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Bill Gates's New Version of the Einstein Letter
dcblogs writes "In 1939, Albert Einstein sent 'F.D. Roosevelt, President of the United States,' a letter with a warning about Germany's interest in a new type of energy with potential for use as a powerful bomb. The letter also outlined the competitive threat posed by Germany and steps for improving US research efforts. Last week, Bill Gates, along with GE's CEO and others, met with President Obama to deliver their own message: that of the top 30 companies in the world working on alternative energy, only four are in the US. Similar to Einstein's point and recommendations, Gates and his allies are asking the US to view the alternative energy push as a competitive threat posed by other nations, particularly China, which may be doing a better job in bringing its engineering talent and money to bear on this problem."
No, Einstein was the sage even at the time, which is why Szilard got him to sign the letter.
Wow, that didn't take long!
Under Breaking News on BBC: "Barack Obama calls for clean energy push"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10313921.stm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This is relevant.
Gates is not the philanthropist you think he is, look at some of the strings that come attached when his foundation offers something... It's never a no strings attached donation of cash.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Actually you're totally wrong.
Einstein acted alone and was not heavily invested in nuclear energy. Gates and his friends are heavily invested in alternative energy sources.
"The Einstein–Szilárd letter was a letter sent to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, that was signed by Albert Einstein but largely written by Leó Szilárd in consultation with fellow Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner."
Szilárd had a patent on nuclear chain reaction.
Szilárd and Fermi had patent on nuclear-power plant design.
This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever read in my life. How many broke ass philanthropists do you know? How many middle class, family providing philanthropists do you know? How many struggling worker philanthropists do you know? All these people may do good works or contribute to charity when they can but a philanthropist's life is moving large sums of their money around to places where he or she feels it can help people.
Invoking the 3MI and Chernobyl event really just declares yourself as utterly pig ignorant about modern nuclear power. And calling them "spills" merely triples the stupidity. Shut up and let the adults handle this. You're just another "OH NOES! RADIATION!!!1!" moron. Seriously, you could not have posted a more cliched and ignorant response if you trierd.
Silly mods. Haven't they heard about this: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html
From what I can understand, the issue is one of duration, not spontaneity.
Specifically, the conditions which cause land-based ice to melt have a very long duration. It is not "On-Off-able". That means that when the conditions ramp up to being sufficient to start that process, while slow, it takes a very long time for that process to stop.
It's a bit like exposing a bit of metal to a proton beam at very low intensity, and claiming "The proton beam's strength is less than 20% above normal, ambient radiation exposure. At that rate, it is perfectly safe to be in the room with it; it would take WEEKS of exposure to have ANY ill effect." However, this discounts the fact that the metal is a lithium/Thorium alloy, and is dutifully producing tritium, and other radiological isotopes upon exposure to the proton beam, and is slowly but surely becoming more and more radioactive by the second.
Eventually, that bar of lithium/thorium alloy is so radioactive, that it dwarfs the output of the proton beam which instigated its instability, and it self-catalyzes. After that point, turning off the beam does nothing.
Once that happens, you can enjoy your radioactive half-life of 200+ years.
The same thing is predicted to happen with water vapor and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. At a critical threshold (which climate scientists have already claimed to have been reached, btw. Thanks denialists.), the evaporation of water vapor increases the greenhouse effect at a rate greater than the rate of precipitation and carbon sequestration can reduce it, resulting in a gradual, continual rise in global temperature, even if you halt all further CO2 production.
This heating process continues, until cloud cover blankets the earth, at which point a rapid cooling occurs, and an ice-age begins. This period of extreme cool re-deposits land-based water in the form of ice, the cold prevents re-evaporation of the precipitated water, and the atmospheric water vapor levels go into rapid decline. When that happens, the atmosphere's greenhouse gas levels are approaching "nominal" levels, and the earth becomes temperate again.
The process takes several THOUSAND years to complete.
From my perspective, your argument that "The rate of melting is so slow, it doesn't really matter; it's all a conspiracy by THE MAN to keep us down!" is very short sighted, and misses the big picture.
That is, unless you LIKE living in balmy 90F+ weather in Toronto.
The US solved the problem by providing asylum to German intellectuals escaping persecution at home. Perhaps the US could use the same approach to attract Chinese scientists.
