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A Critical Examination of Bill Gates' Philanthropic Record
sam_handelman writes "The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record. His philanthropic efforts may turn out to be not as altruistic as one may think. Edweek, not ordinarily an unfriendly venue for Gates, is running a series of blog post/investigative journalism pieces into what the Gates' foundation is doing, and how it is not always well received by stakeholders."
See subject: Anyone that's worked with foundations knows it. I had some dealings with companies that set things like that up for the extremely wealthy whilst I lived in NY City in 2003.
I.E.-> It's better to spend monies on foundations than face tax penalties that would otherwise ensue. You're probably not that much different, considering you probably have monies in IRA's, property, or business investments!
* So - Does this make "King Billy" (I call him that out of respect, NOT ridicule & I have for years) some 'evil guy'? No.
(He's just doing what he has to with HIS monies, and in the most sensible manner possible. Were you in his shoes, would YOU do anything differently with YOUR money? I doubt it.)
APK
P.S.=> Conversely, does it make him a 'saint'? No, of course not - he's just a guy managing his money, and he does a good job of that... I like his educational investments the most! apk
A fair amount of Microsoft's money is going to wipe out malaria and polio and shitloads of other diseases, on people from nations who will grow up to use pirated software. No wonder the scumbag stakeholders are pissed.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
While it seems credible that some money comes back to Bill Gates, they aren't making a strong case that this would actually be his goal. AFAIK he's getting poorer (less rich) rather than richer now. Also, he would have very little incentive to get even more money other than to pump it back into the foundation. This article does not convince me that this isn't real charity and AFAIK many projects have also been very effective and helpful.
Large nonprofit organizations get increasingly likely to be run in questionable ways. The most common failing, of course, is just the usual inefficiency and bureaucracy. But when you're moving around millions or billions of dollars, opportunities for personal interest and corruption are around many corners. As this article notes, nonprofit-corporate partnerships may benefit corporate shareholders, depending on how the partnership is structured (who fronts the money, who benefits, what long-term effects are generated, etc.). And even at levels below official big partnerships, there are always decisions being made: using a contractor here or there, adopting one technology or methodology over another one, etc. It's just really hard to move around billions of dollars without an array of consequences, sometimes intended and sometimes not (and sometimes intended by some people and not intended by others).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It sounds like Edweek is complaining that the Gates Foundation channels its money through private enterprises to achieve its goals instead of corrupt African dictatorships?
Why do people think they have a voice in how a private not-for-profit spends their money? The Gates Foundation does a lot of good. This seems like a lot of knocking down the guy on top.
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
did you forget to take your meds?
The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record.
Not me. I've voiced my concerns that are not so warmly received.
The short of it is that I think what Gates is doing is great but I don't understand why they buy research facilities in America and not Africa or why all the drug companies that get to sell their cures to Africa are all American. I mean without stability, roads and other infrastructure, Africa is going to constantly need someone else to fix their problems. And the money from the B&G Foundation stays in America invested in American companies that pays out to American companies that provide "cures" for Africa. It will perpetually work that way.
Imagine aliens landed on Earth, took an assessment of us and were saddened to see war, pollution, poverty, etc. So they say they're going to help us and they buy 10 long range matter transmitters from another alien race and give them to Earth. But if we ask them on how to make the transmitters ourselves they just laugh and say "Please, you're still searching for subatomic particles. Plus, you're just going to use them for war if you can make them. And on top of that, you would have to pay sums you cannot fathom to the alien race who invented these machines. When these break, we'll get you some new ones." Meanwhile they're receiving accolades from the galactic senate and Earth remains full of war, pollution, poverty, etc.
It's a horrible truth but the one thing Africa has a lot of is humans. Life is cheap there. If you want to reverse that, you need to introduce stability and then farming and then commerce. There are huge areas where crime, corruption and warlords make it impossible to raise crops. Curing malaria is important but it isn't going to stop that from being the hungriest place on Earth. And it's not going to raise the value of human life there. Gates' idea to fix that is to pair up with Monsanto (surprise another American company with tons of IP). Right. I wonder if they'll patent the seeds they breed that grow well in regions of Africa?
Just like thinking up a new microfinancing system can win you a Nobel Prize, ideas on how to make areas secure and stable will go much further for farming in Africa than importing Monsanto seed with terminator genes.
My work here is dung.
Where is the money supposed to come from, tooth fairies?
This is a story about how philanthropic Bill Gates is, so yeah, the money comes from him. That's the whole point of charity -- you give away portions of your wealth for a cause.
Donor nations were shocked last month, when UNICEF disclosed that it has been forced to pay artificially elevated prices for vaccines under an arrangement called the Advance Market Commitment, which was brokered by Gates Foundation-dominated GAVI alliance, to greatly increase drug company profits. Stakeholders also worry that industry reports of particular vaccine's effectiveness might be skewed by marketing goals.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proves once again that leopards dont change their spots.
This is a bad hatchet-job.
For example, it demonizes the Gates Foundation for having some partnerships with Monsanto. Without discussing the details of the actual partnership, and the expected status quo, and the change the partnership creates.
It effectively creates a vast conspiracy of things the author doesn't like. And then blames them on the Gates foundation, because it does some things they don't like. Like their portfolio is in a double-blind trust that can own stock in evil corporations like coca-cola. Which is a fair criticism, buried in the middle of a paragraph halfway down the page. There is some content in here, but it's either buried or so biased that it is like listening to Noam Chomsky.
And it mentions leverage like it's a dirty word.
The quality of slashdot is really going downhill when this kind of thing makes it onto the page.
Some rich people love to hoard money and fly economy class lecturing the world.
Some and presumably Gates is at the enough billions to live in luxury forever category don't seem to care whether they have 30 or 80 billion $ and splash money around? Yes I know it's all a tax evasion scheme linked to the illuminati but seriously if he'd kept the money I'm sure he'd have a lot more now.
But some twerp will find that a charity which spends billions of dollars on good causes has done a few bad things here and there and Gates obviously knows where every single penny goes and is personally responsible. Seriously, compared to most charities which are as corrupt and evil as hell Gates seems to be doing a decent job of spending money and getting practical results.
So, do I need to RTFA to have that confirmed, or is that pretty much the gist of it?
Hey, I've got an idea. Try RTFA.
I know, new here etc etc...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Eh, nice try. Consider ``saving as many human lives possible'' being pretty much the only goal, and all starts to fall into place. It's not about making folks happy, or not leveraging, it's about getting the most saved lives for your moneh, using whatever means [if it means using your moneh to get more moneh, good, if it means using your politics to get others to go along with you, good, etc.].
Heck, it's one of the few non-profits that does things by the numbers. Look around, see what you can do with your $$$ that saves the most lives: identify stuff like malaria, and HIV,... which one kills most folks? malaria. So HIV gets no attention, at least not while other things are much bigger killers.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
And that is what I am talking about, if you build an entire business out of charity, you should make it profitable, you should be able to show that your management costs are very low and that the money that the charity is providing is mostly making it to the actual recipients of whatever the benefit is, and if you can show that, then you can run the charity as a business by hiring people and advertising the fact that you are a very efficient charity and those who want to donate to that cause should do it through you rather than through other charity groups, because you are the most efficient in it.
Only donating your own money is one thing and it always ends, one person's resources are not limited. Creating a steady stream of donations by running a successful charity business is another.
You can't handle the truth.
one person's resources are not limited
- I hope I don't have to explain where the typo is in that.
You can't handle the truth.
Yet people have been denying this from day one on the phrase of "oh it's philanthropic".
If someone can't figure out that working with Glaxosmithkline, Monsanto and Coca Cola (who happily works with Cargill, as if they aren't bad enough on their own) might be a bad thing, then they deserve to have a fast one pulled on them by the Gates foundation.
Maybe now people will realize that Bill Gates didn't step down to do "Great things for the world". He stepped down to continue the Microsoft concept of business and expand it *further*, outside of the US's reach.
Shout all you like that the problem with health care is the US government, nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well (Well as in, people dont die early or have to live with treatable health problems for lack of income, not well as in it makes corporates boatload of money).
Then why have a charity at all?
If you are going to run a business, just run a business. The money is supposed to come from donors, like maybe Bill Gates. Having string attached to charity makes it not even charity. This is just Gates once again showing how horrible a person he is.
...what the authors of Edweek have done. Not a thing compared to Gates.
So the editors of Edweek are innocent, Gates is not.
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
No matter how you run it though there is no need to use it as a tool to make people spend more money.
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
In an inflationary environment created by the government the real return on interest is negative.
You can't handle the truth.
