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Gates and MS Don't See Eye-To-Eye On CO2
Sam Machkovech writes "Bill Gates's speech at last week's TED Conference centered on 'moving to zero-carbon energy, and our need to reduce CO2 emissions 80% by 2050.' His choice of subject was an abrupt turn from The Gates Foundation's typical humanitarian topics, but he insisted that energy innovation is crucial to his Foundation's goals. A move by Microsoft today proves that Gates's old company has less interest in that carbon-neutral goal — Microsoft has begun campaigning against a bridge redesign that would result in more bus and transit options for commuters between Seattle and the company's homebase of Redmond, WA."
There's not really a conflict here. It's just an attempt to spin the story against Microsoft, for no apparent reason, since they want the bridge done as soon as possible. Read the linked article.
"moving to zero-carbon energy"
That would be the end of life as we know it. Quite literally, as a matter of fact, since we're all made of carbon.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The changes Microsoft made to both Windows Vista and 7 have resulted in more CO2 savings that most other efforts combined. I am of course talking about the default and recommended power settings in Windows along with the "best practice" guidelines given to their corporate partners. Microsoft has also added support for power saving features to Windows ahead of what the hardware and or drivers in the market offered...
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to oppose a bridge that may well be a bad idea to build.
Bottles.
That a guy who has practically unlimited money and a seemingly sincere desire for world improvement(some of the "educational" initiatives that basically boil down to getting 3rd world kiddies using MS Office are arguably cynical; but nobody puts money into malaria research except for philanthropic reasons) and a callously profit-maximizing corporation with stockholders to appease might not be in complete agreement. However could this be?
Tha alternative plan MS is arguing against has only two (one each way) lanes for general car use - no wonder they don't want it. Light rail and long range buses are only good if lots of people want to use them. HOV lanes are only good if people can be convinced to carpool. Apparently MS management feels the employees want to drive their own cars to work by themselves. If that's the case, making them idle in the traffic snarls created by the one general lane each way bridge will not only make everyone late to work but also really exacerbate the smog problem.
From the article:
While there are still some final design issues that need to be resolved with the City of Seattle, we should not let last-minute objections undermine the hard-won agreements already in place for the rest of the project. Doing so would cause yet more delay, increase the cost to taxpayers, and put this vital transportation and economic corridor at risk. The current bridge is 47 years old, and state engineers warn that it could sink in a major storm or earthquake.
So its not like Microsoft is against it because they love to emit Carbon Dioxide. In fact, closing the bridge for construction will cause people to go around, emitting more CO2.
Microsoft is mostly against it because it highly affects their employees in a negative way. It means more lates, or more inconvenience. Will the CO2 offset from more buses balance out the increased amount created during its upgrade? Who knows.
Bill's Ted talk was actually great. He promoted the design and development of the new Nuclear reactors that burn the 99% of uranium - essentially the old toxic waste that we have sitting around. Yeah, everyone was afraid of nuclear technology partly because of the waste produced, and with modern super computers we've simulated that we can actually burn the waste produced by regular nuclear reactors. We just need to jump on it. Bill Gates goes through how Solar power and Geo power are great alternatives but they aren't as solid, as such they will only work towards extending our deadline to meet the Carbon 0 goal.
These two events, the Ad and the Ted talk, are totally exclusive and neither are really about the other, and this isn't them butting heads. Bill Gates goes on about how the entire world needs to come together on a new project. This is one company against adding bus lanes to a bridge. Whoever lumped those two together didn't really look at the big picture.
Yeah, MS is opposing the redesign because it needs to pump CO2, obviously.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
First line in the article.
Microsoft took out a full-page color ad in the Seattle Times today opposing any further “delay” on replacing the SR-520 bridge
Seriously, do you even live in Seattle? Do you know what 520 bridge is like? Do you even know all the politics around this bridge redesign? No? Then, STFU!!! This bridge goes through VERY wealthy neighborhoods on both sides of the bridge. These neighborhoods have been dead set against ANY expansion of the bridge and they have been backing any and all candidates with proposals that would delay the contructions of the new bridge. These redesigns have been decades in making, while the bridge is hanging by the thread on every major windstorm. The sucker needs to get replaces ASAP. It does not matter if it is 6 lanes or 8 lanes. It needs to move forward for the good of all people living in the Puget Sound area.
Nothing in this is contradictory. Like most people, particularly those with power and wealth, he wants everyone else to do something to reduce carbon emissions while he flies around in his private jet and pumps megawatts into his electro-fortress. See also Al Gore's mansion and The Governator's private jet commute from Malibu to Sacramento. Contrast with Ed Begley Jr, who seems to practice what he preaches -- and is the exception that proves the rule.
The rich and famous are only required to appear as though they want a better future, or we would rise up and slay them. Good PR does more to protect their aristocracy than making sacrifices -- the PR is all that the serfs know of the nobles.
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Troll? He wants population planet wide to stabilize and drop some for the good of all. Not ... like slaughtering africans with medicine... Bringing places to the 1st world reduces birth rates. That's a good thing... and exactly what we want to see.
It's just an attempt to spin the story against Microsoft, for no apparent reason
Did you miss "posted by kdawson"?
Microsoft is not opposing transit. Microsoft runs a whole fleet of buses to reduce the number of cars on the road. As many comments indicate, this is about a bridge that desperately needs replacing. As someone who think Seattle is in another dimension, I wonder what Ravenna housing prices would do if 520 fails, and those Microsoft commuters move to Redmond so they can get to work.
Seeing as Bill Gates no longer works at Microsoft, I doubt they see eye-to-eye at all. Nor do they need to, or we to know whether or nether they are.
