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Bill Gates: Internet Will Not Save the World
quantr points out an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about setting priorities for making a difference in the world. Quoting:
"The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might. Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. 'I certainly love the IT thing,' he says. 'But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.' These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called 'one of the greatest challenges of our generation.' But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: 'As a priority? It's a joke.'"
They guy is right.
Years ago, when I was a zoology major in university, I spent some time working on a study of elephant migration paths in Africa.
It was an eye opening experience. I was staggered by the sheer poverty, the lack of access to safe drinking water and food, the high rates of preventable illness, and the high rate of child deaths. I remember a woman living in Uganda who made "biscuits" for children made with washed dirt simply so they could get something into their stomachs that would reduce the hunger pains and not kill them. I don't give to USA charities since then. I give all my charity dollars to people who are doing outstanding work in areas of disease and poverty.
I have no idea what people struggling to find food would do with the internet. Would it enrich their lives? I don't see how. Would it save them from disease? Would it allow their children greater likelyhood to see their fifth birthday?
Bill Gates has the right idea. I just wish other very rich people had as much sense and willingness to spend their money to help people.
We keep people alive with no hope for the future. What exactly are we saving people from? How is this saving the world?
The goal posts are too wide and too blurry to consider this a real question.
too many people on the planet ... Gates is way off on this one. ... Who completely overlooked the internet when he ran Microsoft.
Unsurprising, coming from Gates
...his IT tech is certainly never going to save the world. Someone with competent software might.
Everyone using Word.
work for $1.80 a day
Ramen sucks, but is better than dirt cakes.
Eradicating disease sounds like a noble pursuit and indeed Nobel prizes have been awarded for efforts there. However the problem with success is that disease is one of natures ways of keeping populations in check. The other natural method of keeping populations in check is predators and we humans have pretty much eliminated most of our natural predators. Were one of the very rare species that dies from old age, a luxury not available to most of the animal kingdom.
Overpopulation is a serious problem in parts of the world and it's only getting far worse. Not only does overpopulation lead to problems like a shortage of food it also leads to increase in pollution of all kinds. It also further strains social services as more and more people need services such as medical care. The net result would be an inevitable surplus of humans a substantial risk of not being able to take care of them.
Unless we can pair getting rid of diseases with far better birth control all were going to do is create a perfect dystopian future.
One Kickstarter campaign could feed a whole village for 30 years.
I'm not saying Gates is necessarily wrong, but it is awfully convenient that the most important issue for the world just happens to be the one his charity is involved in.
I question whether you can even know what will "save the world". Look at risks to human civilization. What is the impact of malaria on the population versus say, an asteroid crashing into our planet? The latter is more catastrophic to the survival of our species than the former, but the probability of occurrence is much lower.
What if the Internet becomes instrumental to the identification of an asteroid threat with sufficient time to mitigate its effects? Will the Internet have 'saved the world'?
Again, I'm not saying that curing disease isn't important, and I applaud Mr. Gates' efforts even if I may question his motives. But I don't think he can possibly know what will and will not "save the world".
This is nothing new. Bill Gates has been totting around this idea for a few months at least. Don't believe me? See this reliable and heavily acredited news article: http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/08/1622238/bill-gates-promotes-vaccine-projects-swipes-at-google
Hey, look at me! My opinion is valid because I found a website that says the same thing.
He's right. Basic literacy and just the Vitamin A to ward off blindness have to come first. How are they going to use the Internet otherwise?
How about not making money out of pushing ineffective malaria vaccines, by pushing 'loans' to developing countries to buy the drugs from pharmaceutical companies that Gates has shares in ..
"Hey, you guys, remember how I said the internet was just a fad, and that's why our MSN was so totally going to fuck that little thing up? Yeah, I'm still saying that. I'm playing some long-game shit here, bitches. The internet won't solve absolutely every problem in the world, and that's all that matters. In eighty or ninety years, it'll prove to be a fad, just like I said. Seriously, I've got to be right again sometime, just like the old days."