Their problem seems to be that Gates is focussed on building sustainable businesses that can survive after the charity taps get turned off. That bastard!
Doesn't he realise that he is just supposed to pump money into Africa and hope that amongst the missile launchers and the AK47s, someone manages to smuggle in some penicillin?
Are we supposed to be shocked that a man who made a huge fortune in the private sector, favours a private sector approach when he is trying to get shit done?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hope I don't have to explain just how useless that is.
Or to explain, How do thems what don't no what the error is, ever learn?
Not sure how it is working out for us. What is the per capita health expenditures for people 65 and older in the US. I'd like to see that compared to other countries, since in the US we have a universal, government health system for people 65 and older. Wonder if we will find our government doing it better than others?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Running a charity as a business ensures that the money that goes to charity is pretty steady and doesn't depend on a few wealthy one time donors. I thought this place liked charity? I don't even support charity and I have more sense about how to run it than anybody here.
You can't handle the truth.
The money is supposed to come from people who selflessly give money and time out of compassion to help others, not to make a profit. That's why charities in the US are almost always non-profit organizations.
You think otherwise, because you are an autistic narcissist. Every time you post something on Slashdot, especially when you start the discussion, you demonstrate the precisely inhuman way to act.
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make install -not war
one person's resources are not limited
- I hope I don't have to explain where the typo is in that.
You don't have to but it would help.
>Edweek, not ordinarily an unfriendly venue for Gates,
>not
>ordinarily
>unfriendly
Why. Why do you do this? Why give passive voice such a gigantic hug, kiss and grope up the skirt?
Do you mean ordinarily friendly, or usually friendly, or friendly with unfriendly articles being the exception? If so, say so. Remove extraneous logical operators and use active voice.
Your readers will thank you.
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BMO
Thankfully we are not quite there.
If I mister non-billionaire can make money this way, surely Mr.Gates can do better.
It is pretty telling how your faith in the free market suddenly vanished though.
Until the US government got involved, running US healthcare strictly as a business left millions of us to get sick, stay sick and die, without preventive or responsive care available. That left many millions of other people to stay trapped in a sick home, unable to live fully, work properly or contribute economically or educationally.
Since the time the US government got involved in a coordinated way, through Medicaid and Medicare, the large majority of the population has been freed from the worst afflictions, healthwise and otherwise. Meanwhile the expanded healthcare economy has completely transformed health science and practice.
You and your fellow "libertarian" corporate anarchists would return us to the bad old days. Next you'll tell us war is good for the economy, so we should have more of what ruins us.
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make install -not war
I peaked at what you wrote, and there's this:
In a free market economy, the unemployment is very low, anybody with a job can afford * health care and insurance, because those services are very cheap, just like they were prior to 1965 **.
That's obvious bullshit. The introduction of very expensive diagnosis machines (MRI, gene readup and the like) and treatments (artificial organs, radiation treatments) push costs up. Probably hospital infrastructure's more expensive now, doctors more trained etc. Also patients want the best possible care whenever they realize their life and health is at stake. Best possible care today is expensive.
Trying to use the logic of supply and demand to determine prices is doomed to fail here. If I'm healthy, my demand for chemotherapy is zero. If I'm dying, my demand is infinite. Plug those into your equations and see.
Yeah, it worked so great that in 1965 all kinds of things would have been a death sentence that are now done on an outpatient basis.
Even in a perfect free market land if you get a disease that so few people have that no money can ever be made on a cure you are totally screwed.
Even worse is that short term profit motives will slow research to a crawl on all but the most profitable sectors of drug research. We would be able to have 40 kinds of pecker medicine and not much else.
Charity comes without attachments or requirements.
If this article is in any way true, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is in no way acting charitably.
To prove the Bill & Melinda Foundation isn't perfectly run? To suggest it's a sinister organisation perhaps?
There's no love for billg here that's for sure but poo-pooing his attempts (however imperfect) at doing good in the world is just petty.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Shout all you like that the problem with health care is the US government, nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well (Well as in, people dont die early or have to live with treatable health problems for lack of income, not well as in it makes corporates boatload of money).
I hear what you are saying, and I tend to agree with you (having been in Japan, I know what good health care is, and how bad we have it here in the USA.) However, @roman_mir does have a point. Fully privatized health care DID work.
The problem here is not whether health care is privatized, or whether other countries have better health care systems with some type of government intervention. The root of the problem is the collusion of government and health care firms, which have created a self-perpetuating carcinogenic mass of middle man sitting between the patient and the physician.
Not all private enterprises are created equal. There are those that compete freely (with price controls dictated by supply and demand), and there are cartels. Two solutions to the problem exist:
1. Have a government-sponsored health care system as found in Japan or Germany
2. Have the goverment dismantle the health care middlemen cartels, forcing them to compete freely.
Either one will work, and both require goverment intervention of some form. People need to stop looking at goverment vs private enterprise as if both formed a zero-sum game, a black-n-white, matter-antimatter dichotomy. They are not. Such parrochial black-n-white window painting serve well to pander simple solutions to the simple-minded masses on both sides of the political fence, but that's the extend of its usability.
if you build an entire business out of charity, you should make it profitable
If you build a business out of charity, you show to the world that you don't understand the word.
Thankfully we are not quite there.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=realyield
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The young people love Bill Gates, but we keep telling them this is NOT the same Bill Gates we grew up with! This is an old Bill Gates whose trying to get into heaven now.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
You're right but many will fail to understand. I'm as big a Microsft hater as anyone but find it somewhat ridiculous to criticise Gates for giving billions to charity. His foundation has an obligation to properly steward the funds under its control and investing them in a range of blue-chips - some of which have dubious practices in the 3rd world - doesn't contradict his charitable aims. The real problem is the behaviour of companies like Monsanto. It has nothing to do with Bill Gates or his charity.
Meanwhile, with your armchair psychology and your opinions-as-facts style, you're showing everyone how to behave humanely towards each other :o
OP is a reasonable comment, only marked Troll because of groupthink. One may not agree with it, but one's response would normally be restricted to the point itself, rather than this extreme version of Ad Hominem via Psych 101 you're playing.
It may be worth reflecting that people who randomly accuse others of deep (and highly specific) psychological problems are usually projecting their own. Seriously, I would reflect on that, if I were you.
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Well, I agree most with your last sentence. 8^)
I've worked for and with NGOs and non-profits large and small, from UN agencies to universities to the independent think tank where I am now. Let me assure you that the death-knell of any non-profit is to have it taken over by someone who claims it needs to run more like a business.
Profit-making and non-profit organisations are very different in their nature and -more importantly- their culture. They each have a million ways to fail, but here's the key: Non-profit organisations can and must measure success by something other than financial returns. This impacts every single aspect of its work. It sometimes means that you can (and should) spend more time on seemingly pointless details getting things just right. It sometimes means that you work on things that you know have a high chance of failure, but you take them on precisely because no profit-making outfit can't afford the risk.
The killer on both sides of the equation, though, is complacency and power. Allow either to become too apparent and the same sociopathic personalities begin to appear at the head of the organisation. And though they die in different ways, their death is a painful spectacle. Non-profits, especially those with guaranteed budgets, get over-run by careerist know-nothings who spend more time agonising over their per diems and life-saving meetings than actually thinking about what they're supposed to be achieving.
In profit-making ventures, the organisations get overrun by strategic thinking business-school types who spend more time plotting strategy and market position than actually running the fricking company.
Non-profits die like old oak trees: They rot from the inside; they remain standing for far longer than they should, providing shade for a few but hosting an increasing army of parasites.
Profit-making companies die by fire. They remain standing until the first lightning strike, then collapse in flames, sometimes taking half the countryside with them.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
50 billions at 1 percent a year is 500 millions in interest a year. "Inflationary environments" cause the capital to loose value and the charity would loose purchasing power as years go by but this isn't directly related to the argument in the GP post.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Except that Medicare is running out of money in 12 years: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/04/social-security-and-medicare-could-run-out-sooner-than-expected/ Just a couple of years before I qualify, thanks federal government! Yeah, there is Medicaid, good luck getting an appointment under 6 months that isn't a quack, if there are any none quacks still accepting new Medicaid patients.
Almost all Not-for-profit organizations are a for profit organization. They operate like a real business and make profit, they just change the vocabulary around "excess revenue", used to help grow the organization. A NFP organization is just like a company however they get particular tax brakes because their work help the community on the whole, and are willing to do things that may negativity effect their bottom line. (for example, a Hospital will keep funds to pay for services for patients who cannot pay for them, they will not refuse emergency care to a patient, if they do so then they could loose their NFP status. )
Charity isn't giving away your money for a cause, but using your money for a cause. The difference between the Rich and the average joe, the Average Joe works for his money, the rich has money work for him. So if Gates uses his money and profits off of it, that is to be expected, making money is a habit for him now, he is directing his profit making towards the greater good, because if he didn't invest then things may not have gotten done.
