Bill Gates To Stanford Grads: Don't (Only) Focus On Profit

jfruh (300774) writes "The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems."

Comments

Also focus on

[Anonymous Coward]

Destroying your enemies.

Re:Also focus on

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You don't have to "destroy" them, just "cut off their air supply".

Re:Also focus on

[peragrin]

and pick their pockets.

Bonus points for letting them live long enough to get all the change out of their pockets.

Re:Also focus on

[binarylarry]

As well as hearing the lamentation of their women.

Re:Also focus on

[jelizondo]

Typical 20th century thinking.

Bill got to be one of the richest men in the world by understanding that you do not "destroy" your enemies, you embrace them!

Re:Also focus on

[Cryacin]

you embrace them!

Group bear hug!

Re:Also focus on

[Artifakt]

I came to this thread with one mod point left, and here you are, practically begging for it - so no, you can't have it, i'm gonna save it and come back to mod myself -1 off topic instead. And Steven Zoltan Brust is fantastic.

Re:Also focus on

[CodeBuster]

I am totally fine with simply hearing the lamentations of their women.

First you must crush your enemies and see them driven before you, then you can hear the lamentations of their women.

Re:Also focus on

[CodeBuster]

Bill got to be one of the richest men in the world by understanding that you do not "destroy" your enemies, you embrace them!

To quote DS9:

Gul Dukat: A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness.

Weyoun: Then you kill them?

Gul Dukat: ...Only if it's necessary.

Re:Also focus on

[davester666]

don't forget about the lamentations of the women and children...

Re:Also focus on

[davester666]

Oh, is that a knife in your back? How did that get there?

Re:Also focus on

[davethomask]

uh hu hu.

Re:Also focus on

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny? This is the only insightful thing said on this thread so far.

Article could read:

Bill Gates gives commencement speech at Stanford urging new innovators not to compete with him or upset the established industry.

If these folks focus on changing the world and giving away their innovations they will be all the easier to acquire by the exiting infrastructure-rich cabals. Then changing the world suddenly converts into getting our ROI out of a new profit center.

</cynicism>

Re:Also focus on

[tendrousbeastie]

I've just modded the parent binarylarry +1 funny, and modded you down -1 off topic.

Then I posted this message, nullifying both of them.

Which I think brings balance back to the universe.

Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems

That's because it causes most of them.

Re:Water is wet

[rubycodez]

bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way

Re:Water is wet

[blue trane]

Kleinrock and others have explicitly said that economic gain was not a motivation for the beginnings of the internet. And Berners-Lee wasn't interested in profiting from the World Wide Web. How much did Mendel profit from his theory of inheritance? Why didn't Pasteur pursue profits instead of basic research? Were Watson and Crick thinking of money when they thought of the double helix structure of DNA?

Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.

Re:Water is wet

[machineghost]

While I agree in part with what you wrote the reality is none of the value of those inventions would have been realized without profit. Hell, if someone hadn't made a profit and donated it to Mendel's monastary he would have died in the street instead of inventing genetics.

Re:Water is wet

[davydagger]

thats somewhat bullshit. Scientists do science for the sake of science.

The problem is that we treat scientists as freaks and wierdos so we kinda get to ignore their wants and needs.

Re:Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny!

I hope you include in that "dramatic increase in human life and health from profit-seeking", the number of dead and wounded as a result of wars stemming from quest for power and profit, and from profit-seeking from developing more effective weapons and other killing mechanisms, like chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in the last 500 years. Or do you simply hide facts from your consciousness and discount all the negatives, the same as Bill Gates did?

Re:Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I work in imaging research, trying to bring about medical imaging progress, with hopefully useful results. I'm not at all motivated by profit. I just want enough money not to starve and enough funding to pay my students and equipment. In the end, in the best possible scenario, it's a zero-sum game.

Re:Water is wet

[meerling]

It can very easily be argued that the greatest advancements in the sciences, especially in medicine, have been the result of researchers and inventors seeking to solve problems and diseases that plague humanity and that the subsequent commercialization of those discoveries and creations were not their primary motives and in numerous documented cases antithetical to their desires. (Edison was not one of these.)

Re:Water is wet

[ArmoredDragon]

The problem is you have to compare the internet before it was profit driven against after it was profit driven. Sure, the TCP/IP suite is good and all, but without an underlying infrastructure it's kind of useless. That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.

A few things to take into consideration:

1) The original e-mail SMTP implementation was designed under the assumption that it could very well take multiple days to deliver an email. This is because the internet was mostly volunteer driven, and some links weren't open until the volunteers took the time to make them available. (Otherwise why even have SMTP? Why not just send your email directly from your client to the destination server? Keep in mind the spam problem didn't exist back then, so there were no anti-spam motivations for doing so, rather it was purely due to what was a discontiguous internet.) It wasn't until there was a profit motive of an ISP to provide "always on" peering arrangements.

2) Recall numerous times when those behind it said that the original design was never intended to be as big as it is now. That is because before there was big money to be made, most WAN links were pretty damn slow. Where we now have Frame Relay and ATM, there used to be X.25

3) Completely state of the art WAN equipment is hugely profit driven. HFC traders are well known to have some of the fastest and by far the most reliable links that they (not governments, not nonprofits or volunteers) commissioned to be built, which they also lease to other third parties (although these third parties get lower priority QoS, they still benefit from overall faster communication than had they used other links.) Some of the most state of the art networking equipment is also profit driven (like them or not, Cisco has done a HUGE service to the internet with all of the contributions they've made to networking on well more than one occasion, and they're very profit driven. They also provide emergency volunteer services as well though, see Cisco's TacOps team.)

4) You think the Emerald Express transatlantic cable would be under construction by purely volunteers? Look at the kind of work required to build that.

Re:Water is wet

[Uecker]

The dramatic increase in human life an health of the last 500 years has been driven by the ingenuity and hard work of many people. Many of them have not been motivated by profit.

Re:Water is wet

[davydagger]

>Many scientist want to do science for the sake of science but the vast majority of them do it for someone profit else they wouldn't have funding. Even gov funding is largely about profits and no matter how you slice it, the funding came from profits somewheee in time.

thats right, no one gives a damn about those fucking scientists, its all about the people paying for their lab. They get paid like fucking crap. There was even an article on the hacker news about it. I wouldn't be damn suprised if the people who invent these fancy cancer drugs would ever be able to afford them if they should need them.

Here is a hint, those scientists would be doing science in any system, without monetary reward.

>Now that gates is older, he probably cares about more. He probably understands there is more to life than yourself.

unbased speculation. He cares about his damn image. He knows its his fucking face on the borg icon. Like gangsters buying their in with god with huge gold crosses and giant donations to the church.

Lets also be honest, who's getting the most credit for curing malaria in africa. Is it the lab technicians that synthesize the drug? Is it the scientists who made the breakthroughs? Is it even the hardworking men who load it on pallets?

No. None of us even know their fucking names.

Its Bill Gates.

Bill Gates is a living example, of what is the American ethos. You make money, anyway you can get it, without a care to anything besides money. Once you make your billions, if you still feel bad about being a capitalist, or not working for charity, give some money to humanitarian aid, go buy some good will. Thats the story Bill Gates leaves us. No amount of bullshit speculation, hyperbole, or storytelling will change that.

Re:Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing "profit" with "money".

St. Thomas's Abbey was almost certainly paid for by the tithes of working people. You have to have a pretty twisted view of the world to consider a peasant's meager wages to be "profit".

Re:Water is wet

[Kjella]

bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking.

Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest, where Marx saw machines and factories it's now software and data centers that generate billions while the jobs are outsourced to the cheapest corners of the earth.

Re:Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are a true believer? In the face of evidence to the contrary, you maintain your beliefs.

Re:Water is wet

[drinkypoo]

Volunteer driven? Is this true?

After the military involvement it was mostly educational involvement.

Re:Water is wet

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it came because of antibiotics and germ theory, municipal sewage treatment and potable water supply.

Re:Water is wet

[Immerman]

If you work for money you have my sympathies, perhaps you should re-evaluate your assumptions.

There is the option, especially prevalent within academia, of working for your pleasure. You still make money, and have to deal with financing, but it's not the point - if you weren't getting pay you'd make money elsewhere and then want to do the same work out of your own pocket as a hobby. Because the work is it's own reward.

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it. Make your choices carefully. Or at least consciously. Don't let yourself become a cogg in the machine whose life has been optimized to serve the economy.