Yes, the poverty and hunger is horrific but the long term solution to save the world cannot lie purely with saving the lives of these starving people. Surely it makes more sense to improve education regarding birth control and provide free access to contraception? Contraception is widely rejected on religious grounds, I know, but there are simply too many humans on the planet. Most people toil for most of their lives to try and get one over on other people by earning money from them so they can scrape together enough to pay for a little patch of land to live on. This fierce competition over land and resources isn't going to get better by actively encouraging population expansion. Governments like population expansion because it produces more potential tax payers and voters and pushes up the value of the properties they own. It's not good for the planet though - I'd not even mentioned all the other organisms struggling desperately to compete with humanity. Technology could allow a utopian future for humans where no-one needs to work involuntarily but that will never be possible when the land is overcrowded.
Of course ... 5 billion more facebook accounts, more product for Facebook to sell to advertisers.
The old give it to me first so I can redistribute it to whom I see fit..... and most of us blame governments for doing this. Capitalists do the same thing.
Eliminate unbridled global capitalism and you have a chance at saving the world. MCDonalds is crap nutrition but their food distribution system is fantastic. Eliminate the need for McDs profits and use the food distribution for humanity... you might get somewhere.
I would venture to say that the creation of Linux (and other open source software) has done more to benefit humanity that Windows (or OSX).
The free flow of information—that is, the Great Discussion—is already helping people identify and eliminate the stupidity in their own respective cultures/socities.
Cryptographic technologies are allowing countercultures and new ideas to blossom in protected environments, and decentralize the control of resources, thereby allowing society to evolve more effectively by variation and selection.
The Internet will save the world. The Internet is already saving the world.
He didn't just find himself running a disease charity, so therefore he's claiming that's what's important. He chose to set up a charity for what he felt was the most important problem. You can say he's wrong if you want, sure - but saying it's "convenient" is really silly; you're getting the causality chain completely backwards.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Giving people treatment to diseases is great, but it's a short term solution. What happens in 10 years, if you're not around to give them treatment?
People in underdeveloped countries need to be able to self-sustain themselves. Even if they can't develop a treatment themselves, they should be able to economically support importing it. Education is what's needed for all of this, and the internet is the best tool for education.
So, we need both short term (giving them the treatment they need) and long term (giving them the tools they need to advance).
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Once upon a time this guy said that Internet will never survive and NetBIOS will rule the world
If you give them the Internet, they'll know how the rest of us live.
.
Access to fishing instructions is not access to the means to create tackle or access to a body of water where fish exist to be caught.
This needn't be an either/or proposition -- give people basic sustenance and the means to raise their own lot as time goes on. But without that basic sustenance, you have no foundation on which to build anything, and all the building materials and instructions you provide will go to waste.
The Internet is a tool, subject to the human will and policies.
"eradicating disease" is instead long, constant process that requires multiple tools, innovation and people.
It also already has an objective (saving people's lifes).
So, we are comparing a mere object with no specific objective to a long, evolving process with a specific goals...
Color me unimpressed.
But even "eradicating disease" per se doesn't save the world, first because "the world" is not "the people", and because having the cure doesn't mean that you are willing to distribute it freely or at accessible costs.
So, to sum it up... the right policies will save the world?
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
Mark Zuckerberg's and the like don't give a shit personally about the other people who don't have internet connection and the reasons they are not online. They just want them online for revenue. Get them online, make advertising dollars from them, let them figure out how to survive life.
Find a job you love, and never work a day in your life.
Wow. You ARE a dick. You're whining about contractors working at Microsoft and Windows 8? This is a discussion about helping people with or without Internet access, not your own personal bitch-fest.
I don't respond to AC's.
Imagine having a library in your village that could show you how to build water condensers, new farming techniques, basic chemistry that could improve your quality of life, really ANY piece of information you could conceive of as well as the ability to communicate remotely with other vilalges trying to overcome similar problems at the touch of your hands.
And what about having the money to BUY the supplies to build such things let alone the political stability to keep them.
Knowledge is power but MONEY is even more powerful and having the political stability to implement those plans is even better.
Technology and the Internet is NOT a panacea! When will you people get this?!
What's threatening the species is not disease.
It's the species' behavior. Resulting in climate change
and an unlivable world.
And unresponsibility on the part of the opulent.
I had Ramen for lunch today.... I remember when they were 10 for a dollar.
Why did he re-orient Microsoft towards the Internet starting in the mid 90s?
