who are less productive because they are vitamin D deficient?

Also, even in materially poorer nations at the equator, you can be vitamin D deficient if you need to work indoors all day at a low wage job, or even if you are a professional, like a doctor or bureaucraty, who works indoors all day. So, even poor countries may be facing this problem.

Also, even in poor countries near the equator, there is often a rainy season when people spend a lot of time indoors and may become vitamin D deficient (that is when flus and colds tend to strike in tropical areas, in the rainy season, which shows what bunk the common explanation for getting more colds and flus in the winter in the USA is, suggested due to "dry air" in the winter, but then why do people in the tropics get the flu when the air is 100% humidity endlessly).

It's true that a sedentary lifestyle plays a role, especially as people like most slashdotters like myself have made it ever more interesting to be inside with computer media. But, there is specific medical advice (well intended, but harmful) by dermatologists to avoid the sun. It might have not been bad if dermatologist had said, and also you need to take 5000 IU D3 daily and have your blood tested regularly to make up for not being in the sun. But they did not. So, are dematologists all liable for such advice?

Anyway, this vitamin D issue is really a global one, with a much bigger impact than any vaccine, even a vaccine for malaria, as bad as that problem is. Of course, like all things, different people may get the immediate costs and benefits of different health approaches. And no doubt some few people will be harmed by too much vitamin D (even if it is much fewer than commonly thought, but that's why a blood test is a good idea if you supplement):
    "The Truth About Vitamin D Toxicity"
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml

Luckily, there are some grassroots campaigns about these issues:
    http://www.grassrootshealth.net/

And many individual efforts:
    http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
    http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

But it is such a big issue, more should be done IMHO. Vitamin D deficiency is just a widespread epidemic that is a consequence of and indoors and sun-avoiding lifestyle centered around technology. It is the thing every slashdotter should be aware of at least for themselves and their family.

More on why vitamin D would help the tropics etc.

[Paul Fernhout]

Just to follow up on my other post, on example suggesting flu in the Tropics (and I can wonder about some other tropical diseases) is more common in the rainy season with high humidity:
"Do the tropics have a flu season?"
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/03/do_the_tropics_have_a_flu_seas.php
"The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar).
http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/15/3/pdfs/08-0238.pdf
Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to 11 years old and living in the capital of Managua were followed for 2 years, April 2005 to April 2007 and observed for development of ILI (influenza-like illness). We know a lot about influenza in major industrialized countries in the northern and southern temperate zones, but very little about the epidemiology of seasonal influenza in tropical regions. Is the pattern of the disease in these populations the same as in temperate climes? Is there a lot of flu or just a low level? Is it still seasonal influenza? The US and Europe have recently set up surveillance systems that help answer these questions but most countries don't have those resources."

So, understanding more about the effects of vitamin D deficiency may very well help a lot of people in the Tropics directly, much more than vaccinations, since adequate vitamin D is cheap to treat with, and that single thing might prevent a variety of illnesses, not just communicable ones, but also cancer, depression, heart disease, dementia, and so on.

Lots of sources here about vitamin D and influenza though:
http://www.google.com/custom?q=influenza&sitesearch=vitamindcouncil.org&sa=Search

Also, while it is often said people catch the cold and the flu because we are indoors more in the winter (or the rainy season), in the USA most people are indoors around others much of the time, between work, school, and malls. So, that explanation has limited value.

And vitamin D deficiency also impairs the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals, making vaccines harder to process that contain heavy metals (and causing seemingly random problems in those who are most vitamin D deficient and have an impaired ability to deal with heavy metals that don't show up in people getting enough sunshine?). Likewise, vitamin D deficiency impairs immune response (both potentially too little and too much), making vaccines less effective and more dangerous. So, there are lots of reasons to study this, even for those who still believe in the value of most vaccines.

Another comment on this:
"Flu is Vitamin D Deficiency Disease"
http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.blogspot.com/2010/01/flu-is-vitamin-d-deficiency-disease.html
"""
Why does the government push dangerous and untested vaccines on the public for the prevention of flu when it is so easy to prevent it with adequate blood levels of vitamin D? The answer is always the almighty dollar. Follow the green and you know why this simple flu prevention strategy is completely ignored. I personally haven't had the flu in over 8 years since I was informed of the critical role of vitamin D in preventing illness and have worked to keep my vitamin D blood levels adequate. In fact, I am so unafraid of the flu that I would be comfortable in a room full of swine flu patients with no mask! Fact is, you are not going to "catch" the flu if your vitamin D blood levels are normal any more than a sail

actually, I didn't overlook it

[davidwr]

I was, however, unclear in what I was saying.

I should've been clear that I was speaking in terms of dollars per life saved - $1000 spent per life saved is cheap on one hand - a average person's lifetime net economic contributions alone are worth well more than a grand, and that's not even counting the intangible and arguably infinite value of human life independent of economics - but it's still way more than pocket change.

As for the cost of development - unless the drug company is operating as a charity, the cost for all research and other corporate expenses are spread out over the wholesale cost of all products and services the company sells.

per-body cost

[cellocgw]

OK, I only searched a page or two of posts, but it appears nobody has yet pointed out that this projects estimates work out to $1000 per life saved.
Now, I know people worth far more (and less :-) ) than this, but what I'd like to know is how this cost compares with other global medical plans.
IIRC, providing clean water to stave off deaths from diarrhea is a lot cheaper. And of course transplanting a liver into an aging rock-n-roller is way more expensive.

Do some math

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten Billion to save 8.7 Million that is a lot of bucks per life saved for an inoculation program. How does clean water, mosquito nets and birth control stack up. It seems that a lot of lives would be improved to the point of the NEXT nasty life saving medical need.

Re:Show me a single nation that innovated without

[AK Marc]

Except in a socialist scheme, the country would fund the research, then the initial price of the drug would be 1/5 or less, since the marketing budgets at all the big drug companies is larger than their R&D departments, and there wouldn't need to be the overhead for profits and such. You are cherry picking a socialist IP scheme with a capitalistic drug scheme. Not to mention that much of what is done now for drug research is done with public dollars, then given away free to for-profit drug companies, so we get the worst of all worlds. Because there is risk in developing drugs, and corporations are risk-averse, they look for assurance by getting the government to fund their initial research and such. So the drug companies are already "socialist" when it comes to their costs, but "capitalists" when it comes to profits.

Re:Show me a single nation that innovated without

[George_Ou]

First of all, the patents that are granted aren't for the publicly funded R which is pathetic amounts of money to begin with. You're simply making things up to fit your socialist philosophy.

Again, find me a socialist funded program that has developed and given away their intellectual property for the benefit of the world. Show me which socialist nation has donated more free drugs to the developing world than these "evil" corporations.

The problem with government funded drug research is that it's still can't be given away to other nations. Otherwise you too many nations freeloading off of a few nations.

They all suck

[hesaigo999ca]

All the big pharma companies suck, and here is why...
>This 10-year, 10 billion dollar project is expected to save 8.7 million lives
Why???
10billion should at least get 10billion vaccines, if not more, why would it cost more then a buck, for third world countries to get
medication when there is a plan out there for third world countries to pay the manufacturing cost only, ....the fact that Bill and his wife are donating the money, means they pay full price even though the medication is going to the third world countries...???

This is just more proof that the meds these companies are pushing are over priced as it is. And now the next generation is even more expensive, and they discontinue previous generation, not because that generation is better, or has more effectiveness but because they get to charge more. Insurance, Pharma and Oil are the biggest greediest companies amongst us, with government coming in after them. Government is justified for running a country though.