A lot of the time drugs are hard to get by because of lack of resources. They may know how to make it, but have a hard time justifying the upfront capital to mass produce it. That is where the Organizations like the Gates Foundation comes in. They will give the company the millions to mass produce the drug (allowing it to be sold for cheap), they may agree to share the profits of the drug (or the profits back will be a donation to the charity (remember the difference between FP and NFP is vocabulary) ). This will give Gates Foundation even more money in the long run to invest into other resources.
A lot of organizations hate the Gates Foundation, because it isn't all in your face political. They will do the research do some small scale tests, if it works they expand it, if not they will drop it. That is what is missing today, too many organizations are against the idea of making mistakes. When there is a mistake then there is a head hunt out there to find the cause and fire it... Not learn from it and work to make it better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Gates is a prominent example, but perhaps it is not fair to single him out. This is widely practiced among wealthy "philanthropists". Rarely is money given without some profit motive or strings attached. The ultimate example might be Jerry Sandusky's use of philanthropy to provide himself with a steady stream of boys to butt-bang.
Proverbs 21:19
I think both of those are fine.
I believe the problem is the deals with Pharm companies that demand more expensive drugs be purchased. That kind of running it like a typical MS business. If you really want to save lives you get the cheapest drugs that do the job.
You don't even support charity? Nor do you want people to have access to healthcare?
You are either a troll or the most disgusting person I have ever heard of. I am going to go donate some money to a worthy cause in your name.
Running health care as a business worked out really well for USA before the government got involved, I don't want to repeat it, so here is the argument I wrote down some time ago.
In 1920 or so? Everything stated there was a special, one of a kind situation. Look at what the other companies at large were doing. There's a reason there were major pushes to unionize workers (Ford was not a cause) Workers were generally exploited. Lifespans were significantly less than today. Various diseases ran rampant, all cured or mitigated since the government got involved. (After all, under Ron Paul, vaccinations et al would be up to the individual - wouldn't want to get the government involved in that now, would we?) The one thing I have to give Ron Paul - I believe him when he says he believes in these statements, he did watch a campaign worker and close friend die of a treatable disease after all. The thing he hasn't answered is how he feels about someone involved in an accident who doesn't have proof of insurance readily available and needs immediate and expensive care: does he let them die or treat them? If they cannot provide proof of financial capability to pay, at what point do they kick them out of the hospital (during the operation?). What if they do have insurance and die because of refusal to provide care?
No matter how you slice it, care will be given, and some won't be able to pay, which leads us down the same road we're on now, perhaps at a different rate, but the same road none the less. Unless you advocate the full set of (hopefully) unpalatable options listed above, you're in favor of the mandated insurance clause, and would actually be a proponent of at least basic universal healthcare. There's a set of diseases IMNSHO that would require additional health insurance, and of course most of the cosmetic type things would be excluded, and undergoing them might require purchase of additional insurance (as part of the procedure cost) to cover the potential complications thereof.
Of-course same thing applies to SS, etc.
SS is a different boat, I didn't but lightly skim this one after the Libertarian diatribe. SS is not quite a Ponzi scheme, and it was never meant to be the sole source of income for retired folks. Why isn't it a full Ponzi scheme, because it actually tried to set up a partial pay ahead balance system. You might want to visit the SS site for some amusing facts about internet myths.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Did you read the articles (duh, Slashdot, I know...) - the problem is the Foundation is campaigning on behalf of it's business partners to get the governments who they claim to be helping to establish policies that benefit Monsanto rather than their population. The end result is, Foundation spends x, corporate partners gain x*y. Bill Gats (personally) and Foundation then also gain from investment in corporate partner. This is not about charity at all, it is about disguising dodgy business practises as charity.
I can get 1% on 20k. 50 Billion is going to get a heck of a lot better rate.
If a charity is worth running, it is worth running well as a business, otherwise the gravy train stops.
Why was this modded troll?!? It's true. Every charitable foundation uses this principle to remain solvent. It's the whole point of having a foundation (instead of just making a one-time big donation to some charity).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I can get 1% on 20k. 50 Billion is going to get a heck of a lot better rate.
You could buy up unsubsidized student loans at 6.8%. Low overhead costs and no worries of getting discharged in bankruptcy.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
All of this 'run it like a business' stuff is misplaced, becase it is always meant as 'like a for profit business'. It is misplaced when applied to government and misplaced when applied to charities.
A for profit business has the single goal of making a profit. At whenever mean necessary, and even if that means is illegal, as long as the profit exceeds the penalty it should be done. No matter the external harm. If distilled down all decisions at the business should be about profit: who to hire; who to fire; changes to the product; which congressmen to lobby; etc.
If the goal is to just be efficient and mindful of the purpose of the organization's existence when making decision, there is no need use for profit businesses as a model. Efficiency isn't their exclusive domain nor are a lot of them even good at it. Look at pre-bailout GM, who could possibly consider them efficient?
People run their households in an efficient manner every day. You don't burn your furniture to heat your house.
FTFA:
"chemical giant Monsanto has partnered with the Gates Foundation, which works to suppress local seed exchanges and environmentally sustainable agricultural practices"
"Gates Foundation has increasingly shifted its funding to promote market domination by its British corporate education services partner, Pearson Education."
"owns a profit-generating portfolio of stocks which would seem to work against the Foundation's declared missions, such as the Latin American Coca-Cola FEMSA distributorship and five multinational oil giants operating in Nigeria. "
Once a crook, always a crook I guess. Fuck you Bill.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
http://www.deathhousebarber.com/images/jr-647-copy-2.jpg (another fine example of philantropy, al capone's soup kitchen)
Gates is using his fundation to:
=> Remove cash from his taxable income
=> provide a cushy long term job & tax free playground for his descendent
=> invest in feel good actions to boost his cash cow's marketing drive.
Moreover if I steal your money, or con you out by putting you in a situation where I have a monopoly on something you need it's a crime.
The fact that I might or might not give it to somebody else does not make it less of a crime, particularly if I cannot claim to be some "robin hood" equalizer if I prefer to steal from the weak and uneducated.
What is surprising is not that his philanthropic record is criticized, but that there are people who are not raving maniacs or subnormal idiots who didn't realize this earlier.
In practice churches and philantropic activities should be subjected to a flat rate tax at the highest corporate taxation level.
Although coordinated involvement by the government (Medicaid and Medicare) were the right thing to do and freed the population from the worst afflictions, it also freed the population to multiply at an unsustainable rate, and we haven't been able to stem the birth rate. So these were good, but only half of the solution to the problem. Without solving the other half, population multiplication will continue to outpace resource multiplication and although we've mitigated this with technology, our ability to keep doing so appears to be waning, and we won't be able to sustain the coordinated involvement. What we see is a boom followed by a bust. That's why Medicaid and Medicare are now out of money. It isn't because they were the wrong thing to do. It's because we tried to have our cake and eat it too, while other nations seemed to avoid doing the same thing.
I know it's all the rage to bash Monsanto as the big, evil corporation that causes all the misery in the world. But I feel obligated to point out that it's the research work that companies like Monsanto and ADM do that have given us the crop yields to support 7 billion people on a planet where most people aren't even farmers anymore. Do you really think we could sustain this planet as it is with a bunch of organic backyard gardens and fields of non-GM crops?
So unless a significant portion of the population is willing to commit suicide and another large portion willing to go back to being semi-starving sustenance farmers, we kind of need that evil Monsanto and its ilk.
In a similar vein, sure it's easy to bash big pharma too. But would you rather go back to life before the vaccines that have eradicated childhood diseases that used to kill millions each year? It's easy to talk big when you don't have to watch your child die of whooping cough, of course.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
oh but it shows that you do.
The world is run by scam artists, huslter, and muscelle bound thugs.
Bill Gates did a good job of making sure the third world got computers, if only if they ran windows.
India for example, and now they are stealing our jobs. I wonder for who's profit?
Exactly, this is lobbying & bribery that is being portrayed as charity. He donates a few million for drugs if a country agrees to stop using cheap imported drugs (that violate patents but would end up saving many more lives). Its sickening and immoral.
Medicare running out of money has nothing to do with whether or not it was a good idea. It is running out of money because of the combination of a baby boom and a poor economy. Even if it single handedly made the baby boom possible, it didn't make it necessary, and so it still was not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, statistics suggest that more, not less, government aid results in better systems.