And as a result of this kind of thinking Gates and other capitalists employ you get this:
"As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface." Chris Hedges
And percolating they are. :)
Bill Gates clearly is thinking intelligently. The silicon valley notion that connectivity and communication is what the world needs more of is so out of touch with reality that it's counter productive. That attitude (that hurling pictures at each other solves the worlds problems) is the reason why I can't even stand short trips to the SF and the surrounding cities.
That the internet was just a fad, and not a priority for Microsoft?
Or at least something to that effect?
I think it was in his book.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It doesn't matter that the contractors harmed aren't poor third-world people. You don't get to excuse mistreating your workers just because your profit from the mistreatment goes to help people who are worse off than the workers you mistreated.
There is plenty of information on the net to build nuclear bombs.
But I can't because the uranium isn't available to me.
Get the analogy?!
Getting all of the 5 billion unconnecteds will certainly go a long way to making their sitation more real for many more people. Right now it seems like people who have a personal experience see things for what they are, but for everyone else it's abstract. A constant connection (the internet) to those people will make it more real for a significantly larger part of the population. Hopefully that makes more people appreciate what they have and allows those that have the resourses get to those that need the help. Maybe, finally, the needy can be empowered with knowledge and resources and be able to pull themselves up from their situation.
Contractors aren't mistreated in any way. They don't get company health insurance. Big deal. They're generally paid much more than "permanent" employees. Regardless, if you can't cut it for whatever reason, then find another line of work. There's no comparison between a IT contractor for MS and a kid starving to death in some shithole in Africa, and anybody delusional enough to think so needs a swift kick in the ass.
I don't respond to AC's.
When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.
And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.
Bruce Perens.
The important part is that when we send food and supplies, part of the supplies should be education tech. Its going to take a very long time to raise the floor in Africa, but tech modestly and intelligently applied will make incredibly widespread progress.
Good-bye
Ok, give me a trophy. Call me a really negative idiot or whatever. But seriously folks over population is an urgent and overwhelming issue. If you want a healthier world, a more employable population, less diseases, wars and poverty then the last thing you want to do is save lives. Saving lives is only valuable when you have firm control over birth rates. For those with very short memories the population bomb is real, it is here now, and it is eating us alive. If you think thing suck now wait until another twenty years passes and the world population doubles again.
The trap is that although science is wonderful it is down right ignorant to assume that breakthrough after breakthrough can prevent a total collapse of our system and a a day of reckoning unlike any cluster of horrors we have ever faced before. And it is coming rather quickly.
neither will you
...saving the world from Humanity?
I want to see him cure a disease for which the cure is protected intellectual property. Funny how his eradicating of a disease is the one where the cure wasn't IPed by the inventor.
Why can't we have both?
In the long long run, nothing will save the world. I'm rather hoping technology will allow us to colonize other worlds so we don't go down with it.
The power of the internet in poor regions is that it could empower poor people to build, fix, grow, and use the things they need.
Big Brother Bill would rather send all your data to the NSA and have controls in place to keep poor people from breeding. Or thinking for themselves.
RMS and Linus will be a historical figures for centuries. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be easily forgotten footnotes.
Build them out of what? Using what tools?
The other anonymous coward most likely refers to survival tricks that start out simplistic using sticks, stones and cloth.
And where do these survival tricks using primitive materials come from? They often come from the indigenous people of the region. For example the technique of filtering water through sand, plant materials, charcoal, etc is thousands of years old. These people don't necessarily need the internet to explain such things, a tribal elder of the region explaining how his grandfather used to purify water, what different plants were used for, etc may do a far better job. Well, at least for the people living in rural areas. For those in urban areas the techniques using primitive materials may not scale up.
Give a man a fish, and don't teach him to fish, and he will eat today and die of hunger tomorrow.
Teach a man to fish, and don't give him a fish, and he will die of hunger today before he has a chance to catch any fish.
Give a man a fish and teach him to fish, and he can eat long enough to figure out this "fishing" thing, and he has a chance in the long-term.
If you're trying to address a problem as deeply entrenched and complex as the rates of relative survival, happiness, food availability, etc. in different nations in the world, it is essentially guaranteed that you will need a many-pronged approach to have a chance of success. There's no need for "charity competition". Sure, there are some things that should be pointed out as having near-zero returns - some kinds of "charitable" efforts actually don't help and might do harm, and those should be rejected. But providing access to food, providing access to medicine, and providing access to education / knowledge / the Internet are all beneficial and all complementary. Bill isn't wrong when he says that a malaria vaccine is important, but why deride other beneficial things?