Re:Water is wet

[Krishnoid]

Plus you have to repay a Stanford education's worth of student loans before you can start thinking about 'profit'.

Re:Water is wet

[tlambert]

Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.

Actually Celera and the HGP out of Santa Cruz agreed to concurrent publication in February 2001. It's widely acknowledged, however, that Celera's efforts gave the public effort a much needed "kick in the ass", and it's also widely acknowledged that Celera got there first, but didn't publish because they were attempting to use the technicality of the "Bermuda Agreement" to patent a number of sequences, which can't be done in many countries, following publication. The patent must precede publication in the EU and many other areas of the world, or it is considered "public domain", whereas you have a year following publication to patent in the U.S. - but then it only applies to the U.S. and a few dozen other countries, and everywhere else, it's Public Domain.

Re:Water is wet

[zippthorne]

Here is wiki entry about a citation. The Wealth of Nations.

Re:Water is wet

[zippthorne]

IIRC, Human Genome Project didn't really kick it into gear until there was a risk that someone else would actually finish the project, though.

Re:Water is wet

[rolfwind]

But the devices that allows everyone to use those devices came into being and became cheaper through the pursuit of profit.

Face it, a lot of people will say things like "Everyone should have clean water". But the idealistic goals are the ones that require the most effort where the less hardcore idealists become lazy and drop out.

Profit/capitalism is just someone putting their money where their mouth is, and allowing someone else to fulfill the drudge work for direct benefit. And yes, capitalism needs to be fully regulated so it isn't gamed into another system as individual successful players are wont to do.

Re:Water is wet

[fellip_nectar]

Just because the inventors did not pursue financial gain, it does not mean those who funded their research didn't.

Re:Water is wet

[rtb61]

What is worse, with lot's of profit you get to buy the solutions you want, regardless of how many more problems your solutions cause other people.

Just to be clear profit solves no problem, the creative thinking of many minds thoughtfully applied by many hands, solves problems. With lots of profit you just get to take credit for it all, without doing much of anything, neither thinking of the solutions nor applying them, just paying for them and pretending you did everything and reinforcing it by paying PR=B$ types to spread the manure.

Re:Water is wet

[TapeCutter]

Don't forget that the people who invented the MRI, CAT-Scan, etc. are motivated by profits.

You and I have no idea what these people were motivated by, the fact they were paid does not imply that money was their motivation. Making a profit and being motivated by profit are two completely different things to a non-sociopathic capitalist. And yes it is possible to be motivated by profit and accidently do something useful for society.

Re:Water is wet

[Tom]

That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.

Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?

The infrastructure is not the problem, and running the infrastructure commercially is not causing the Internet to become filled with ads and scams.

Re:Water is wet

[sumdumass]

I'm not sure what you said that qas different than what i said other than you obviously are upset over it.

Here are some more interesting facts. The majority of tax payers who fund government spondored cancer research cannot afford the drugs their tax dollars helped produce.

Also, the term probably when prefacing motivation of someone else is speculation. It is based in current actions of the person which lwad to the speculaton. So lets take a deep breath, now another, and agree that we agree. I'm just not angry or otherwise emotional about it.

Re:Water is wet

[zarlino]

The pursuit of profit is inherent to money and makes it work. The pursuit of profit has driven science and technology and changed the world largely for the better. Yes it has it's own problems: crises, wars and pollution.

Re:Water is wet

[lgw]

There is the option, especially prevalent within academia, of working for your pleasure.

If your salary is paid from the taxes of those of us who do work for money, maybe don't bite the hand that feeds you?

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness

Different people have different utility curves. When someone acts in a way that's sub-optimal according to your values, it's rude (but normal in academia) to assume they're stupid instead of simply having different values.

Re:Water is wet

[EzInKy]

If it weren't for proiteers, you might have achieved you goal already.

Re:Water is wet

[EzInKy]

So removing the benefits of making a profit would do away with scientists seeking to make a profit? I guess that makes sense, but how could it be accomplished? Even MickeyD's won't poney up a burger if you don't have coin.

Re:Water is wet

[kilfarsnar]

bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way

Well then, we're right screwed. Profit seeking can indeed bring about benefits aside from the profit, but they are by-products. When profit is the primary goal, other things will be sacrificed to it. Examples abound of companies making inferior products or putting people in danger in order to maximize profit. The financial sector is wildly profitable, but I'm hard pressed to find the benefit of their activities to anyone but themselves.

I'm not completely disagreeing with you. Our capabilities and standards of living certainly increased after the industrial revolution. But it's kind of like saying that religion is great because it helps a lot of poor people, while ignoring the wars and bigotry it has engendered. It's a mixed bag. And philosophically, I'm not sure that placing our hope for the future on selfishness and greed is the wisest move.

Re:Water is wet

[kilfarsnar]

In my career so far I have been involved in a couple of projects worth several hundreds of millions of dollars, that resulted in the company I worked with to see its valuation multiplied by a factor of about ten over the course of a couple of years. The company was bought resulting in a massive profit for the CEO and immediate associates. I only collected my regular salary. Good for them, they took all the risks, I only did my job.

I admire your attitude. I'd be pissed. If they took risks in running the company, you took a risk by working for them. I assume it was possible that the company would fail and you wouldn't be paid. I've seen it before that everyone in a small company is working hard to make it successful. Once that success is realized and the company is being sold, only the folks in the room when the contract is signed get any money. It isn't always that way of course. But it seems most of the time the profit is rather narrowly distributed.

Re:Water is wet

[rubycodez]

not relevant, you ISP seeks profit. so did the makers of your computers and so did your phone or cable company

Re:Water is wet

[rubycodez]

you are funny, the lives saved and years added far outweigh the sum of all wars

Re:Water is wet

[rubycodez]

nonsense, profit being the primary goal is what has driven civilization and progress

Re:Water is wet

[kilfarsnar]

wow, you mean Bill Gates is wrong? How could that be, he is always right. Or is he?

He's not wrong. It's just really easy to tell people not to pursue only profit when you're one of the richest people in the world.

Re:Water is wet

[rubycodez]

you are funny, most scientists work for corporations. most the rest are funded by those big businesses known as schools.

Re:Water is wet

[kilfarsnar]

The countries that embraced capitalism are far better off than the ones that haven't.

And the social democracies are even better off that the capitalist countries.

Re:Water is wet

[kilfarsnar]

nonsense, profit being the primary goal is what has driven civilization and progress

Funny, I thought it was the steam engine.

Re:Water is wet

[Immerman]

The problem is that very *very* many people believe that having more money will make them happier - it's a belief that our culture instills in many subtle ways the entire time you're growing up, and gets reinforced by virtually every piece of advertising we see - a media form largely dedicated to generating a previously non-existent or negligible desire, with the implicit promise that sating that desire by giving Company X your money for their product/service will make you happier.

And it's completely false, as evidenced by a huge amount of psychological research around the world. Once you have shelter and plenty of food it doesn't actually have much impact on happiness whether you're eating beans and rice in a comfortable hovel or caviar in a mansion - other factors that have very little to do with money become the dominant factors in your happiness: things like close friendships, job satisfaction, and stress levels. All things that an unpleasant job can have serious negative impacts on. Income becomes relevant to happiness only insofar as your income compares to your peers - so long as you're not considerably less wealthy than your friends your income will have negligible impact on your happiness.

The evidences shows that we're virtually all really bad about judging beforehand what will make us happy, and rarely question our underlying assumptions. Meanwhile our culture is saturated with indoctrinating influences that tell a story soundly disproven by science. In such an environment I believe we have an ethical duty to point out the lies we're being told about ourselves, and encourage people to ask themselves what really matters in their life: what do you already do, today, that makes you happy, and why are you neglecting that in order to make more money to buy things that almost certainly won't make you the slightest bit happier after the initial rush of acquisition has passed?

If even one person reads these posts and decides they should spend a little more time with their friends and family appreciating the simple joys in life, instead of working overtime at a job they dislike so they can buy a nicer car/bigger house/newer TV/etc, then the total amount of happiness in the world is increased. And I for one think that's a worthy cause to fight for.

Re:Water is wet

[ArmoredDragon]

Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?

I imagine that 19 billion wouldn't even build one. I mentioned the Emerald Express, which I think is costing some 1 billion dollars, and this cable only goes from the USA to Europe. What about the literally hundreds of other ones that span longer distances?