Another way of looking at it is that Medicare isn't designed to be profitable. The amount of money it can get is determined by law makers who decide how much goes to Medicare and how much goes elsewhere, like say, the military. If the military was running out of money, it wouldn't mean having a military is a bad idea, it would mean we're not funding it enough. It's the same with Medicare.
Meanwhile Big Pharma has let farmers stuff farm animals with antibiotics until resistant bacteria (including old killers like tuberculosis) are a major health problem, while failing to develop new antibiotics. I, like many older people, depend on a couple of drugs to remain healthy and reasonably comfortable, but I believe that the drug industry needs supervision and regulation, just like the banks.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One would think, after seeing Bill Gates' TED talk, he would be spending his money in projects that would ultimately help to ... kill most of us.. no kidding. He blatantly said so.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html 3:57 - 4:50
So I didn't have a slashdot account since like 1999 and we get
"The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record."
is this really true, say it aint' so. But I've seen the MS brownshirts on slashdot. on IRC channels dedicated to hackerts, etc....
back in the day being a geek almost exclusively mean being free/open source friendly from one angle or another, what happened?
I have an issue with the way "United States healthcare for 300+ Million people" is compared on the same chart as "Norway healthcare for 5+ Million people".
Let's add country population to the analysis of world health rankings and see how USA compares....
WHO "Ranking" from 2000 of countries with Population greater than 100 Million:
10th Japan 127M
37th USA 313M
61th Mexico 112M
88th Bangladesh 142M
92nd Indonesia 237M
112th India 1,210M
122nd Pakistan 180M
125th Brazil 192M
130th Russia 143M
144th China 1,347M
187th Nigeria 166M
And here are the population rankings for the 10 countries mentioned in the chart the parent linked to.
3rd USA 313M
10th Japan 127M
16th Germany 81M
21st France 65M
22nd UK 62M
23rd Italy 60M
35th Canada 34M
52nd Australia 22M
86th Sweden 9M
118th Norway 5M
This small analysis should temper the hatred towards the US for its healthcare system.... the US is a big country with lots of people and relatively low population density. It's *hard* for big countries with lots of people to take care of the health of their citizens. As expensive as it ends up being, the USA does a reasonably good job while comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia falter.
health ranking and population ranking.
My wife has been financial adviser to several charities and has seen at first hand how the failure to run them like a business wastes the money donated. If people give money to a charity and then find it is being used to give bonuses to executives, pursue goals incompatible with the objects of the charity, or engage in expensive window-dressing, they are rightly upset. A charity should be run like a business to the extent that the overheads should be minimised versus the spend on the object. You are, if I may say so, failing to consider the difference in interests between the donors and the people who actually spend the money.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well if the charity is putting the needs of Glaxosmithkline over their patients, is that terribly bad? Or is that still left-winger thinking?
How does the world survive? Stop allowing relationships like these to continue?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
But that's not like a business at all! How will people survive!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Unless, like the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, the point of your charity is to give away some small part of your investment earnings so that you can avoid paying more in taxes on the whole of your earnings. It is true that these tax shelters are also called "charities" but as Honest Abe once pointed out, if you choose to call a dog's tail a leg, that does not mean you have a dog with five legs. To be blunt, calling a tax avoidance scheme a charity does not make it something other than a tax avoidance scheme, especially when the "good works" contributions are necessary incidental expenses to the main point, which is to use the massive investment portfolio as a big club to beat the industries of interest into the shape you want.
Will
"Inflationary environments" cause the capital to loose value
How can inflation cause capital to set value free? I think you just said the exact opposite of what you meant to say.
Free Martian Whores!
Still, given the general tone of what they are saying, you assume (and they are counting on this) when you look into the sponsors of PBS that they will turn out to be honorable entities. Well, it turns out that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for one, is one of the great scams of all time -- check out the book about HH's life (I don't remember which one it was that I listened to on Audible.com 15 years ago, sorry). HHMI is the Monsanto of medical "foundations".
I call this sort of thing the "got milk" scam. Something that seems reasonable that absolutely everyone is bombarded with turns out to be Class A stupid. Happy rich celebrities with milk mustaches are quite a long way from the reality of milk.
I come here for the love
Much charitable donation comes from moral balckmail (you have to sponsor your friend if they're going to run a marathon to raise money to nuke the gay whales for jesus).
Much also comes from a personal reason to want progress in the direction being collected for. E.g. children and grandchildren of those who died from cancer, and thus who even subconsciously think they are at elevated risk, will donate to the Imperial Cancer Relief Fund, etc. . You may substitute "personal" with "selfish" in the above with little or no change in meaning.
So on the input side, the idea that money is given to charity for purely selfless reasons is naive, it's rarely the case.
However, the egress side you're right - the charity should be focussed on directing that money into the helping of others, not profit-making. Pay yourself a fair wage, and if need be employ professionals who can manage projects and money well, sure, but if the thought "I could retire soon" goes through your mind, you've been milking the charity, and the generosity of those who've been donating.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
First the article is focusing mostly on the way he is using the cash he put in security far from the taxman...
Partnering with all the wrong organisations to f*up the world under guise of philantropy is not "good" no matter where the money comes from.
And of course the money comes from abuse of monopoly powers.
You are right in the fact that a charity worth running is worth running right, but for instance trying toe get a monopoly on a market segment is something most companies try to do, there is no value in a charity to do the same.
I think that when most people say a non-profit should be "run like a business", they really just mean that the organization should be setting concrete goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals and evaluating all the organizations actions as they relate to achieving those goals.
No, that's precisely the kind of talk I was objecting to. For one, it leads to insane reporting requirements, often in situations where every hour and every dollar spend doing actual work saves -or at least changes- lives. For another, it leads to a desire for quantifiable metrics, which mean that a ton of really important aspects of development work get left by the wayside, because they can't be easily measured. For yet another, it turns the conversation into a financial one. That's important, sure. Nobody wants their money to be wasted. But it should not be the only topic discussed when evaluating the success of a non-profit.
All too frequently, though, that's precisely what happens when people try to run a non-profit 'like a business.'
I know it sounds whippy-dippy to say that concrete goals are of secondary interest when the real goal is saving lives, but bear with me. As a good friend of mine who worked in disarmament used to say, it's hard to know if you're doing well when you measure your success in terms of the number of people who didn't die. They don't always show up when you're forced to measure your progress in terms of 'concrete goals.'
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good financial controls are essential. We're in screaming agreement on that count. But that's not nearly as big a part of the conversation as you might think when it comes to measuring success in this kind of work.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
nope you have to spend 5% or risk taxes, but of course if you are gates and are able to strong arm and bribe governments to help your investors, getting 5% on top of a good yearly interest is not too hard.
And not all the interest would need to spent, either. Only enough of the previous year's investment income has to spent to continue to qualify as a tax exempt charity-- the rest of that year's income can, in the case of Bill and Melinda's Foundation, be folded back into the ever increasing investment portfolio. And choosing where to invest all that money can have a significant effect on some industries. Which, if past personal history is any indication, would be of great interest to Mr. Gates. He is still a man with a vision, who would like to change everyone's world into the shape that he thinks is best.
Will
Why is it harder for large countries to fund healthcare than small countries? I don't understand the rationale behind claiming that it does.
GDP per capita is surely a better indication of how good healthcare _should_ be, generally. Low population density can add problems, but countries like Canada and Norway seem to manage ok with this.
All other countries with more than 100m people are much poorer than the US, so a straight comparison is a little worthless, IMO.
Critical analysis from outsiders is a great thing for a foundation, and they don't get enough of it, because most of the people best able to criticize are also lining up for funding.
That said: this shouldn't make you feel bad about Gates as a person. The Gates Foundation has moved (relatively) fast, been (relatively) willing to make unpopular decisions and has been (relatively) willing to risk high profile failure. This is all pretty normal in the tech world, and completely atypical in the philanthropic world.
The limbic "OMG they aren't perfect on the first try" response serves to make foundations progressively more risk averse and slow to act. Less of that please.
You can make an interesting correlation lines between visits of the BMG fundation to emerging countries, and the influence on copyright laws, patents protections, and the type of software these government select (after the visit).
The fundation is only charitable if you believe that charity starts on ones door (preferably on the inside side where you personally live).
It seems many Ayn Rand fans literally had their mind blown away, ... :-)
And they are still searching for it
Ideological whingeing that Bill Gates has found a way to make helping people beneficial to corporations and the wealthy (whom we hate because 99%1%GINI COEFFICIENT PROFIT-MOTIVE WHARRGARBL) instead of just hoping that they would do it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Wake me up when there's evidence that Bill Gates' approach is actually less successful at helping the people it's supposed to help than some other proposed alternative, and that he knows it but doesn't care because he's just a money-grubbing bastard.