In particular, it seems very likely that there are multiplicative effects. Suppose that $1 spent on A will improve life by 0.5 while $1 spent on B will improve life by 0.3, and therefore it seems like you should spend all your money on A. But if the systems are correlated, perhaps splitting your dollar between half-A and half-B will improve life by 0.7.
Energy use fundamentally underlies all economic activity, and this is primarily a technological issue. The general ignorance regarding this relationship and what it implies about how we produce energy can theoretically be addressed by the Internet as it is an issue of consciousness.
Gail Tverberg's excellent article on the matter should be carefully considered: http://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Economy/Why-Rising-Energy-Costs-are-Responsible-for-Widespread-Economic-Recession.html
The globe consumes on the order of 17 terawatts, primarily in some form of fossil fuel. Average use per person is around 2 kW, while the United States average is around 10 kW. As increasing energy use is a primary method of reducing poverty, we need to consider raising global per capita use. In order to address both the economy and the climate, all fossil fuel consumption must be eliminated while dramatically lowering the cost of that energy production. Meaningfully lowering the cost of energy requires minimizing land and material use, so energy density is of great significance. The only reasonable candidate for accomplishing this is nuclear power, but as current technology is no where near suitable for this task, so we must look to new technologies. Currently the most promising approach involves something called the molten salt reactor, which has precious little public support despite its potential for addressing both cost and liability. If we are going to responsibly manage the great risk that all of humanity faces, this situation must radically change.
To have some idea of the scale of the challenge that faces us, aiming for 50 terawatts of production by 2050 will merely raise per capita consumption to 5 kW. Today, it is unimaginable that this will be achieved as current efforts are focused on increasing efficiency to mitigate rising costs. This will not solve our problem or help us avert the risk of catastrophe- it only buys us a little time. With the right technological approach, this goal looks within reach, but this will require substantial public support in terms of mindshare and $billions, perhaps 10s of $billions. Current renewable approaches figure in the range of 100s of $trillions and is not remotely feasible for addressing poverty, climate, or any of the other myriad of problems we face including disease.
This truly is an issue of consciousness, and hopefully the Internet will serve its purpose in helping us confront our widespread superstitions and general fear so that we may focus our efforts towards policies that will make a difference. Our intelligence is being challenged and our future is at stake. What will we make of this? Are we going to be content with a hellish existence, or will we rise from this mess with a coordinated effort to address fundamental problems with this experiment at civilization?
A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.
Are you sure you're not mixing up two different stories here? Although trace amounts of Arsenic are common in aquifers that contact certain kinds of alluvial sediments, only a few areas have experienced really high concentrations. In particular, this has happened with shallow tube wells in India and Bangladesh. These types of wells were extremely cheap, and were drilled in the millions starting around the 1970's with UNICEF assistance; I am unaware of any similar large-scale occurrence of contamination in Africa.
On looking at the morbidity and mortality modeling from the WHO link, I wouldn't automatically label it an complete tragedy right away, either. The amount of Cancer and other diseases from arsenic contamination (chronic ingestion, the concentration is not the kind required for acute poisoning) is definitely non-trivial. However, following the implementation of the tube wells, infant mortality dropped by something like half (keeping in mind this that the high starting point of mortality means half of a fairly big number), with substantial reductions in prevalence of waterborne diseases. It is entirely possible that the number of lives (and maybe person-years of life) saved by the wells could outnumber those that were lost.
Actually, I strongly suspect that the person-years of life saved could be greatly more than the number lost, but I can't directly substantiate the possibility with numbers, except to say there is evidence that recent anti-arsenic campaigns have resulted in increases in infant mortality, due to avoidance or loss of well water leading to greater use of microbially contaminated water supplies.
Obviously, it would be great to have both clean water with no arsenic at all. Possible with deeper but more expensive wells that have been gradually replacing the older wells (it sounds like other strategies like filtration and rain-water storage have sustainability problems when implemented out in the field), but I doubt UNICEF or similar charitable organizations can get the money they need these days to replace them all at a sweep.