The infrastructure is not the problem

It very much is. Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints? That said, you think services like Netflix or Youtube can just transmit bits using pixie dust? Or how about this...Forget about the pipes for a minute, hell even forget about the routers and switches (forgetting even that all of that combined will outpace your 19 billion figure several fold.) Think about the logistics of deploying the sheer volume of that content to be mirrored so that it can be quickly accessed from every major city in the world.

Remember; every device connected to the internet is part of the internet. That also (and especially) includes the content servers. Even the cheaper cloud deployments I've seen to serve more than 1,000 users (a very low figure) tend to cost in the $50k range. I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.

Re:Water is wet

[Tom]

I think Google (or somebody) recently built a datacenter in Europe that cost some 85 billion Euros alone; far outpacing your 19 billion figure.

I think you mis-remember. I did a quick Googling and by that figure, Google spent 7.2 billion on all of its datacenters, globally, in 2013. I would be very surprised if they'd spend 12 times their annual budget on one datacenter all of a sudden. All the news I could find at a glance about datacenter construction was on expanding existing ones and it was usually in the range of 100-250 million.

"Emeral Express" is said to cost 300m, according to this article, not 1 billion.

Think about this for a second: What good is having an internet if there's nothing useful to be found at the endpoints?

Think about this for a second: How much less infrastructure would we need if we wouldn't spend 90% of SMTP traffic on spam and half of HTTP traffic on advertisement and tracking?

Re:Water is wet

[ArmoredDragon]

I think you mis-remember.

Perhaps. So I'll tell you what, instead of going off of my memory I'll simply play a trump card that renders your entire argument moot. I'm not sure what in the hell would possess you to think that 19 billion could ever come close to rebuilding the entire global internet infrastructure, but I'll tell you this: It costs some 5 times that amount minimum each year just to keep ISPs running, forget about rebuilding it from scratch, and forget about the non-ISP infrastructure (which by far does not make up the whole internet.) The US ISP figure alone is already well known and proven to cost more than your figure every year, at any rate.

www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/03/14/how-much-does-the-internet-cost-to-run/

Think about this for a second: How much less infrastructure would we need if we wouldn't spend 90% of SMTP traffic on spam and half of HTTP traffic on advertisement and tracking?

Probably very little, if any at all. Given your existing belief that 19 billion could rebuild the internet (or even rebuild it multiple times as you ambiguously implied,) I don't believe you can even fathom what you're talking about here. Believe it or not, SMTP and web traffic is gzip compressed. Yes, you read that right, it is quite literally the same algorithm as the gzip binary found in a *nix environment. Gzip compresses that kind of traffic especially well (here's a technical exercise for you: run wireshark and analyze your web traffic as you send and receive it across the wire.) Another algorithm called deflate is also commonly used. Not only that, but it only makes up a very tiny portion of the overall internet traffic.

In fact, web traffic alone makes up perhaps 16% of the global internet's bandwidth usage. SMTP traffic is so small that it actually makes up for less than a single percent.

https://www.sandvine.com/downl...

As for your advertising? These come in the form of cookies that typically sit in the range of tens to hundreds of bytes. That is a very tiny portion of web traffic.

I'm not sure what kind of communist revolution you're trying to inspire here, but these notions about the internet having no commercial dependence, or that advertising is hogging the pipes and possibly ruining the internet (quite the opposite in fact) are heavily heavily flawed.

Thank you, and perhaps consider paying cuba, north korea, or venezuela a visit before you start that revolution, I'm sure they'll give you some handy tips on how to properly build propaganda, because what you're doing isn't working.

Re:Water is wet

[ArmoredDragon]

Sorry, substitute the word advertising for tracking. Banners of course use a bit more, but not much compared to the overall content of most web pages.

Re:Water is wet

[Tom]

You're a little overzealous there.

Yeah, $19 billion won't pay for the Internet, agreed.

I do still think you underestimate advertisement. I've consulted for a tracking company, for example, and their database is gigantic. The traffic they generate is comperatively small, but we were talking about infrastructure, right? There's a good part of a datacenter right there, used for nothing but tracking. And that's just one company, there's a dozen of those in my city alone.

Of course the Internet as we know it today is heavily commercialized. I never doubted that. My argument is that quite some of that "commerce" is basically incest with no actual value production, thus it doesn't help paying for the maintenance.

Re:Water is wet

[flaming error]

"If your salary is paid from the taxes of those of us who do work for money, maybe don't bite the hand that feeds you?"

He didn't bite you. He wasn't rude. He didn't call you stupid.

If his post stung, or caused you to feel stupid, perhaps deep down you feel there's another way of life that might suit you better. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to re-assess priorities and perhaps try another path. Seriously.

Re:Water is wet

[davydagger]

scientists in general do not work to seek a profit. If they did, they wouldn't be scientists. Science is one of the fields with the worst "money you pay for college", with "money you get in job/how hard you work/ability to find work" ratios in existance.

If scientists cared even the slightest about profits, you wouldn't see science done at all.

Re:Water is wet

[gmyuriy]

This answer is simply awesome! Wish I had mod points.

Re:Water is wet

[Sciath]

That assertion is questionable at best. The invention of many vaccines (Jenner, Pasteur, Salk, etc.) had one thing in mind, curing the sick not personal profit. It wasn't until the development of the large pharmaceutical industry formed with the express purpose of generating personal profit that the modern focus of developing new vaccines the industry shifted from curing the sick to making money. On a fairly recent PBS Frontline episode one of the principals of Merck specifically stated there are few companies developing vaccines BECAUSE they are not profitable enough. Thus, it's no longer public health concerns that motivate "inventors", rather it is profit which is in sharp contract to vaccine manufacturers 60 years ago. Instead, pharmaceutical companies are investing in medications that are questionable at best and/or largely pointless in regards to life expectancy and overall health but something the public narcissistically wants, such as erection sustaining, hair loss "cures", muscle mass and sex drive enhancers, and countless other essentially pointless and "cosmetic" treatments. Now, one might assert that the "market" knows best as market ideologues like von Mises, Friedman, et. al. and the Chicago School of Economics cabal has mistaken claimed over the past 50 years has claimed. But all one needs do to debunk that school of thought is to critically examine the actual choices people make everyday. They are often very far from "rational" choices and that certainly applies to the modern world and its focus upon immediate wants as opposed to long-term needs. And vaccine development is just one important area out of many being ignored or overlooked for the sake of quarterly profits.

Re:Water is wet

[Sciath]

I respect entrepreneurs who see themselves as merely another human being, can live without an overblown ego and can appreciate living in a community of other human beings perhaps not quite so fortunate. Anyone who thinks that by virtue of their "smarts" or "motivation" they are worth a million times more than some schmuck who works for the local trash hauling company, well, they just aren't part of the human race any longer. They've elevated the selves to the status of a demigod. They like all gods are dead (or should be). Thanks Nietzsche.

Re:Water is wet

[Sciath]

"Return on investment" is a pretty nebulous criteria. Few question the idea that people want something over and above an initial investment. But the real question is "what is a reasonable return?" That has become the $64,000 question and the problem with that is that expectations have become so skewed as to render the idea of "return" meaningless. Fifty years ago investors invested largely for the long-term and those, like today were the institutional investors. The short-term markets were essentially the playground of the wealthy who had the money to "speculate" with. Very few middle class families had anything to do with the stock markets. Families "saved" for their future. But then the banking and money market industries realized they could make a huge killing on fees, etc. they waged a big political and public relations campaign to drawing all the other "saving" into their markets even trying to take over the Social Security system. The more money the more fees, while convincing everyone they could retire rich. The ones who are in reality making the profits is the investment companies. The point being, (as usual) the customer gets the shaft. The whole scheme was concocted to make the wealthy even wealthier. No one I know or have even heard of has retired rich by putting their savings into the stock markets.

Re:Water is wet

[davydagger]

>Here are some more interesting facts. The majority of tax payers who fund government spondored cancer research cannot afford the drugs their tax dollars helped produce.

Along with the scientists, technicians, and even plant workers loading palets. Agree 100% Do you know why? Because exists a system that is set up to make men at the top of the large corporations money. Not just that, it dehumanizes, and even strips the achievements from the people who actually did the work behind the vaccine.

Science is not done *because* of capitalism. Science is owned by capitalism because capitalism used leverage to create a monopoly on science.

Bill Gates is not a hero. The reason the rest of us can't afford cancer drugs is because capitalism deprives us of the right to have them. Same thing with the malaria drugs. No amount of charity will change that.

So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

Cartoon lightening should hit gates in his weedy little head. What a hilarious hypocrite.