Nobody likes a poor thief.
It may (I don't have the data), but it's fucking up sooooo badly in the rest, that it vastly outweighs any good it could possibly be doing. Please, just look at the numbers.
We had a discussion which I think can be relevant to this story.
The edweek series is merely a response to Gates advocating teacher testing in public schools, They should at least mention it in their articles. The summary here sure should have figured it out. While I understand the author's feelings don't necessarily invalidate her argument, not disclosing them adds to the picture. The way the piece takes the worst possible spin on every thing the foundation has done is another clue.
Note to slashdot: This is not investigative journalism....
Fully privatized health care DID work.
It depends entirely on what you mean by "work": If your goal is to protect property rights (which @roman_mir believes is the most important goal, e.g. this thread versus yours truly), then yes it works. If your goal is to minimize premature death caused by lack of proper treatment, then no, it doesn't, because those who can't afford medical care don't get it and die.
I am officially gone from
Maybe Gates deserves this in a (pop culture) karmic sense, but taken by themselves, these criticisms of his philanthropy are just about as absurd as Microsof't FUD about Linux.
No, charity may come without attachments or requirements. Say I want to have a charity to help drug users - I will most certainly require certain behaviors from the recipients of the charity in order to receive benefits. This does not change the fact that I am being charitable and giving away my resources for no personal benefit.
Mr.Gates resources are actually pretty close to not limited. He could easily set enough aside for the foundation that only the interest would ever have to be spent.
Actually, one of the characteristics of Mr. Gates's charity is that this will not happen.
Gates's position is that while this sounds good, what you end up with is a charity that exists to function like a business. And then, like a business (let's take Microsoft for example), you end up with an organization that's weighed down with layers of middle managers, most of whose chief priority is to keep the business (charity) running -- not to achieve its goals, but to protect their own jobs.
Gates rejected that model. Instead his charity has a mandate that it must spend ALL of its money by XYZ date. After that date, the Gates Foundation will be broke, and it will disappear. Personally I admire this decision.
Breakfast served all day!
Odd, most people label me as a left-winger but I don't think there is anything inherently evil about corporations or governments, both are mearly organisational 'tools' that we use to do things that no man can do alone.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The question that I always ask myself when dealing with charities is what is the end goal?
There are certain causes that are temporary. A storm or natural disaster struck an area and they need help to recover. I see that as worthy since the people already had a certain standard of living they achieved and you are helping them to restore it.
But does it really help truly primitive cultures to introduce modern medicine? I don't think so. Their culture has only advanced to support a certain population density. Disease and death are natural results of their culture. Saving lives due to illness does nothing to improve their ability to sustain this population and makes it worse. The aid in these cases should solely be voluntary education programs to improve their culture.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Why is it harder to design a space telescope than a magnifying glass? A space telescope is much more complex. More people + lower population density ==> Higher complexity.
Why are these machines very expensive? Who could afford them if nobody could afford the treatment necessary for the hospitals to recover costs? What about $2,000 hearing aids?
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No it didn't. Fully privatized health care (everywhere, not just in the US) used to be moderately expensive, so only the rich could afford it. That meant lots of people went without.
Most other governments in the western world decided that health care was the kind of critical service that society as a whole should provide and did so. Health care in many places got a bit cheaper due to economies of scale, but more importantly it got a LOT better, measured by the kind of care the average person received. The US got stuck with the worst of both worlds - mostly private health care for the average person, with subsidized care for certain people. Which brings us to today, where US health care is unbelievably expensive (IIRC it's at least twice as expensive as any other major western country), inaccessible to large blocks of the population, and consistently rated poorly in terms of average care received.
Do you want a report supporting government-run health care (i.e. accounting for individual direct spending only) or a report showing that government-run healthcare is severely harmful (i.e. showing tax burdens, more granular differences in health care, and overall economic impact, along with comparisons between general income levels for various countries--Canada and Norway being prime examples, fantastic government health care from two major exporters of oil and one also a major exporter of wood)?
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The common perception among Slashdotters is that while Bill Gates may cause us some professional difficulties, he makes up for it with an exemplary philanthropic record.
That may be the perception of some (especially those who are paid to monitor various discussion boards and rebut any negative comments about Mr. Gates), but I'd be reluctant to say it was a common perception.
imo, Microsoft, under Mr. Gates' direction, raped an industry and its customers, directing excessive profits into his own coffers. And now he is trying to rewrite history so that he is portrayed in a better light by using that stolen money for philanthropic purposes. It does not appear to be working.
It's harder to design the space telescope, but if you've got lots of money, it can be done, and is a much smaller burden than if it has to be done by a country with not as much money.
Your rationalization is silly. The US has a large population it has to care for, but it also has a high GDP. Providing care for 300 million rich people is NOT the same as providing care for 300 million poor people. It's much more like providing care for 5 million rich people.
Are you congratulating yourself that the US ranks well among third world or near third world countries in terms of care delivered (and paying more than anyone else, first or third world, for that care)?
Have you also considered that Norway and Canada are major exporters of oil (Norway is #4 in the world?) and that Canada is a major wood exporter? What does the US export in such size as to be one of the richest per capita countries in the world? I believe we export cheap grain...
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Right. Because the last sub-prime loan speculations treated us so very well.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Initial government involvement on such things should always show a benefit in the near term. It's the long term ramifications though that truly matter. So you've "saved" part of this generation from worrying about "sick homes". You've just placed the financial burden on the next. And b/c it's not free the gov tries to dictate pricing. Talk to some medical friends and find out how many are still accepting Medicare/aid and look at how soon those programs are expected to run out of money.
Call me crazy, but I don't think business should be run like a for-profit business either. That is to say, I don't think people should generally be motivated by, "what's going to generate the most possible profit at the lowest investment over the course of the next quarter."
If you're making a computer OS, then focus on making a kickass computer OS. If you're building hardware, make awesome hardware. Build your business around your business, around doing a good job at the thing your company does, and not around generating short-term profit.
Sure, yes, obviously you need to make a profit. You need to at least break even, or you'll go out of business. But so long as a business is making enough profit to keep their doors open, then in my not-so-humble opinion, they should devote their attention to doing a better job at serving the clients/customers and providing good products, services, and support.
Oh, and yeah, I know. Shareholders, shareholders, bla bla bla. Fuck'em. If we can't run our businesses responsibly because everyone needs to constantly kowtow to the abstract idea of "maximizing investors' profits", then it's time to reevaluate our system of investment.
Even if his charities were genuine (which they are only to a very limited degree, as anybody really looking could see early on), how massive counter-innovative work, his arrogance and incompetence pushed on countless people (I will never, ever, understand how Office users put up with this much pain) is staggering. One lifetime is not enough to make up for so much evil, even if he tried really hard. BG is scum did incredible damage without any redeeming qualities in his professional work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I still don't see the difference. The success of both for-profit and charities can be measured in the same way:
Dollars spent * Efficiency Coefficient = Dollars of revenue
or
Dollars spent * Efficiency Coefficient = Lives saved/improved/etc.
Obviously you can spend too much time looking at metrics when running a charity, which would cause your efficiency to drop. But you can also spend too much time looking at metrics when running a for-profit, which would cause your efficiency to drop. The proper use of metrics is the exact same in both organizations: only spend time with metrics when it improves your bottom line (profit, lives saved, etc).
You talked about how it is difficult to measure success in charities, but it is also very difficult when running a company. Customer satisfaction is a common secondary interest in business, and it is very hard to quantify how that translates into increased profit. Or how about determining how much money an advertising campaign made you. Companies even have scenarios where their efforts are successful even if they lose profit, because they could have lost even more profit. That is no different than measuring success in terms of the number of people who didn't die (measuring by the number of customers you didn't lose).
Your post just sounds like someone who works in the industry, and has a problem when people try to effectively gauge if you are doing your job properly. Just like how teachers don't like to be measured, or programmers for that matter. Some fields are harder to create metrics for than others, but the core principles behind measuring success and failure based on the goals given to you are the same. Regardless of whether those goals are provided by stockholders or philanthropists.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The US isn't a very rich country. Money in the US is loaned into existence--a dollar saved is a dollar owed. Essentially the US will die if we don't have inflation.
Let's talk about education. In the US, student loans have interest. Additionally, we've government-guaranteed student loans, taking all risk off the banks. Thus, the banks (now the Government directly) can loan out endless money without worrying about defaults, since the US Government will levy taxes to pay for it. This gave a situation where students--the least experienced of the bunch, not necessarily financially irresponsible but very much inexperienced--can be told a college education is important, and then billed at rapidly increasing tuition costs, taking loans to cover it.