Technology is the practical application of science (engineering), so the vaccines that he is using were once the height of technology. These hopeless billions that he so wants to save wouldn't even though exist if it wasn't for farming and industrial revolutions born of advances in technology. My point is technology is the only solution to disease and starvation (possibly genocide too). Solving that problem alone will just lead to a bigger boom in population in the third world and lead right back to starvation.
And that's why I'm switching from Databases to Civil and Environmental Engineering
I went to that Kiva site after seeing ads all over Hulu and was, frankly, quite appalled at the usury rates that the local loan sharks are charging when lending the money you donate.
I like the idea of making it a loan rather than a hand-out, but they should be charging normal interest rates, or even no interest. They don't need to cover the risk cost because there isn't any - that's the whole point of donating money, you expect to lose it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Before he tell others to spend money on "helping" the world he should start. Using that entire 30+billion to truly help the world rather then just sprinkling a few million here and there with strings attached. I have seen more people with very little give away more then I have ever seen him or his foundation ever do. I worked with a group trying to get funding for micro-loans to help people create environments to bring people up out of the dregs of there life. We tried to get even a small help from Gates foundation but the strings required were a joke, we would have ended up paying them more then we would ever have received.
So many seem not to care that the top 1% have over 40% of the wealth, you get the world you deserve.
()-()
Your ignoring the scale of suffering caused by disease in places like Africa and just how staggering an impact it is happening.
Take a place like Swaziland. 1/4 of the population has HIV, is too poor for triple cocktail treatment and are thus dying. 110,000 children are orphaned as a result. On top of that, 58% of the population requires treatment for pneumonia each year, and nearly 60% requiring rehydration for diarea (And we're not talking having a sore gut from a cold, but conditions that are often fatal).
Will education help them? Well swaziland has around 90% literacy rate, and an exceptionally good school enrollment rate which is comparable with even western countries. Something is failing here that *isnt* education.
The last major war Swaziland was involved in was nearly a century ago, and its monarchy is widely held to be benevolant and not particularly corrupt or malicious. Its economy however is , like many post-colonial countries, a bit of a basket case and income disparity is utterly terrible, with a fabulously rich ruling class and the majority of its population surviving on about $1.50 a day. Despite being well educated, simple education alone appears not to be fixing this.
The simple fact is a massive chunk of the productive workforce is incapacitated and dying placing enormous economic pressures on those who do work, and this causes terrible poverty, compounded of course by the terrible inequality that was foisted on the country from its legacy as a british colony.
Bracketing aside the troubling questions of wealth distribution, it is clear that swaziland is doomed without a very serious improvement in health care. HIV does not have to be a death sentence anymore when treated by modern anti-virals. We can't cure it yet, but we can make it something that doesn't kill. A westerner in a UHC country (to ensure poverty doesnt remove access to medicine) with HIV can live as long as someone without HIV as long as they continue to take the required medicines and lives a generally healthy lifestyle. Malaria is a disease that stalks the poor (when was the last time you heard of a malaria outbreak in europe, australia or the united states?) and can be trivially contained if the money is spent as it should. The remaining conditions can be contained and cured with simple antibiotics and ensuring clean water and hygenic waste disposal.
There is no reason Swasiland should be any poorer than a european country. But like many african countries, its problems revolve around universal access to healthcare, wealth disparity and equitable access to clean water and waste disposal. Education, and by this I mean the internet too, does not factor here. Whats the point of reading about the fabulous lives of the westerners whilst dying of AIDS, malaria and diahrea.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
worth every penny.
The internet can save the world, and is doing so right now.
Consider the widespread awakening of people, organizations and communities to the details and orchestrations of world government.
The psycho paths who have deliberately destroyed countless civilizations in the past, no longer can destroy in complete secrecy.
If we lose this civilization, it will be because most people want it too happen.
The destruction of obsolescence of such concepts of freedom, liberty and personal virtue is every where in the news: from bankers stealing whole countries savings and pensions like they did in Greece, to the criminal scientists endorsing crap science in the name of making trillions in carbon credits in the whole scheme of man made global warming and other such nonsense.
The internet will save the world and if it does not, it will be because everyone sees the injustice being done and decided not to do anything about it.