Tell you what, Gates... after I hit 70 billion I'll stop making it all about the money too. What a giant joke.

Yes, gates does a lot of very nice charity work around the world... and that's lovely. But he didn't just hop on a couch airplane and then do relief work in africa for years. The man amassed an insane fortune and then casually jet sets around the world making appearences for his charities. Don't get me wrong... he writes checks that clear. But that's his contribution to all these issues... writing checks. And that's very important... but to do that you have to have money. If you don't you can't do that.

So... I'm a little confused about his message. Because if I judged him by his actions... the sensible thing would seem to be... make billions of dollars by any means and then retire to run various charities and tell people what a good person you've always been.

I don't know... this charity kick that some of the super rich go off on seems like more of a donation to the "Everyone love me" fund. I frankly respect the anonymous donations more in most cases simply because you know they actually care more about the cause then they do about what people think of them.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[rmdingler]

Or perhaps in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, he's merely seeking a better mention in history.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Livius]

What a hilarious hypocrite.

Most hypocrites do not realize that everyone else considers hypocrisy a bad thing.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[flaming error]

Or maybe he started out with a ruthless bloodlust for destroying all competitors and slowly grew up. And retired and tried to do something useful.

And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.

Hey, it could happen. Maybe.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[nschubach]

So... before leaving the company you built with those tactics... Oh, I don't know. Maybe open up a bit?

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I've got this mental image of John D. Rockefeller handing out shiny new dimes to homeless orphans for the benefit of the photographers...

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[misexistentialist]

He's not even really done since he continues to manage an investment portfolio that accumulates wealth at scale that is probably detrimental to the average consumer or retiree

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are arguably two possibilities:

1. He's a hypocrite who got filthy rich and now also wishes to indulge his jaded palate in the pleasures of self-righteousness.

2. He learned something, arguably the hard way, when becoming richer than god failed to provide any substantial hedonic benefits that merely being wealthy enough to avoid the overt pains of poverty didn't.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Beck_Neard]

If "The cost of something is what you give up to obtain it", then Bill Gates has 'spent' very little on his charity work. Not trying to diminish the importance of his charity - I'm sure the recipients of his donations are very grateful. But let's not pretend that this man is a shining example of moral perfection for all to follow.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

Its not that hypocrisy is bad so much as its frequently contradictory.

Their words do not match their actions and that has to be reconciled if they're giving advice.

For example, if you're a heavy smoker and want to caution against smoking... say "I've been a heavy smoker for most of my life and regret it... don't be like me."...

Well, gates isn't doing that. he's basically saying that people should go out to do something besides make money but that's exactly what he did and most people would be very happy to be in his position.

Seriously... would you rather run an impoverished charity or have 70 billion in the bank?

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Opportunist]

All? No. But, you know, most people who do NOT have that kind of money don't even realize that they could have problems like Bill Gates because they're busy worrying about REAL problems. Like, say, how to make ends meet.

Realizing that money can't buy immortality when you hit 90 and notice that the fifth liver transplant failed because, well, you're too old is one thing. Not being able to afford life saving medication at 30 is another one. In other words, the second person doesn't even live long enough to find out that money won't solve all his problems.

It only solves enough problems that you live to notice that it doesn't solve them all.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[sillybilly]

It's voila, not viola. There is this old DOS game, the Merchant Prince, where you can throw parties, etc, and the game is all about profit, difference is prices, also bribing cities, local rule, church, pope, silly corruptions, silly pirates, private armies, and it's all in the name of profit, how profit controls activity and seeking it makes the world a better place, and it does describe the best way to world ever functioned, right before the Lord Almighty, or powers that be, decided to take Columbus over to this other place called Columbia, and bring this kind of world over too - with churches, gunpowder, horses, sail ships, etc, colleges, sciences, etc. Now the Great Spirit regrets a lot of it, especially losing so many of his people, and I had this dream, like a year ago, where they say we lost so many of our brothers, there is only a few of us left, like you can count it on two hands, and they point up to the top of the cliff-hilltop, where a small white colored church with a cross on top is standing, as in, that is part of the problem, or cause, that christian brotherly love hypocrisy is what destroyed us because it's so powerful, and then there is an ambulance rushing, and cops, somebody got shot again, it's one of my people again, and you can see he is in tremendous pain and bleeding from the gut, but still alive, and they did it fighting over the women.

Over a decade and a half ago I saw this PBS documentary, with a native american on a reservation saying he accepted the Lord three years ago, then. And you can tell on his face, his words, his body language what a rape-job that was, how that robbed him of everything that he used to be. Now he probably gets good food, an easier living, etc. But that kind of stuff is just plain wrong. Forced conversions of Great Spirit believers by the Judeo-Christian powers that be are not in accordance with the ways of God.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[sillybilly]

By the way you can hit the top score in that game if you construct a road running a bunch of Camels from Katsina to Novgorod, if you luck out with a Katsina with lots of diamonds, not just ivory, and you attack Cairo to lose access rights so you don't get a screen pop up every time you go through it. Every time you get an attack or storm and hit Esc you don't have to fight it, that's like a cheat. Also it takes forever if you get involved in politics, so if you just focus on one thing, trading, and nothing else, you'll end up losing half of everything when you have 400,000 florins, then 800,000 florins, every time Venice gets sacked, and the banks where you keep your money in there get sacked,(which you could have avoided by hiring private armies to defend the city and banks where you keep your gold) but can fairly easily get to 1,000,000 florins which gets you the Merchant Prince title in the score log. After that the game gets kinda boring, but it's a nice game to have for the next generations to learn.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

He seems to live pretty well for a guy ashamed of his money.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[sillybilly]

I hate javascript and this xmlhttprequest stuff, cuz I never know if the typos up there I typed myself or someone snuck them in while I was down the page. I mean most of them I probably did myself, but some are weird and creepy, like no way!

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[sumdumass]

Hypocrisy is not always bad though. I smoke, i tell my kids not to and will punish them if i catch them smoking. A neighbor from years ago broke his neck back yard wrestling- after the then WWF said do not do this at home. His then idol, jake the snake roberts did the same shit he did. Luckily, he wasn't paralyzed. I know a guy who dropped out of school but tells kids to stay in school.

Some hypocrisy is good, some inconsequential, and some bad. And most of that is subject to interpretation too.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[sillybilly]

Preaching water while drinking wine. It's what you call a good sense of humor.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[s.petry]

If you look at his wealth historically you can see if he had some sort of revelation and is now feeling bad about how he fucked people over. His wealth is increasing annually, not decreasing, so there is no reformation.

Same old same old in my opinion. If he got no tax breaks for doing charity work, he would not be doing charity work. I'm not his CPA, but I'm guessing that his "charity" ends where the tax breaks end. His charity work also happens to be largely philanthropic, but I don't agree with his version of philanthropy and believe it's harming society much more then benefiting it.

If I met him, I may be persuaded to have a different opinion. Perhaps he could demonstrate how he's really not abusing the charity work for tax purposes, and show me how his philanthropy is supposed to work over time so it's not as nefarious as it seems. I won't hold my breath for that to happen.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[ClickOnThis]

It's voila, not viola.

Actually it's voilà, with a grave accent over the a.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus fucking christ, i wish you autists would venture a step out of your parents' basement. yes, bill gates made his money through microsoft. and yes, we all understand how much you hate microsoft. but you idiots are so narrowminded and so willfully ignorant about the bill and melinda gates foundation that it's embarrassing.

you're guessing that his charity ends where the tax break ends? do you have ANY idea what the bill and melinda gates foundation even does? also, you say that you don't agree with his version of philanthropy - please, do elaborate. he's given $28
billion to charity, which by any estimate is >25% of his personal wealth. and what's going to happen to the rest? it's also going to charity, because he's giving 0% of it to his kids. over $10 billion is going to vaccine research. is this for some reason not the type of philanthropy you can support?

people like you are stupid, lazy, and embarrassing. all of this information is a 10 second google search, but instead you want to hold onto your biased judgments. why? because of some nerd hatred of microsoft. please realize, there is more to the world than computers, operating systems, and software

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Przemo-c]

Yeah and the people dying of malaria rather die with lack of medicine from anonymous noble people then be a wipe of conscience for rich people that led their buisness ruthlesly eliminating competition and live.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Khashishi]

I don't understand where people get this weird idea that tax write-offs compel people to donate. The math just doesn't work out. Given some level of altruism in a person, tax write-offs do push the equation slightly toward higher giving, but donating still cuts into their personal wealth after tax. If there was no underlying altruism, tax write-offs won't get people to donate without some truly bizarre tax brackets (>100%).