Let's say in year 2000, $100 billion is loaned at 1%. In year 2001, that $100 billion is owed at $101 billion, 1% interest making the other $1 billion, while $110 billion is loaned. That means that there are now $210 billion in the economy, all debt, but $211 billion owed. Now in year 2002, the people from 2000 are old (we're dealing in Plutonian years, they're long) and pay off their $102 billion in loans (another 1% interest..). Now there's $120 billion loaned in 2002, giving $330 out, $102 billion in, and $231 billion owed... with a pool of $228 billion.
Ok, let's face facts: A third of the money in the economy just vanished.
Salaries can't be sustained like this, because we are now poor. Economic activity decreases, hiring decreases, and defaults start happening. Money evaporates in defaults. The economy is suddenly weaker. Now students become wary of taking student loans, which means much less is loaned but interest keeps accruing. This in turn means less money flowing in the economy (imaginary borrowed money, but money nonetheless), making it even harder to get jobs. It's going to be impossible for the latest generation to pay their debts.
Crash.
The united states' balance sheets are a big mess of interest accruing on loans giving a negative net value. To handle this, we expand our population and take even more loans, and also have inflation (an invisible tax that makes everyone more poor and then allows the poor to demand higher salaries from businesses as a 'cost of living adjustment'). The government of course is in debt out the ass on the same scheme: hold debts, wait for inflation, take new debts and pay off the old debts--the new debt is hopefully similarly sized given inflation, and the old debt has hopefully not accrued enough interest to outpace inflation. Thus at 100% inflation, we hope to borrow $1000, then after inflation borrow $2000 which is equivalent to $1000, and use that to pay off the $1500 of debt + interest and have a net $500 left over to work with. It doesn't work that way, but we try.
Poorest country ever.
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Good mission statement. Let us know how your IPO makes out.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I you require blowjobs, it's not a charity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Is that really a common perception? I mean, the guy does hundreds of billions of dollars of damage to the computer industry, costs who knows how many lives, and the few billion he gives to charity makes it all better?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Next you'll tell us war is good for the economy, so we should have more of what ruins us.
- if I prove you to be 180 degrees wrong, would you write a retraction of this statement??
On more than one occasion I have shown that it is in fact the ideas of morons like Krugman who believe that war is good for economy, I always said that war is destructive to economy. You don't understand first thing about Austrian school of economics, do you? War is detrimental to the economy, even if it necessary because it's a defensive war, it's still detrimental and destructive to the economy.
You can't handle the truth.
It is running out of money because of the combination of a baby boom and a poor economy
- which only shows that Medicare is a ponzi scheme, it's a pyramid without any assets behind it, the money isn't actually there, it's all spent on cold and hot wars, space race, arms race, etc., none of it exists.
Medicare and SS are bankrupt, there are no assets, they depend on an ever increasing population, well Madoff's scam also depended on an ever increasing client base and hope that clients don't start pulling their money out too quickly.
You can't handle the truth.
The population of the U.S. is not growing unsustainably, were it not for immigrants, we'd have a net loss in population. The U.S. stopped producing more than replacement about 1999.
Medicare and Medicaid are running out of money because the population is getting older and poorer, the latter mainly due to the current recession. The former due to the Me Generation finally getting read to pop their clogs.
What the U.S. will be forced to do is reduce benefits either by raising the age limit for Medicare and/or taxing to spend on Medicaid. The new health bill contains quite a few new taxes to pay for the increases they want the States to make in Medicaid. There's no fixing Medicare with increased taxes mainly because the younger generation is too small for the Baby Boom Blob.
Other nations haven't necessarily avoided the problems either. Usually they use some form of rationing. In the U.S., we use the insurance companies and their "death panels" (someone has to determine what gets covered, they just aren't government death panels, the former apparently do not distress Conservative Republicans whereas the latter are presumably the spawn of Satan). Also, the U.S. as allowed the growth of "specialty" medicine to provide extraordinary life styles for the specialists. And the U.S. allows the Court system to rape the doctors in malpractice thus requiring those nice insurance companies to get another paycheck.
So your saying that Ponzi would have been fine had he setup an account full of 'Ponzi' bonds?
SS is a full Ponzi Scheme. The bond scheme part is not an arms length transaction. Any private individual who tried that would be cuffed.
Insurance companies are not allowed to hold their own bonds as reserves, no matter what their credit rating is.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Company sponsored health insurance was actually an outgrowth of WWII in the U.S. Taxes were structured such that if you had it, they took it. So in order to help keep labor peace, companies gave workers health insurance. After the war, there was no turning back.
So in the nice libertarian utopia that was the 20s, if you wanted health insurance, most had to buy it themselves...great for the rich, the poor always get the short end of the stick.
Libertarian principles generally fail at anything that one cannot easily put a price on. Fish stocks in the world's oceans being depleted, the Libertarian principles would have the oceans fished dry before any effort was made to save the fish species from extinction. Libertarianism is morally and ethically bankrupt, that includes Ron Paul and his fellow travelers.
nobody can hold up an example country with fully privatized health care which is being run well
That's only tautologically correct. You will not find a country with fully privatized health care, therefore, you cannot find one whose fully privatized health care is run well.
Another post on the site asked rhetorically: Who elected them? Why do they get to influence government policy? The post was complaining about the Gates Foundation's effort to support school vouchers ( which I too support, as a step toward making education voluntary ), but I would also tend to agree that Bill Gates' or my voice should not be able to drown out Joe Shmoe's.
If corporate donations influence the policies of politicians, then they can influence the policies of charitable foundations. Not only that, but one may imagine a world where humans patronize their employers as workers and other businesses as customers, while those entities in turn patronise politicians and also charitable organizations.
The vast majority of the value the average person has as a patron ends is reified as who they work for and what they buy rather than what they believe would be best for them politically. Vast swathes of idiocy make considered voting largely irrelevant.
People ( me included ) don't know what is best for them anyway, and must rely on the sources of information and opinion around them to make a best guess. Often people look for an attractive style or group and trust the consensus to have been well arrived at. Turn up the heat slowly and people will happily boil like a lobster in a pot.
In the Red States, they elect Cokelicans, in the Blue States, it's the Pepsicrats. There's no need to vote with anything but your wallet. It's a matter of taste preference. Elect Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho ( Brought to you by Carl's Jr )
Privatized X is no more efficient than public X unless there is perfect competition. Monopoly, oligopoly, and imperfect competition is inefficient wrt consumers, which is WHY government is inefficient as it monopolizes force ( hopefully ).
Charities trying to direct the use of taxpayer dollars by contributing is an attempt to purchase the force ( power to collect taxes ) that the governent monopolizes.
Charities ultimately benefit the donors. When the donors are human, mostly the charities provide the service of making the donors feel good. Often the act of Charity is ill considered. Beneficiarys don't control Charities as a rule, when something is free, you take it, even if you don't like the idea of it being given away for free, such as printed ( or borrowed ) money from the government. If you depend on it, you won't want to see it go ( like any other dole ).
Considered Charity of any kind is inherently a rebellious act. It's voluntary unlike paying taxes. The effects can be good or bad for a bystander, or for the one committing the willful act of Charity.
Consider Charity, and the Charity of others.
...
Well, to be fair, it's not just the US government who makes this stuff fail. Countries like, oh, Sweden (or wherever it reputedly works out well financially and effectively, I think this was pretty much the only country that fits the mold) don't have the other socioeconomic problems the US does which exasperate the issue: obesity, obesity, diabetes epidemic, and of course, a health system itself which is merely a shell of a host for the pharmaceutical and "healthcare assisting" companies.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why I hate the Left, lesson 123: No matter what you do, you get complaints. If you do some good, it's not according to THEIR methods, or it's not good enough.
-Styopa
the population is getting older and poorer, the latter mainly due to the current recession.
- nope. The population is becoming poorer not because of a recession, the recession is only a systematic response to the problem of poverty.
Poverty is lack of production, do you understand that? Not lack of money, money (as in paper) you can print. Production is something you can't print.
But in fact the reason for the lack of production is the fake money that is being printed - the inflation is what caused the real savings to move out or disappear, and investment capital is savings, it's not fake money. Investment capital was driven out by inflation and other government policies (regulations, taxes).
In fact recession is only a free market response to the bubble that was inflated with the fake money. Sure, while the bubble was inflating the people FELT like they were wealthy - they could flip homes and extract equity.
It is always funny to read or watch about somebody "losing" a house, where they have 0 equity. Everybody reacts to it as if the house is stolen from them.