If that happens I say good riddens to the human race. It was evil to begin with, and when it died it got rid of a lot of evil in the world to make for a better place.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Bill Gates hates the internet. He can't make money from it, and costs him money. He can't run is proprietary crap on it (and yes you brain dead mickeysoft fanbois, he *did* try, and it failed miserably). A shot paid for by Bill might save your life (or not). Education that can help you every day of your life (what to eat/not eat), how to grow more food, get clean water, can improve your life more than the shot. Good food and clean water beats a shot. Bill doesn't get that. Bill has always been most interested in what Bill wants. If his customers can benefit or not, is their problem.
I'm not saying Gates is necessarily wrong, but it is awfully convenient that the most important issue for the world just happens to be the one his charity is involved in.
What a moronic statement, it isn't convenient at all. He picked what he thought was the most important issue facing the world and created his charity around addressing that, how the fuck is that "convenient".
"Saving the world" involves increasing mortality rates, not decreasing it. Bill should know better.
He is so transparent. He want to "save the world" through so-called cures made by companies that he owns stock in. That's called advertising, not charity.
He's already sitting on a job-destroying pile of money, and this is what he does with it. He uses it to accumulate even more obscene wealth and destroy the careers of millions more people. How much more of this bullshit are we going to take?
The Earth is overpopulated. That's the fundamental problem we all face. Eradicating disease is a worthy aim, but will only make this underlying problem worse. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't eradicate disease, but it must be coupled with real action on overpopulation. Even thinking about the problem would be a start.
Bill Gates' "philanthropy" may have saved 100's of thousands of lives but his and others warped view of "Eye Pee" and his ethically and morally bankrupt brand of capitalism has indirectly contributed to the deaths of millions. Malaria is irradicated with good nutrition, health, insect reppellant, a secure place to sleep, In other words raise the standards of living for the third world and less people die. Simple really. Problem Gates probably has is a stronger third world will mean less reliance on and therefor much less money, for robber barons like him. Is Gates or any ilk similar to him investing in discovering/developing a source for nearly free energy? Nope. And if he was you can be sure he would be trying to squeeze and angle( remember morally and ethically bankrupt) the maximum profit from "His" "Eye Pee". The quicker he passes ala "Steve Jobs" the better the world will be.
Greed, that's the great disease that is making most damage to our world.
I'm not disputing your comments. However, what gives me second thoughts about the efforts of the Gates foundation is that they don't try to promote self-sufficiency in the target areas they're supposedly trying to help. For example, instead of simply trying to donate medicine why don't they try to set up labs that will manufacture the medicine within the country that needs it. It seems that even in his charity work Bill Gates has adopted the mindset of a proprietary software vendor, where even if a product is given away free, you're not given too much of a control over how it is to be used.
Has Bill really thought out his quest to it's logical conclusion? It's great if we can save lives and cure malaria, but then what? Who's going to feed these millions/billions of mouths? Aren't we just going to save them from disease only to have them die from starvation?
Is this kinda like when Bill Gates said the internet will not change the world?
Much of your post requires citation. Who is the joke? Well ... you of course.
To really alleviate global poverty, every https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world nation Currency should be pegged to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opec Oil for 4 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Casteism
A great idea bot if we care about childen suffering ve also need to make contraception easily available. If a man fathers 13 kids of which he cannot properly take care of,feed, a vaccine Malaria is of much help.
Translation: What I am doing is right, and whateveryone else is doing is wrong.
I'd say he's slightly biased. I guess this is payback for people not liking him, or his products, or his predatory practices
A few years back, just having a PC in each home was a generation challenge. Indeed generation challenges are nothing but that...a challenge.
Solving the world's problems is another thing. Internet access will not solve those issues like access to food, drinking water, health care and so on..
I happen to agree with Gates (not my greatest hero) on this one. This is not a world challenge to save humanity but Zuckerberg's challenge in pursue of an increase in advertising revenue for Facebook.
I don't think that either one is doing much for humanity, they are doing charity work, yes. But follow the money and you'll see the real intention behind this so called philanthropy.
They're generally paid much more than "permanent" employees.
That's absolute pure fragrant BULLshit. Microsoft itself has admitted this fact under oath.
Regardless, if you can't cut it for whatever reason, then find another line of work.
If they can't cut it, then why did Microsoft hire them?
There's no comparison between a IT contractor for MS and a kid starving to death in some shithole in Africa,
Both are caused by the same kind of thinking. That's what makes poverty possible, asshole.