I do believe you are projecting your own sentiments on to billionaires as a whole.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[91degrees]

Some speculative startups failed because they went up against a monolithic company and had to fall back to their highly paid software industry jobs.

Well, I can see how that must have been kind of irksome for them but it really is a first world problem.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Tom]

And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.

Negative on that. He runs his charity much like he ran MS. In fact, several other charities are complaining how he's driving out the "competition" - which even though it's not about profits does have the same result we all know from MS: A lot of the aid programs now depend on his foundation in one way or the other. Especially in his most public work against malaria, he's made the pharma companies he works with near monopolies (and, surprise, he owns stock in them).

He's doing good now, but his methods are still the same.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[nukenerd]

Or perhaps in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, he's merely seeking a better mention in history.

There is no perhaps about it. He is following a predictable pattern also followed by eg Nobel, Carnegie and Rockefeller. Nobel seems to have succeded - in his time he had been described as "The Merchant of Death". I don't think Gates will succeed though - his fouling of electronic document formats will see to that.

Anyway, WTF else does anyone do with such money that it would be physically impossible to "enjoy" it all themselves? He could buy a new car about every 20 seconds for the rest of his life (do the math) but would not have time to get in and out of each one, let alone drive it. I don't consider myself a generous person , but if I had that money I would be giving it to charity (but not Gate's ones).

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Livius]

Hypocrisy is contradictory by definition. The double standard offends people.

It's not hypocritical to admit to a poor judgment and cautioning others about making the same mistake.

Of course, the advice itself isn't necessarily bad just because it's hypocritical.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[tverbeek]

So you've never heard of someone getting on in years, looking back, and telling younger people not to make the same mistakes they made?

(Maybe someday it'll even happen to you.)

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[nine-times]

I always try to point out this kind of thing when people go off about what a saint Bill Gates is. He became the richest man in the word by being a ruthless, cut-throat businessman, and then donates some of it to charity, and suddenly he's the best person in the world, going on tour with the "hey everyone, I'm such a good guy!" act.

I may sound crazy, but it's sort the only metaphor I can think of: Imagine you had a really crappy roommate. He throws parties and doesn't clean up after himself. He never does the dishes or buys the toilet paper. He plays loud music in the middle of the night. He steals money out of your wallet, and once took a dump on your bed because he thought it was funny. He's just generally an asshole and a terrible roommate. And then one day, he decides that he's going to donate $10/month to the local homeless shelter, and suddenly he's going around telling everyone about his wonderful charity work, and everyone is telling you what a great guy his is, but you keep coming home to find that there's poop in your bed.

Doing one nice thing doesn't absolve you of your other ethical obligations. If Bill Gates wants my respect as a "good guy" and he wants credit for his wisdom, he'll publicly apologize for the unethical business practices conducted by Microsoft under his watch, and use his influence to set things right.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

I don't think bill gates is a bad guy and I don't associate making money with being immoral or evil.

I just find it be intellectually dishonest to live the life he did... and continues to live... and then tell people money isn't important. He could give it all away. He's never given away something he'd miss. You can say he's given away billions but he's got 70 of them.

I give a car away if I had 70 of the damned things.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[s.petry]

Dear anonymous apologist, or shill (impossible to tell the difference).

In your alleged 10 second Google search by adding a single word you would see how this is not a one sided altruistic organization. I won't stoop to a LMGTFY link, but try adding the word "Corruption" to your search on the Gates foundation.

With the addition of this single word, you will easily find references to doctors and professors who have been requesting investigations into the foundation as not just a tax shelter but a corrupt organization. The top link is a Wiki linking to numerous pieces of information which is here. Text from the links on this page are below, and just a glance shows that it's YOU that are living in a cave and not myself. Kindly take your personal attack and pound it right on up your asshole, preferably with a few pounds of sand and a large hammer.

2014
[edit] June

Professor Diane Ravitch Calls for Investigation by Congress of Bill Gates’ Latest Offences

[edit] April

People Who Worked on Bill Gates Projects Speak to Techrights About Fraud and Misappropriation of Funds
Society Still Occupied by Bill Gates and Other Plutocrats

[edit] January

Systematic Looting of Society Disguised as ‘Crisis’ (for Austerity/Privatisation) and Bogus ‘Charity’ as Solution
The Age When Press Organisations Are Run by — Not Just Funded by — Plutocrats

[edit] 2013

Most coverage posted in Identi.ca, Diaspora, and Twitter this year.
[edit] December

Mother Jones Shows That Gates Foundation is a Hypocritical Ploy
Bill Gates Brings NSA-esque Surveillance to Children

[edit] November

Convicted Monopolist Near Our Children
Crisis Capitalism: Bill Gates and Other ‘Education Oligarchs’ Turn Schools Into their Private, For-Profit Ventures

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[nine-times]

...I don't associate making money with being immoral or evil.

Neither do I, at least not inherently or necessarily. But Microsoft has not earned a reputation for being an ethical company that puts "solving the world's problems" ahead of making a profit. Hell, Google's motto of "don't be evil" seemed to have been partially in response to Microsoft. Not that they're selling chemical weapons to warlords or anything, but they've had a long history of screwing over their customers and partners, even forgetting the underhanded tactics used against their competition. And some of the worst stuff took place while Gates was still the acting CEO of the company.

Sorry, you don't get a pass on being an unethical asshole just because you've given money to the poor. Yes, you should give money to the poor! That's a great thing to do. Curing Malaria? Fantastic! But that doesn't give you license to go around acting self-righteous while still collecting profits from your previous unethical (at times arguably illegal) business tactics.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[dave420]

His children are receiving precisely $0. All of it is going to charity. He is currently using his money to make even more money, which will also go to charity.

You are assuming an awful lot, which reflects rather poorly on you. But then you are a Senior System Engineer/Architect/Psychic, so I guess you know what you are doing. I'm so glad you tell everyone your job position, as it lets people know they're dealing with some socially-crippled person who doesn't know what's important to them is of scant importance to others.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Karmashock]

just out of curiosity, what is your problem with his education push... I am not terribly familiar with it... your opinion would be enlightening.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[s.petry]

I have no choice but to make assumptions and even admit as much. Above, in response to an AC post, I provide an interesting link to the questionable behaviors and actions of the so called "charity" which is usually what people point to in an effort to claim "he's a really good guy".

I have no information on his kids financial status, but claiming that they would have to receive money directly from him is nonsense. His kids could receive money, jobs, etc.. from various sources simply because they are "his" children. Look at Chelsae Clinton making $900,000.00 a year working part time for NBC. Her job according to NBC was to provide periodic information on "The Clinton activities".

You can believe what ever you want, I'm just claiming that historically when people have remorse for how they have gained their wealth they usually behave quite differently. You can verify that information by reading about occasions where that happened, or not.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[MrL0G1C]

Except he is a giant hypocrite because the gates foundation has been criticised for making unethical investments in pursuit of greater profit. They thought about it. They continued with the unethical investments. C**ts.

Clearly shows that the gates foundation is just a giant tax haven so big that it also wields political power.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[twistedcubic]

Some people would rather spend their taxes on charities than the war effort, even if it costs more money to do so. I suppose you could call this "altruism", but some just consider it the lesser of two evils, the "evil" being spending money at all, not donating to charity.

Re:So says the richest man in the world...

[Khashishi]

If you aren't going to spend your money at all, what's the point of getting all that money? To leave it to your spoiled progeny?

Oh shit, Mr. Gates!

[Narcocide]

Did you suddenly realize that no matter how many children you save from Malaria you will still go down in history as "part of the problem?"

Re:Oh shit, Mr. Gates!

[Khashishi]

Clearly Bill Gates is a monster compared to the typical Slashdot user, who would never stoop so low.

Some say

[jmd]

Profit IS the problem adbusters.org

Re:Some say

[machineghost]

I don't think even adbusters would argue entirely against profit ... they're anti-excessive profit, anti-corporation, anti-marketing, etc. but even they recognize we can't all go back to subsitence farming. The ability to profit, and subsequently trade those profits to other people for things you can't produce yourself, is necessary for any viable economic system.

just trying to thin the competition

[dltaylor]

Again.

Common plight

[ACNiel]

A lot of people have also said this when he started his charitable foundation.

Some of the robber barons of yesteryear also fell to this thing they call a concience. Carnegie with the libraries, etc.