Ha!
Nothing could be further from the truth! The money was stolen from the people, whose savings went to finance those ever increasing mortgages over and over, all the refinancing and equity extraction went into the pockets of those so called 'home owners'. Of-course they felt wealthier than then today, than they had crazy credit available with no questions asked, today they actually can no longer buy on credit and are required to repay.
The system destroyed productivity of the people by driving out investment capital, that's what made them poor, not the recession. Recession is only a symptom of the problem, the system attempting to fix the problem.
You can't handle the truth.
The smallpox vaccine, the rabies vaccine and the poliomyelitis vaccine were all developed by small teams
Smallpox:
Edward Jenner. 1796.
Now tell me how you build a large medical research team under eighteenth century conditions and no clearly defined germ theory of disease.
Leslie Collier developed a freeze-drying method to produce a more heat stable smallpox vaccine in the late 1940s. Collier added a key component, peptone, a soluble protein, to the process. This protected the virus, enabling the production of a heat-stable vaccine in powdered form. Previously, smallpox vaccines would become ineffective after 1---2 days at ambient temperature.
The development of his vaccine production method played a large role in enabling the World Health Organization to initiate its global smallpox eradication campaign in 1967.
Smallpox vaccine
150 years of work before the vaccine exists in a form that will make possible the global eradication of the disease.
Rabies:
Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux. 1885.
But that is again only the beginning of the story.
The human diploid cell rabies vaccine (H.D.C.V.) was started in 1967. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines are made using the attenuated Pitman-Moore L503 strain of the virus. Human diploid cell rabies vaccines have been given to more than 1.5 million people as of 2006.
Aside from vaccinating humans, another approach was also developed by vaccinating dogs to prevent the spread of the virus. In 1979 the Van Houweling Research Laboratory of the Silliman University Medical Center in the Philippines developed and produced a dog vaccine that gave a three-year immunity from rabies.
In 1984 researchers at the Wistar Institute developed a recombinant vaccine called V-RG by inserting the glycoprotein gene from rabies into a vaccinia virus. The V-RG vaccine has since been commercialised by Merial under the trademark Raboral. It is harmless to humans and has been shown to be safe for various species of animals that might accidentally encounter it in the wild, including birds (gulls, hawks, and owls).
V-RG has been successfully used in the field in Belgium, France, Germany and the United States to prevent outbreaks of rabies in wildlife. The vaccine is stable under relatively high temperatures and can be delivered orally, making mass vaccination of wildlife possible by putting it in baits.
Rabies vaccine
Polio vaccine
Jonas Salk. 1952.
In 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 a year. Amid this U.S. polio epidemic, millions of dollars were invested in finding and marketing a polio vaccine by commercial interests
There were many, many, teams working on Polio on separate tracks, with clinical trials and production on an unprecedented scale. 1.8 million kids drawn into the trials of the Salk vaccine alone. Polio vaccine
Amen. I read a quote somewhere, that said (paraphrasing) making money is a side effect of a good business, not the goal.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
I have to disagree with your premise here.
Part of the reason why healthcare was leaving "millions of us to get sick, stay sick and die" isn't because government wasn't involved, it's because government had already been involved. Governmental regulations and policy is a big reason why it was even a problem to begin with.
Before spouting things you don't understand, maybe you should look at the relationship role between early healthcare providers and the government. It's quite eye-opening. In short, the people who were considered quacks in their day (and rightfully so, to a large degree) had more lobbying power and preventative care got cast out the door as a result.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's about time someone else woke up and saw the emperor has ALL the clothes.
The Gates Foundation uses it's "donations" to secure a strangle-hold on operations that ensure continued domination of it's financial interests.
I know of this first hand.
As I was completing an extensive Linux thin client roll-out project for Atlanta Public Schools in 2007, the Gates Foundation heard of the work and came rushing in with a "donation" of loads of Microsoft software and the edict "You can all of this for free if you unplug that Linux stuff". The school system caved in once the threat of a BSA audit hit the table and the Linux thin client work was scrapped. APS is back to a less than 30% working student-access PC rate down from the peak of 98% working student access PC using the Linux systems.
Bill Gates supports nothing but his own and friends financial interests.
Bill Gates welcomes you to his New World Order.
Seriously though, this is not just Bill Gate's money. It is other people's donations (to other charities) too. If Gates pushes for a project that costs a billion dollars and his foundation funds $700 million of it, then where does the other $300 million come from? That's other people's money. Of course, this is a simplified example. In reality, the way he influences the investment of world-wide government and charitable funds is much more subtle and varied. I'm not saying he does not do good. My point is that if he is not kept in check, then the harm could greatly outweigh the benefit. Look at the examples in the article.
What? Does the average slashdotter really think that? Oh well, at least make that "Slashdotters \ { me }", since I'm deeply convinced that who's born square can't die round.
I agree.
At this point, I'm tired of people saying, "make it single-payer!" or "make it private!" I'll listen to anyone who has an idea how to improve the healthcare system, and can show that it would actually improve things (saying "Norway does it!" doesn't count).
There are a lot of things we can do that would improve healthcare in the US that aren't controversial, and aren't risky. But people keep treating it like a religious thing (it has to be my way!) so nothing gets done.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The problem is that while you can measure "dollars of revenue" by looking at your bank account, there isn't any simple, or even correct methodology to measure "Lives saved/improved/etc".
Because of that, when you tell a non-profit that it must measure its output to improve its efficiency, in reallity what you are saying is that they should estimate their output by proxy, and optimize to that proxy. As a general rule, every proxy stops working if you keep optimizing after it for more than a couple of cycles.
Welcome out of the world of exact sciences.
Rethinking email
Funny, Google's IPO did quite well, while basicaly saying the same thing.
Of course, they used a more diplomatic language.... But the contents were quite similar.
Rethinking email
One of the problems with these perpetual trusts is that long after the founder is dead they become sinecures for the people running them, making the occasional nominal grant while absorbing most of the trust income in salary.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Exactly. More people need to be talking about this. The corporationification of charities is not a good thing.
Basically Edweek's beef with Bill Gates is that he's advocating tests for teachers in public schools. Another crime is not supporting unions for teachers in other countries.
That makes you public enemy no. 1 in teachers union's eyes.
So basically, it's a union threat - try to hurt us and we WILL spread nonsense FUD against you.
This space for rent.
I've worked in the non-profit world myself, and it's equally a death-knell not to be run like a business at all. For example no organization that fails to watch its cash flow can continue to operate. Believe me an irreversible negative cash flow is a financial fire, just as much in a non-profit as a for-profit. I've seen up front what happens to a non-profit that fails to attend to financial realities, and it is not pretty.
We used to sometimes say that the difference between for-profit and non-profit was that "owner's equity" on the balance sheet was re-labelled "retained earnings". Of course we *knew* that a non-profit has different priorities than a for-profit; and that non-profit and government budgets are run according to stricter principles (spending is *authorized* rather than *estimated*). But the point is that you still have to manage finite resources, coordinate people, set and achieve objectives, etc. So for many of us who were in support positions rather than line positions, being in a non-profit made very little difference in how we did our job, other than we took a lower salary for the privilege of doing good in the world.
In fact, business and non-profit management shares a very significant failure mode that you point out. You take an interesting organization and you give it a leader who is uses it primarily as a vehicle for ego-gratification. The difference is that in the non-profit world you have this co-dependency relationship with donors who equally see the organization as a vehicle for ego-gratification, which sometimes allows brain-dead organization to stumble forward for a few more years.
The difference between non-profit and for-profit management, aside from accounting technicalities, is *ethics*. In the non-profit world you have many more ethical duties, but as in for-profit enterprises, the only ethical issues that get *consistently* attended to are those that outsiders consistently check on. It is rare that anyone attempts to hold a non-profit to account -- there's no political glory for an attorney general to become known as the scourge of charities. So in the non-profit world you need the good fortune to have leaders of exceptional moral character. Unfortunately, a lot of what passes for that is sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If the military was running out of money, it wouldn't mean having a military is a bad idea, it would mean we're not funding it enough. It's the same with Medicare.
The fact that Program X is running out of money certainly does not mean that Program X ipso facto ought to receive more funding.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
If I mister non-billionaire can make money this way, surely Mr.Gates can do better.
Isn't this how the Nobel Prizes are funded? I seem to recall hearing something about Mr Nobel which stated that when he died, he left instructions to use his assets to fund the whole Nobel Prize thing, and that the monetary rewards for those prizes are all derived from the continuing return on investment of those initial funds.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The "right" is never happy either. If you get into specifics, I would not be surprised in the percentage of unhappy left is higher than unhappy right and this would make sense because the political landscape is far greater than the 1 dimensional left and right French seating arrangement of past centuries. Most of the political landscape exists to the left of the so-called small area we refer to as the left. I won't go into the studies claiming that the "right" is more conformist in nature (which for a large portion is also true.)