I think it's pretty much a non story, and I think most agree since nearly every commenter so far hasn't bothered to RTFA and proved it with ignorant comments.
Basically Bill Gates gives a talk about the environment and says we need to burn hippies for energy (or something with nuclear power, I haven't watched the video yet) and people cheer.
Microsoft, which Bill Gates has next to nothing to do with anymore, says to the city, stop fucking around and build the bridge you have been planing since forever before the old one falls down, but because some hippies want to make last minute design changes like powering the lights with bicycles (or maybe adding more HOV lanes or something) which would mean redoing a lot of work and added years of delays, somehow makes Microsoft anti environment.
He is still the largest single shareholder (8%) and a non-executive Chairman of the Board. He's still quite involved with MS.
McGinn’s proposal would also introduced further delays. Which is what MS is complaining about.
I'll bet they don't give a hoot one way or the other about the LRT lanes. But if that bridge goes down for even one day, no matter what it looks like, they lose millions.
How does this indicate that Microsoft isn't green?
Maybe Microsoft is simply looking at the reality: there is no incentive for people who might cross that bridge to use public transit. People who are able to afford a lengthy daily drive to work are also likely to be able to justify not sitting another 20+ minutes on a bus/train with strangers.
Also, public transit has shown to do one thing very well in the US: bring criminals from their urban homes to suburbia where they can commit crimes and then hop back on the train in time for dinner.
Upper-middle-class people do not ride on public transit unless it is very, very clean, safe, and private. (This is partially because train lines seem to typically go from urban downtown to their pleasant neighborhoods, resulting in urban scum coming out to deal drugs and expand their turf in the relatively safe 'burbs.)
Maybe Microsoft is opposed to the lengthy extensions to the bill proposing public transit because said public transit would then come out of the Redmond tax coffers.
There's probably close to a half dozen plausible reasons why MS might be opposed to this bridge, and it has nothing to do with how "Green" they are.
Why don't you call them "Reds" and have McCarthy go after them? (That's what this Green bullshit is becoming - the New McCarthyism.)
I'm going to go burn some tires.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That's pretty much it. KDawson has got to be one really sick individual.
I mean, when I do a web search all I get is articles talking about how Microsoft is doing everything it can to accelerate the plans for the new bridge -- which can only be good for CO2 emissions, especially considering that the construction has been delayed multiple times over literally a decade. When I read TFA on slashdot, it looks like MS is just getting in the way for absolutely no reason.
Pathetic, kdawson -- absolutely pathetic. You are a really sorry excuse for a person.
The summary is unbelievably slanted; whoever tagged this story "troll" was correct. Here is the complete situation; judge for yourself.
Lake Washington is a tall, skinny lake that's rather deep in the middle. It takes a while to drive around it; if you bicycle around the circumference of the lake, it's about 50 miles total.
On the west side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny city: Seattle. The biggest city in the state, lots of people live there.
On the east side of the lake, you have a tall, skinny populated area. But it isn't just one city; it's Bothell, Woodinville, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and a few small ones. Collectively these are known as "the Eastside".
Because Lake Washington is so deep, an ordinary bridge is impractical. That is why the three longest floating bridges in the world are on Lake Washington: the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (I tend to slip and call it the "floating point bridge") is the one with highway 520, and it is the longest single floating bridge in the world. (The other two are used for I-90 a couple of miles to the south of 520.) By the way, I suspect that one of the reasons we have the longest floating bridges is the fact that the Chittenden Locks in Seattle allow for some control over the water level of Lake Washington; if we have torrential rain, engineers can just open the locks and let the waters drain out of the lake system and lower the water level again to the safe zone for the floating bridges.
When the 520 bridge was first built, all the action was in Seattle. Not that many people lived on the Eastside, and not that many Seattle people needed to go to the Eastside. But Microsoft and a bunch of other technical companies are on the Eastside, so now many people actually commute from Seattle to the Eastside over the 520 bridge.
There are rich neighborhoods right on the water, on both sides of the lake. The fabled small city of Medina, where Bill Gates has his famous house, is right by the 520 bridge. The rich folks have been successfully blocking all attempts to upgrade the 520 bridge; as I understand it, their attitude is that they already don't like the car noise, so why would they want more traffic to be able to flow over the bridge? The area has been talking about replacing the 520 bridge for something like 14 years now, and for most of that time the project has been blocked.
But the 520 bridge really needs to be replaced. If you measure the life of the bridge in terms of how many cars have driven over it, the bridge is way, way past its planned lifetime already. A serious wind storm could sink it. A serious earthquake could sink it. And the consequences for traffic would be epic (not in a good way).
Right now, all it takes is a Husky football game at the University of Washington, putting extra traffic on the already overloaded bridge, and the whole area is just about paralyzed. Normally the I-90 bridge is fine, but when the 520 gets bad enough and traffic diverts to the other bridge, both bridges can be parking lots. It will already be bad when the 520 bridge is closed for construction of the new bridge; I seriously hope that they can mostly build the new bridge somewhere and float it into place with minimal down time. If the bridge fails in a wind storm, we will be many months, possibly years without any bridge and the traffic will be dire. In short, any further delay in building the bridge is Not A Good Idea.
Now, the existing bridge is two traffic lanes each way. There is no carpool lane. There is no shoulder. Any time a vehicle stalls, a tow truck gets over there ASAP and pulls it off the bridge, but it still does horrible things to the already horrible traffic. As other posters have noted, the 520 carpool lane disappears right before the bridge, and the westbound neck-down where three lanes go to two lanes is the single most congested piece of road in the whole state.
So, we have a bridge plan finally that is ready to move ahead. It ha
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