They are so caught up in winning, they don't realize what they sacrificed until after their are done. When no one will play with them anymore, they realize what they have done.

Re:Common plight

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There's also mortality salience: bottomless pockets certainly buy better medical outcomes than penury does; but until somebody comes up with a way of shoving the EOL numbers for humans, rather than merely curing more of the causes of premature death, no amount of money keeps you from feeling your body's gradual decline and the gnawing proximity of incipient death.

For now, there are some things money can't buy. Inconveniently for those who have it, they include the stuff of some of humanity's oldest and darkest fears.

Oblig Soviet Russia joke

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

In Soviet Russia, Bill Gates thinks YOU'RE a hypocrite.

Easy for him to say.

[davydagger]

Thats really damn easy for Bill Gates to say. He did some pretty unethical things for profit.

But no wait, in the business world, ethics are proportional to profits.

Re:Easy for him to say.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

But no wait, in the business world, ethics are inversely proportional to profits.

FTFY

Bill Gates can fuck off

[Anonymous Coward]

When he has more money than hundreds of millions of people and gives advice on not being greedy? Fuck off.

Re:Bill Gates can fuck off

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

To give credit where it is due, Bill Gates providing advice on avoiding greed is no more insane than the pope providing advice on morally acceptable sexual conduct, and popes have been getting away with that for centuries.

Re:Bill Gates can fuck off

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh, I wasn't even considering the pedo-priest stuff. I was just considering the curious practice of using a relatively elderly, celibate, man, with his advisory force of somewhat less elderly celibate men, as an authority on such matters.

Assorted abuses of authority don't help; but even if everyone were acting as the rules allege they should, it'd still be kind of weird. (Just as the "Bill Gates says don't just focus on profit" thing sounds a bit off whether or not you think that Microsoft's business practices during his tenure were actively illegal or just pushy.)

Like repenting on your deathbed

[cupantae]

It's very easy to tell people not to focus on profit when you've already made yours. I'm also adding my voice to the "Fuck Gates" camp. What he gives away is a small price to pay to when you consider what he's got left over. He manages to lose the reputation he should have for poisoning the technology industry in every way he could get away with for his own benefit, and still keep the vast majority of the profits. What a villain.

Re:Fuck the world

[Opportunist]

Pretty much this is what I'd expect from the audience.

Does anyone think these people want to start companies to "change the world"? Or solve the world's problems? They want to solve their own problems. Which are almost invariably solvable by the formula "insert money here, problem goes poof".

Re:Fuck the world

[sd4f]

Exactly! All I require is $500,000,000.

Gates is right

[manu0601]

The general interest is that smart people work to help humanity and make no profit.

The smart people particular interest is to work to make profit.

In other words, Gates defended his personal interest and now defends the general interest by telling people to do what he says and not what he did.

Re:Gates is right

[seebs]

That's not obvious at all. I am pretty sure I could make more money doing other things, but I enjoy the things I do now more. Your best interest isn't necessarily what makes you the most money.

A warning to the young

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was young in the nineteen sixties, I listened to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, and all the other bullshit idealism. We were going to make a better world, eschewing wealth, war, and capitalism.

Fact: 50 years later, my life is less than optimal, while Dylan, Baez, Pete Seeger, Airplane alumni, and others of their ilk all have had comfortable millionaire lives and not a worry in the world. If I had to do it over again, I would ignore all pop culture, save and invest every penny I had. By the time I was fifty years old, I would have been worth a a couple million, but I pissed it away on bullshit idealism.

Don't be fooled by philosophy, love, idealism. In the end, it is only money that makes life worth living. Sure we can sing songs about the contrary, but I'd like to see those Dylanesque pied pipers, who sold us those lies, give away their millions and trade places with me.

A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[quietwalker]

Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.

Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.

Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.

So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.

The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[dbIII]

focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.

Less than half a second after reading that I thought "what about Ghandi - he did exactly that and ended up running a country of hundreds of millions of people". If that's not "world-changing" then what is?

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[phmadore]

I agree with most of what you say here. My only addition is that it would be nice if Gates and others would address the contribution gap.

What I mean is, there are many millions of minds who never get the chance to contribute to technology due to circumstantial or financial realities. There is no telling how much progress we could be missing out on. I think that Open Source has been a decent if not stellar vehicle for addressing this, and I wish that Bill Gates would just take a few minutes to think about it from that perspective. I believe the last time he spoke about Open Source in an interview, he had the same childlike opinion he had in the 90s, despite Firefox, OpenOffice, et al.

I can't afford to buy the code of Rise of Nations or to buy any sort of licensing for so doing, but I can think of many ways the game could live on. For me, it was the only piece of Microsoftware I ever truly, truly enjoyed.

For awhile we had an Xbox, and then we sold it when we realized we were only using it for Netflix anymore. When he did his AMA, I asked him to open the code and received no response. Surely people were asking him more important questions, but still... It was actually why I made a reddit account, LOL.

But if you ask me, Steve Jobs was by far more evil than Bill has ever thought of being. That's only my opinion. Remember, as Jerry Garcia said, choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[ClickOnThis]

focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.

Less than half a second after reading that I thought "what about Ghandi - he did exactly that and ended up running a country of hundreds of millions of people". If that's not "world-changing" then what is?

Wait, what?

Ghandi was never elected to any public office. He didn't "run" any country.

Yes, he changed the world -- as an activist, not a politician.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[ClickOnThis]

So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential

New grads aren't at the "peak" of their earning potential. That happens a few decades later.

I think what you meant to say is that it's a problem to encourage new grads to maintain their focus on charity.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[dbIII]

Fair enough, Hollywood confused me on and it was a descendant who was President, but he was most definitely also in politics for a few decades and most definitely did make "world-changing" decisions on two continents. I'm sorry I couldn't come up with a better example in half a second but it's still enough of an example to show that QuietWalkers' point is seriously flawed.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

Man, apart from the general Bill Gates hate, can we just know what he actually told the students?

Where's the "go work for a charity" part that everyone implies? All I know is he said not to focus _only_ on profits. I agree with that message, anything wrong with it? If you're motivated solely by profits, whatever, but I'm not, and I would agree that new graduates coming in all likelihood from rich backgrounds should think about their impact on the world as a whole and not just make money. It would avoid problems like, I dunno, the subprime mortgage crisis or whatever.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[quietwalker]

I took some pains to speak in terms of potential as opposed to guaranteed impact; I did not claim that focus on either profit or social causes would itself deny or develop social change, only that there's higher potential in one place than another. A generality, if you will.

As for Gandhi as the, he was born into privilege - his father and grandfather had been prime minister of their state - and even as the third son, was sent to England for education as a lawyer. He ended up working in the much less lucrative position of a legal aide doing drafting work because could indulge the luxury that he was "psychologically unable to cross-question witnesses," which would have been necessary as a barrister. Then it was 21 years in South Africa working for a trading firm before he returned to become what we know as the public face of the Indian independence movement.

Look, there's no doubt that he was a great person, and that he did great things. The fact that he had such a comfortable launching pad from which to achieve this doesn't detract from his accomplishments, but you ought to recognize that he had an increased potential to do so because he didn't have to worry about other aspects of his life, like where his next meal was coming from, or whether he had to maintain gainful employment. Since all his needs were met, he was able to focus on his ideals, and fight for rights and freedoms.

All of that just underscores my point. It's easier to be rich and charitable than to be needy and charitable.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[ZouPrime]

> Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.

You could also tax the shit out of these high-paying peoples with fancy degrees and use the windfall to help fix social ills. Sounds a much more realistic plan than to just hope these guys will do charitable work by themselves - something they may not even have experience or aptitude too.

I really admire and respect what Bill Gates has chosen to do with his wealth, but he's still only an exception, not the rule. Instead asking billionaires like him to redistribute their wealth, we should instead ask ourselves how it is possible for them to amass such massive wealth to begin with.

Re:A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity.

[dbIII]

Well put.

If he wants to be well remembered

[symbolset]

If he wants to be well remembered for his charity only, he will have to kill the monster he created to amass his filthy lucre. Otherwise what evil it does when he unleashes it will taint his legacy still.

May I direct your attention to this?

[Weaselmancer]

The other Microsoft story, on the exact same page as Bill Gates telling you not to pursue money at all costs, and instead focus on making the world a better place?

Chinese Gov't Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-Killer Patents

Right. We acquired all these patents to crush competition and make the phone market a monoculture. To make the world a better place.