I am informed and I think; therefore, I am going to take issue more often.
If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people??
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It was supposed to be self-financing, and would have been had 2 things not happened:
1) The lifespan increased significantly beyond projections
2) The birthrate dropped significantly in proportion to the population
I agree that currently, it would be considered a Ponzi scheme. When it was instantiated, it was more like an insurance pool.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Not too old for care, but likely too old for any of the care those tests would indicate.
What exactly is a 70 year old going to do when an EKG shows he needs open heart surgery he will not survive?
Only if you are poor. If you are rich, or super hyper rich, then the trend is the opposite.
As of Bill Gates philanthropy, do you happen to know that because he "invested" 50 billion dollars in his charity organization, he actually pays ZERO taxes. For the stupid and deaf, i will repeat: ZERO. NULL. NONE.
And for the idiots i will say it 3rd time: ZERO.
Gates' wife was on Colbert last week. Why? Damage control, it seems.
And it is a good thing that he can avoid taxes, it should be applauded. For the deaf: plenty of hand waving.
By the way, if you can read through my latest journal entry you just may learn something about what income taxes are.
You can't handle the truth.
I don't support charity, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing it right, as a business. Charity is never sustainable, it's a self defeating enterprise, business has to be at least sustainable.
As to healthcare, here is my take on ACA (and there is something about income taxes there too, you may learn something useful for free, first time in your life)
You can't handle the truth.
I learned how much of a dick you are and how foolish you are. Go ahead and not pay the IRS, let me know how that works out.
If something is really worth doing, it is worth doing it without the profit motive.
If something is really worth doing, it is worth doing it without the profit motive.
- and how would you know that it is 'worth doing' without the profit? Giving things to people without asking for anything, putting them into a position of them being in your debt, enslaving them this way by turning them into dependants, giving them incentives to stay in their predicament for the fear that they would lose that charity if they started relying on themselves.
Yeah, that is what you regard as 'moral' but I see as evil.
We just had a thread on that here.
You can't handle the truth.
There is a missing component:
For people in the US who weren't insured before age 65, how many of them have poor health or have had to cope with chronic conditions because they didn't have coverage or weren't able to afford yearly check-ups even if they did, or who weren't able to afford expensive medications to help moderate known conditions?
Because of this lack of preventative care, many of the people who rely on Medicare after 65 have been in pretty bad shape for decades compared to people who had good insurance and who, even after 65, likely still have good coverage and don't rely as much on Medicare.
We also as a nation have higher rates of obesity and other complicating factors that affect a person's health later on in life (and will affect costs associated with that) than many other (most other?) nations.
The numbers are not simple - there are a huge number of factors that go into determining how effective health efforts are, and anyone who pretends like they know the whole story is almost certainly wrong and pushing an agenda.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
And, I hit post too soon:
Personally I am a huge advocate of universal coverage and expanding the idea of preventative approaches to health.
The thing is, I can't say for sure whether it will be more expensive or less expensive to have universal coverage than it would currently. I have an idea that it would ultimately be less expensive overall simply because the rest of the developed world seems to have figured it out. However, the cost, as long as it isn't going to bankrupt us (and there's no reason to think it would) isn't the main consideration - it's the good thing to do, it's the humane thing to do.
That said, on numbers: as I said the numbers on the effectiveness of various elements of coverage are truly complex, there are some very simple and stark numbers: with our current healthcare system we spend more per capita than any other nation, and yet we have overall poorer metrics for health than most other developed nations. This tells me that there is either something fundamentally wrong with Americans that somehow makes our exceptionally diverse population that comes from all over the world more sickly and expensive or that there is something fundamentally wrong with our healthcare system (or maybe both). I don't think that can be in dispute, except by ideologues.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
When I was in my 20's and before Bill got married, him and Melissa came into the restaurant i was working at. As much as I wanted to go up and say, "Hello Mr. Gates, I pirate your software." I didn't.
Now, 20 some years later, I should of. One of the few regrets in my life will be that.
Be seeing you...
Wow, you are as naive as you are uneducated. Do some research on non-profit scams and tax dodges.
Cheap storage VM.
Note to mods: "flamebait" would be repeating this little gem: "comparable countries like China, Brazil, and Indonesia"
From an outside point of view it is amusing (and somewhat sad) to see the change in the US perception of its role in the world. A world leader comparing itself to Indonesia, ha!
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Off topic: can you tell me where the quote in your sig comes from, if it's not something original you wrote yourself?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Jesus you format your answers poorly, I've given up reading everyone of your posts.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Right. Because the last sub-prime loan speculations treated us so very well.
You can default on a mortgage. You can no longer default on a student loan.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If you can't figure out which corporations put their own profits above *anything else*, you need to do some research. Don't label a corporation "innocent" just because it's not a person. That would be like saying "there's nothing inherently evil about foreclosures" even though the "corporations" involved robo-signed a bunch of illegal foreclosures to get people out of houses.
It's really not a gray area by any stretch.
I'm not saying all corporations or governments are evil, I don't even get where that comes from? I'm saying specific ones are clearly putting profits ahead of society (to their own gain).
Melinda wanted it to be about repairing gate's name. Gate's wanted to expand and use this to expand MS. Now, he wants to take American nuke tech and give it to China.
I wonder as spotlights are shined on gate's dealings, if buffet will continue with the idea of sending his money to gates.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So letting people die in the gutter is moral?
The Foundation is nothing but a stock laundering operation. Under SEC rules, Gates can only convert so much of his stock to cash at certain times. By giving it away to a Foundation run by his father, which can then invest the cash into corporations Gates wants to influence or profit from, he essentially "launders" his stock.
If you look at the Foundation's actual philanthropy, you find it was once threatened by the government by removal of its non-profit status because so little of its assets were actually disbursed.
And further, much of its large headline-grabbing PR initiatives are disbursed over a decade or more, meaning the actual amounts disbursed in a given year are much smaller than the overall award.
It's a scam, like most such foundations. It's done for political, economic and social influence, not actual philanthropy.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
First, think about the context for a second. I'm saying, "fuck shareholders," and your response is "I don't think shareholders will like that!" Well... fuck'em.
But ok, because the thing is I'm not totally serious about saying "fuck'em". It's more that people tend to go off on these rants about how the moral obligation of an officer of a company is to "maximize shareholder profit", and I'm going to an extreme in the other direction to make a point.
The reality is that current officers of companies are not really setting "maximizing shareholder profit" as their highest priority. Some of them really do try to do a good job. My impression is that Steve Jobs, for example, had so much of his ego wrapped up in Apple that he would refuse to release a product that he didn't think was good. I think you could have accountants show him that it would make shareholders a bazillion dollars, and he probably still wouldn't go for it. The end result is that Apple's stock does exceedingly well, but I don't think that was Jobs' primary focus.
Other CEOs are dead-set on collecting huge bonuses by pumping whatever performance numbers get them the bonus. It might mean manipulating the numbers and ruining the company, but they're out for themselves. If they can get 12 consecutive financial quarters where they get huge bonuses, and then the company completely falls apart, that's fine. They've got their golden parachute coming.
So this whole "maximizing shareholder value" is a fiction. It's a scam created by modern-day robber barons that preys on your hopes to get rich by playing the stock market. An investor may invest in order to maximize his own value, but it is not (and generally should not be) the primary goal of a company to maximize their shareholders' value. I believe that businesses would do better-- and therefore shareholders would ultimately do better-- if business leaders made "doing a good job" (in all the various ways that one can do a "good job") the highest priority.
Cons and scams don't require brute force, but that still doesn't make them right.
How does that matter when you have 20% of the population underemployed and below the garnishment threshold?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority prefer you to be poor/subservient/defenseless so that they can promote their hegemony in the pretext of patriotism/democracy.
Casteism
Sure charitable foundations bring tax benefits, sure Microsoft benefited from bogus IP laws. But Gates has provided the world with great goods, not once but twice and you manage to criticize. I'd like to see you do even one percent of the good he did.
Microsoft, with Windows and Office, have enabled massive innovation and wealth creation. But to listen to you, he acquired his wealth by stealing, not by producing goods and services.
Similarly, you question the motives of his charitable efforts. If people don't like his motives, feel free not to accept his donations.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." -- Adam Smith.
In other words, the beauty of voluntary cooperation in civil society is that it produces good results from a group of individuals with diverse and sometimes even questionable motives.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.