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Bill Gates Promotes Vaccine Projects, Swipes At Google
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bill Gates discussed his Foundation's work to eradicate polio and malaria, while suggesting that vaccine programs and similar initiatives to fight disease and poverty will ultimately do much more for the world than technology projects devoted to connecting everybody to the Internet. While Gates professes his belief in the so-called digital revolution, he doesn't think projects such as Google's Internet blimps (designed to transmit WiFi signals over hundreds of miles, bringing Internet to underserved areas in the process) will do the third world nearly as much as good as basic healthcare. "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that [Internet] balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you," he said. "When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there's no website that relieves that." Gates then sharpened his attack on the search-engine giant: "Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down." Google focusing on its core mission is fine, he added, "but the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor." The Microsoft co-founder also has no intention of following Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech entrepreneurs into the realm of space exploration. "I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into.""
Microsoft isn't out saving the poor from malaria, Bill Gates is. Why should Bill Gates expect Google as a corporation to be doing what he's doing as an individual philanthropist, rather than floating internet balloons which holds long-term potential for shareholders?
The Gates foundation follows a very methodological approach to charity.
They calculate how much good you will get per dollar. The gates foundation sees the Cost of curing malaria vs. the Good of curing malaria is a good deal. While Internet balloons cost vs good is much less.
It isn't as much that Internet balloons are a bad idea, however the good produced from it isn't worth the cost.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Bill Gates does not waste his time "attacking" Google - he just answers questions.
-question: "One of Google’s (GOOG) convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems?"
-answer: "When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.
Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor."
The same about the "shooting rockets" thing!
-question: "There are other successful businessmen who are orienting their extracurricular interests around space exploration. Is that interesting to you? Is that worthwhile for humanity?"
-answer: "Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into."
Keep saving the world Bill - God bless you!
Or he's trying to drag other very wealthy people out of their comfort zone.
He doesn't have to do any of this, you know.
Bill Gates is not the philanthropist he pretends to be.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $30 Billion making it the largest philanthropic organization in the world. But one third of that money is invested in companies whose practices run counter to the foundation’s supposed charitable goals and social mission.
In Niger, the Foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars in oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron. These firms have been responsible for much of the pollution causing respiratory problems and other afflictions among the local population.
The Gates Foundation also has investments in sixty-nine of the worst polluting companies in the US and Canada, including Dow Chemical.
It holds investments in pharmaceutical companies whose drugs cost far beyond what most patients around the world can afford and the Foundation often lobbies on behalf of those companies for "Intellectual Property" protections that make obtaining low cost medicines more difficult.
Other companies in the Foundation’s portfolio have been accused of forcing thousands of people to lose their homes, supporting child labor and defrauding and neglecting patients in need of medical care.
In the mean time, Bill Gates' net worth has gone from $50 Billion to $70 Billion over the last 3 years.
Canada tried that process. Look how well it worked for them.
Oh, wait... it actually worked for them. Sorry, nevermind.
What you and everyone else is missing (possible Billy G too) is that all of these problems he's trying to address is caused by dictatorships, despots and other forms of corruption and tyranny. Education and good health will pave way for a future generation to actually change the culture to one that's confident in the ability to demand freedom and democracy. Regardless, the culture must be there for it to happen. Otherwise, we (the West) is just continually pumping water out of a leaky boat. A complete waste of time and money with lives depending on keeping it afloat.
Life is not for the lazy.
None of the above is counter to philanthropy - these are Foundation investments, not Bill's personal portfolio.
Have you also considered that the Foundation disagrees with your viewpoint that these investments have practices running "counter to the foundation's supposed charitable goals and social mission"? Last I checked, it didn't intend to create an egalitarian utopia, where the poor weren't being exploited by the rich, but to solve a few fundamental problems.
If you think some of the Foundation's investments are running counter to its specific goals, rather than more hand-wavy goals about progressive work in Third World nations, go ahead and put your case to the guys who do the cost-benefit analysis.