Re:May I direct your attention to this?

[ArchieBunker]

What if I told you all that happened after Bill Gates left the company?

Re:May I direct your attention to this?

[Rick in China]

Left the company? How about you pay attention. He didn't go anywhere. He stepped down as chairman of the board, and is taking a much more hands on approach, his new title (february 8th, 4 days after he 'stepped down') is "Founder and Technology Adviser" (to directly advise the new CEO). In his own words, he will be "substantially increasing time at Microsoft" in his new role. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...

The rich are the new communists

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let the up and coming generation have capital to compete with the established corporations. Establish regulatory regimes making it prohibitive to try and compete without massive capital investment. Patent everything that moves and demand exorbitant licensing fees. Slavery is the new freedom.

Re:The rich are the new communists

[phmadore]

Thank you for this. I'd burn 2 mod points upping it if I could. HINT.

Re:Fuck the world

[ArmoredDragon]

Solving your own problems very often results in solving somebody else's problems. I've seen all too often where somebody noticed an ongoing inconvenience or problem, which they figured out how to solve, and then marketed their solution, which became lucrative.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

[Gothmolly]

Steve: "Our stuff's better Bill."
Bill: "You just don't get it, do you Steve?"

Just like Murdoch's speeches

[dbIII]

He wants good subordinates paid for by someone else instead of direct competition.

Don't Hate

[phmadore]

Well, when I was 12 years old, I would have said fuck him, he can never make up for the all pain he's put the users of computers worldwide through. But now that I'm grown, I have to say, fuck him, could he please lend me $1M for my startup?

Except when profit actively undermines charity

[RobinEggs]

The process of earning your profit can easily counteract the effects of spending your profit on charity, however. The wealthy often realize this paradox when they begin "giving back". The Gates Foundation itself has been accused many times of investing in things that completely undermine its goals. This editorial from 2014 is just one example.; I recall hearing similar claims about investments in totally different industries almost 10 years ago

How you get your profit makes a big difference in what net accomplishments your money can achieve. If your earning provides great support to systems that keep poor countries unstable or work against universal improvements for humanity, but then you wish to spend your profits on humanist goals, then what was the point? I'd rather you'd just become a janitor instead of digging holes in human society and then desperately filling them back in, hoping you might create mountains in the process.

honest profit

[stenvar]

The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.

As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.

Re:honest profit

[Anonymous Coward]

"The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it"

This has been said over and over again and reality has shown corporations use their profit to negatively harm society.

Re:honest profit

[Khashishi]

Are you sure it's not useful? So he made a big profit and now uses a lot of that money to help the less fortunate. Suppose someone else (or a group) profited from the aforementioned ideas. What would the chances be for these people would be as philanthropic as him? Not many rich people are as generous. Usually, the very wealthy, when they do donate, donate to causes which are more relevant to the rich people, such as endowments to the arts and contributions to politicians or churches. The rich also give to universities, which is kinda nice, but not nearly as effective as helping the truly less fortunate in poor countries.

He's not "trying" to salvage his reputation. He has already done it. Only in Slashdot do you find such vile hate for him. I try to save my hate for people who are much worse than average.

Re:honest profit

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

He does some of that "investing in money-making companies" thing you're talking about, via contributing to Acumen and other philanthropic funds: http://acumen.org/story/fundin....

Making an impact is hard. The Gates foundation invests in a few things that no one else does, or areas in which there isn't enough funding because it's not profitable enough. Things like basic medical research, for example, and not only direct "here have a toilet" type of stuff.

I know the entire Slashdot hates Bill Gates for Microsoft and profiting from other people's technologies/coding and anti-competitive behaviour, but your perspective does change when you age. You can become more, or less, idealistic. And you do realize you made mistakes, and you might want to change things. Ever heard an old banker tell their young alma mater to go for a profession that makes them happy, and not chase the money in investment banking? ... Well maybe you haven't, but I have. There's nothing wrong with realizing that money isn't the _only_ thing, and that there are other things that need to be focused on.

Re:honest profit

[Khashishi]

Yes, less fortunate people do actually exist. I don't have my head stuck in the sand like you. Yes, they do need help, in the sense that many of them will die without help. Call it handout if you will, to help people directly or to give out grants to research cures or better techniques for fighting global problems. Maybe you should take a look at what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation actually does. You are so ideological that you can't judge a person for his actions but by how much he adheres to your free market religion.

Re:honest profit

[stenvar]

I don't doubt Bill Gate's idealism. I think he used to think of himself an idealistic tech innovator, and I think he thinks of himself as a well-meaning philanthropist now. I just think he hasn't been very competent in either role.

Re:honest profit

[stenvar]

Yes, they do need help, in the sense that many of them will die without help.

They do need our help: they need access to our markets, open borders, dismantling of protectionism, dismantling of agricultural subsidies. You know, things that matter and actually would cost us money. Instead, they get cheap shiny glass beads from people like Gates.

Your views are little different from the racists that brought us colonialism.

Re:honest profit

[Khashishi]

You aren't ready to understand this yet, but I hope some day you look in the mirror and realize how fucking wrong you were. Straw man (toilets) after straw man (cheap glass beads). It still seems like you have not taken a look at what they do. I'm having trouble figuring out what you really don't know shit about and what you are purposefully misrepresenting. Colonialism is about forcibly replacing a government with a regime that will allow external corporations to extract the wealth of the colony. Not the same as researching and supplying drugs and aid.

Obviously you don't know me well enough to call me a racist, so you attack me with weasel language. I know where you are coming from. You think that advocating helping people is the same as insinuating that they (as a race) are incapable of helping themselves. (No, it isn't. I advocate helping people no matter their 'race', and whether or not they 'need' it.)

I'm all in favor of open borders and dismantling agricultural subsidies in US. But there is a difference between domestic agricultural subsidies and researching effective agricultural techniques for use in Africa. The difference is that the former is not actually useful for increasing production and is an unnecessary manipulation, and the latter will increase production. What, did you think they were just shipping food there?

Re:honest profit

[stenvar]

You think that advocating helping people is the same as insinuating that they (as a race) are incapable of helping themselves

No, I am saying that you advocate doing the thing that is cheap, easy, and convenient for well-fed, wealthy Westerners, just like Gates is doing. The kind of self-serving pseudo-philanthropy you advocate and Gates engages in has a long history of hurting Africa.

I'm all in favor of open borders and dismantling agricultural subsidies in US. But there is a difference between domestic agricultural subsidies and researching effective agricultural techniques for use in Africa. The difference is that the former is not actually useful for increasing production and is an unnecessary manipulation, and the latter will increase production. What, did you think they were just shipping food there?

You still don't have a f*cking clue because you still think that Africa's problems are an inability to produce enough food and that some magical Western technology developed courtesy of jet-setting Western brainiacs will fix it.

Africa doesn't need new agricultural techniques and they don't need to produce more food. Their problems are social and economic in nature. And many of those problems are exacerbated, and often even caused, by Western aid and Western aid organizations. Often, Western aid is simply used to pay off political elites in those nations to acquiesce and not do what would actually be best for their citizens.

so you attack me with weasel language

Ther is nothing weasly about my language. Your views are morally reprehensible and the policies you advocate are evil. Clear enough for you?

Re:Fuck the world

[TheLink]

Yeah we should encourage the people who want to start cooperatives instead of companies :).

Re:Fuck the world

[Opportunist]

Sadly it has become more profitable to be someone else's problem so he pays you to go away.

Re:Fuck the world

[Immerman]

640 Megabucks should be enough for anyone.

It's actually very common.

[Anonymous Coward]

As people get older they experience death anxiety. People who spent their lives accepting death as inevitable and believing they had come to terms with it discover the reality of existential crisis once the reality of death begins to draw near.

A very common reaction to this is a rapid shift of values. People who spent most of their lives seeking some form of hedonism start to want meaning in their lives instead. They want to make up for lost time, too.

Lots of rich robber-barons became philanthropists near the end of their lives. Bill Gates is just another character in that same story.

The next generation of young-ins will be just as greedy as the previous, despite these admonitions from their elders. That's just how it works.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Do as I say, not as I do.

People are more altruistic than you think

[Camael]

bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way

Untrue. And unlike you, I have citations and links to prove it.

You might have heard of Edward Jenner , father of immunology and the man whose work in vaccination reduced smallpox from a feared fatal disease to a mere footnote today. Did he become rich from it? No. He sacrificed his own practice and in the end had to be bailed out with public funds.