On the other hand if those scientists are located in the EU, Russian Federation, or India, they're probably happy to stay where they are.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No, he's too batshit in his calculations. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/
Short version: 200km^2. 40,000sq km
What's the size of California? 411,048 sq km. Or 1% of the area of California to manage the ENTIRE WORLD'S NEEDS. Not Just USA.
As to the "more consistent supply" here's a couple of links:
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/3/llIbjC49Fjs
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/2/WO3V2uXTM6k
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Holdings Outperforming S&P 500 Handily
It is also overweight Healthcare, Consumer Staples and Industrials. The Foundation is underweight Telecom, Consumer Discretionary and Energy, and it has a 0% weight in Technology, Utilities and Materials.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Owns Over 7 Million Shares of BP
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Buys CSX Corp., M&T Bank Corp., XTO Energy Inc. Mcdonald's, Devon Energy Corp., Sells Johnson & Johnson
These are the top 5 holdings of Bill Gates
1. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK-B) - 1,251,250 shares, 48.36% of the total portfolio
2. McDonald's Corp. (MCD) - 6,867,500 shares, 5.27% of the total portfolio
3. Canadian National Railway Company Fully (CNI) - 8,399,653 shares, 4.82% of the total portfolio
4. Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) - 4,285,000 shares, 4% of the total portfolio
5. Costco Wholesale Corp. (COST) - 6,128,000 shares, 3.74% of the total portfolio
Is this a philanthropic venture or a tax evasion investment scheme?
I do commend Gates for what he is doing but I would not go so far as to slobber all over him for his philanthropic works considering his past illicit activity that played a significant role in providing him with the funds to become a philanthropist.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.
To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.
http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/
http://keystone.org/files/file/SPP/energy/NJFF-Exec-Summ-6_2007.pdf
Even under extremely agressive but realistic growth scenarios, nuclear could only cover about a tenth of our projected requirements.
Wind, by comparison, does surprisingly well, as does solar thermal, but they won't be able to cover it all either.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/26/full-global-warming-solution-350-450-ppm-technologies-efficiency-renewables/
In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!
That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
The fact that buy taking his money you are now agreeing to the patents on other drugs. These drugs then are sold and that is how this makes money.
Ooooookay, let's start by exploring just waht a "foundation" is. The applicable definitions would be:
a : funds given for the permanent support of an institution : endowment; b : an organization or institution established by endowment with provision for future maintenance
(emphasis added)
In other words, a foudnation is precisely an organization that has an endowment of seed money, invests that money, and uses income from such investment to do some sort of work (in this case, charitable work) perpetually. Typically some of the investment income is reinvested in the foundation (rather than 100% of the income going to do work), as this helps ensure perpetual operation and can even cause the foundation's strength to increase over time.
An organization that doesn't invest, but rather does its work directly with the money it takes in from donors or other revenue streams, is not a foundation.
So pointing out that the foundation invests in profitable things and therefoer concluding that it's a tax scam is entirely misguided. If you want to distinguish a charitable foundation from a tax scam, look for an outbound revenue stream into the founders' pockets. If you have evidence of that, then there's something to talk about.
Your first link represents a dillema that every successful investor with a diverse portfolio has to deal with. Your second and fourth links only show that they are good stewards of their seed money. Your third link is such trivially emotional crap that it barely deserves comment.
the other thinkers of his time (Tesla, for example) were pretty much bonkers.
Uhh, bonkers or not. That AC power that your PC ... and everything else uses... was his design. He designed.. and actually built things. Not just drew them up on paper.
Tesla had a huge impact on society as a whole. I pesonally believe that Tesla did more for humanity than did Einstien.
yeah, apparently the Chinese learned that Mao's purges of intellectuals were counterproductive. And because they make the government look bad it's really hard to find information on their history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Persecution
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090420120327AA9Yzfe
Oh, and don't forget Tienanmen Square in 1989.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
So, uh, basically no reason. no reason at all. China is clearly a haven for persecuted scientists.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I read somewhere that more lives were saved before when they used copies of patented drugs than now with his 'donations'.
You read something garbled then. The donations do save lives, this is not in dispute. The problem is the cost that they come with. The B&MGF buys the patented drugs, but the drug companies only provide them on the condition that the receiving countries sign treaties with the USA introducing US-style patent laws. This means that the country can then not buy (or locally produce) cheaper, generic, patent-infringing, versions of the drugs. As a (wholly unintentional, of course) side effect, the new treaties also make it possible for companies like, for example, large software firms, to enforce their copyrights and software patents in the countries that have received this aid.
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