Every charitable mission can be identified as in some way contributing toward some sort of nastiness, even right down to the fact that no bank makes 100% ethical investments for every person's definition of ethical.
Spoken like a true Canadian, with the apology for the burn at the end.
The UK's healthcare system is ill-managed, under-funded, and constantly in traumatic reform as it's become a political football always kicked around between factions. The waiting lists are long, the wards overcrowded, and the hospitals understaffed.
And yet we still managed to beat the US on every major metric of public health, with the exception of cancer survival rates - and we spend a smaller portion of GDP on it via taxes than the US does via insurance premiums and medical bills.
Even our badly-run mess of a single provider manages to beat the US. Really, America... when you are being beaten in the life expectancy charts by the like of *Cuba*, you really need to admit you are failing.
This is perhaps grossly politically incorrect, but: feeding and/or healing people in poorest parts of the world does nothing good in the long run. It only means they will reproduce more, having even more starving sick children. Promoting local means of drug manufacture could at least have a meaningful effect on their quality of life, but Gates Foundation's gifts come with strings attached: countries that want to get free drugs need to enact "intellectual property" laws that in the long run deprive them of availability of such drugs.
Google's internet baloons, on the other hand, lets those people obtain education. This lets kids escape the deadly circle of starvation and cranking out more kids for local warlords' private armies.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
FFS, can you people bother to RTFA?
Say it with me: RTFA
Once more, all together now: READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE!
He didn't compare himself to Google, he was specifically asked to comment on Google's internet-blimp initiative and whether he thought it would help poorer countries.
Stupid sensationalist summary begets stupid irrelevant comments. Another typical day on Slashdot.....
He should hoard money like Ellison, Brin, Page, and Jobs! That will help the poor!
They may not be helping the poor, but at least the other fellows aren't kicking them while they're down.
The Internet lately has been full of the meme that Gates will be famous centuries from now while Jobs will be forgotten. Here's an alternate scenario: Gates concentrates more and more on wiping out disease and feeding the world. This enables the population to balloon out of all sustainability, wrecking the environment. Then when humanity is like a teeming Petri dish, a pathogen evolves which incurable and virulent and takes out 90% of humans. Gates' name is cursed by the wretched survivors trying to survive on a poisoned, strip-mined Earth.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The Gates Foundation is run as a business, which is why it has been so successful thus far. One side effect of that is that the investing branch of the charity is completely separate from the charity part. So the investors just try to maximize the return on investment of the Foundation, while the charity people figure out how to spend the money.
Dow has what I would argue is an objectively bad record, but...
One of the reasons you can say "very bad" and ackthpt can say "very good" is that "bad" or "good" for Dow usually means 'in comparison to other representitives of the industry'. (I don't claim to know what either you or ackthpt were thinking, beyond what you or he (?) actually posted, but that does seem to be common to many people making such evaluations).
Many people forget that Union Carbide is now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary, but at the time of the Bhopal disaster, was a competing corporation - Dow bought them 17 years later. Do we count that as Dow was at least better than UC, and UC is not as bad now that Dow owns it, or not? Surely we don't blame Bhopal on Dow?
Morton-Thiokol had a magnesium related explosion in 1971 that killed 29 people and injured about 50 others, but the official cause of that one is that the US government gave them some very bad advice about some unusual additional explosive risks, known to the military but not to most civilian chemists, in storing magnesium based flares in extreme bulk, in spaces which didn't have powered venting and detectors, and otherwise even hundreds of flares burning off wouldn't have led to an actual explosion. Probably, M-T has a better environmental record for the same time frame than Dow, but that's if we believe the causes of the M-T 1971 Georgia explosion have been adequately analyzed by the courts.
The chemical industry in general is bad on both the safety and environmental records. Searching for "Chemical Industry Accidents", "Industrial Disasters" or such terms doesn't yield much evidence, but try searching for "Superfund Sites" and see how many of these tie to the major chemical industry players. Even if Dow somehow stood near the top of the pack in their industry (they don't), it's a lousy industry.
Who is John Cabal?