Jenner's continuing work on vaccination prevented him continuing his ordinary medical practice. He was supported by his colleagues and the King in petitioning Parliament, and was granted £10,000 for his work on vaccination. In 1806, he was granted another £20,000 for his continuing work in microbiology.

Or we can look at Louis Pasteur, father of microbiology. He

...was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, and his discoveries have saved countless lives ever since.

What was was the motivation for his work?

After serving briefly as professor of physics at the Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849, and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood; the other three died of typhoid. These personal tragedies were his motivations for curing infectious diseases.

You may be cynical and personally driven by profit-seeking, but don't assume everyone else is.

Re:People are more altruistic than you think

[nukenerd]

Your little list can be easily trumped by Thomas Edison alone...

The context was human life and health. Edison was in the world of science and technology. In any case it was Edison's unsung underlings who made most of the advances. For other science examples, do you seriously think that the likes of Newton, Bacon, Galileo and Einstein were motivated by profit?

We need to distinguish between profit and salary. Many scientists and medical pioneers want a comfortable, or at least a livable, salary if only so that they can concentrate on what they like doing. Newton had his allowance as a Cambridge professor, and was later rewarded by the post of Master of the Royal Mint. But he did not make his discoveries so that he could become Master of the Mint. In fact he lived like a monk. Francis Bacon, as Lord Chancellor of England, was already a very wealthy man yet took an interest in science as a hobby, such that he was the founder of the modern scientific method. Bacon certainly did not look or expect any profit from his scienctific work - he did not need it.

Seriously?

[ArchieBunker]

You gotta be shitting me. Apple is doing way worse things today than Bill Gates ever did in the 80s or 90s.

Re:Seriously?

[nukenerd]

I thought we were talking about Bill Gates.

Re:Fuck the world

[Cryacin]

I want to experience the Peter Pinnacle to get some gardening leave.

Re:Not fooling me.

[Tablizer]

Even the Grinch sneered at him.

Re:Let me know

[Khashishi]

You set the standards high enough that nobody qualifies. He might not be Jesus Christ, but he's done a lot more good than most other people. Why don't you start improving yourself, then trying to bring him down to your level by disparaging him. How many people give away *all* of their money?

Ugh. I hate it when

[aussersterne]

the very ruthless and very rich tell us that money doesn't solve problems.

Well, you already got everyone else's money after being absolutely driven to do so for decades. Now you tell us that having tons of other peoples' money is no good anyway when it comes to really important stuff. Hmm...

So rather than sit on a pile of billions that you've tied up after getting it from other people, just give it back if you've now learned that it didn't do all that much good in the first place. No? Well then, you're either a liar or a hypocrite.

Re:[need YMMV]

[Lotana]

Have a look at the post you replied to:

Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it.

Please point to the part where you came up with "lovey dovey feel good philosophy doesn't pay the bills" from? That is an absolutely true statement. Once you have enough money to cover your needs (Needs depend very heavily on your expectations and accepted standard of living), there is no improvement to your quality of life. You do not require to be rich to have financial security to do what you love.

You think widget makers in the widget factory want to build widgets in their off time?

Absolutely!

My father is a cabinet maker. He spends all his working hours working on the factory floor and he is not rich in any sense of a word. However at home he has a shed with a work bench, wood and a hell of a lot of tools. After he comes home he makes stuff just for the pleasure of it. All our friends got custom chairs/tables/drawers/bookshelves that he built out of his own time and money just for fun and a thank you.

My grandfather was a plumber. For his whole life if any of his friends had issues in their home he would fix it up for free. I can assure you, he wasn't rich either.

There is so much more to life than money! Do you think that every single volunteer out there is rich?

But, Maximizing Profit is the Law

[Scot Seese]

".. a Fiduciary Responsibility to Maximize Shareholder Value."

Capitalism 101 guys - In America, reaping obscene profit is not only desirable, it's the law!
http://www.litigationandtrial.... ..Consequences be damned!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Nope, Gates still uses the MSFT business approach

[HannethCom]

They have very strict rules for "giving" money.

First off, Gates only contributes as much money to the foundation as can be written off.

He "generously" gives to school districts. In exchange the school must only use Microsoft products. We will pay for the computers and initial licenses, but then you get locked into an agreement to pay Microsoft Licensing Fees, which means the Gates Melinda Foundation will pay %40 of the cost, and the schools have to pick up the back end 60% in a few years time. Gates still has substantial shares in Microsoft.

Some places they have built water treatment plants to treat the water that has been polluted by the factory built up the river. In quite a few of the cases, the factory built up the river was made by a company with investment money from the Gates Melinda Foundation.

They have also developed Common Core, to teach English and Math in the way that Bill Gates thinks it should be taught. Adopted in 46 states so far partially due to the $76 million to help adopt their philosophy. Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point instead of Shakespeare. Freakonomics instead of Poe. Bill and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the future through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives. Regardless if you agree with this or not, the "charity" is making sure with its money, this is what your children are being taught.

surprised?

[Tom]

Anyone surprised?

Gates has been on a campaign to whitewash his image for many years now. He probably realized that he has more money than he can ever spend in his lifetime, even if he sleeps on a bed of dollar bills ever day - and burns it in the morning.

But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag. So he did what all the robber barons have done before him, he turned to philantropy and creating a nice new image of himself, hoping that ten years from now people will remember that part of his life and forget the other.

And it just might work, because humans in general are stupid. Too few realize that since he made most of his fortune extracting economic rent, the damage he has done to society is larger than the money he has, so no matter what he does, if he wants to become a net positive for the human race, he has to do a lot more than just give away his wealth.

Re:surprised?

[Zalbik]

But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag.

Only on Slashdot. The thing that most extremist geek types don't get is that the public as a whole doesn't really care about tech infighting. Nobody but geeks care how Gates got his fortune.

Things people care about / will remember:
- Gates was the richest man in the world.
- He was a geek
- He was a college drop out
- He founded a huge charity
- He gave a bunch of his money to charity.

How Microsoft made money under Gates will be entirely ignored, or a footnote at best. It has nothing to do with his whitewashing....just really nobody else cares.

Re:surprised?

[Tom]

I disagree. I have quite a few non-geek friends, and from the times this topic came up, my estimate is that their view of Gates is better than mine, but they do understand that MS isn't a company they like and Gates is not exactly a hero.

Re:[need YMMV]

[Lotana]

Perhaps my examples are not the best. Plumbers and cabinet makers are professions that pay well eventually. The point I was trying to make that people do indeed spend their free time doing thing what they do for a job.

Stating that craftsman do not work for money (and its benefits) is ridiculous.

This is the part that I just don't understand where both you and the grandparent post got from.This whole thread is about working for pleasure ONCE the income from that activity covers the cost of living. Again the quote from the original post is: "Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head". Quote from the post above that is: "Yes, I work in imaging research, trying to bring about medical imaging progress, with hopefully useful results. I'm not at all motivated by profit. I just want enough money not to starve and enough funding to pay my students and equipment." (Emphasis mine).

No one that I can see has stated in this thread that anyone works for absolute free. We do not dispute that! Your bills needs to be covered first. But beyond covering your needs, profit need not be the motivation!

For example: You have a choice to stay doing a job you love, but only covers your expenses or do what you don't like, but earn triple the amount that you need. In BOTH cases you are NOT working for free! In BOTH cases your living expenses are covered.

What this thread is about is that choosing the former is better for your quality of life than the latter. This is the interesting and complex part that is being discussed. Not simplified "Be a hippy to be happy!" nonsense that you are reading into the discussion.

Oh shit, Mr. Gates!

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically, you're saying that you care more about paying a few bucks extra for some software than about some poor African kid dying...

The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

The journal Aspects of India's Economy recently published a very good piece on Mr. Gates' widely acclaimed philanthropy: http://www.rupe-india.org/57/gates.html

Pain and suffering

[EzInKy]

The same could be said for human pain and suffering. How many people today would be alive if someone else didn't suck the life out of them to increase their own wealth? Whether under the guise of Democracy, Communism, or Facism, those who seek personal gain suck something from someone. They have to because, in order to profit they have to have someone to profit from.

Re:Pain and suffering

[cyberchondriac]

Whether under the guise of Democracy, Communism, or Facism, those who seek personal gain suck something from someone. They have to because, in order to profit they have to have someone to profit from.

While that's often the case, that's not an absolute truth. It's quite possible to achieve personal gain without "taking" it from someone else. Unless you're talking about obscene amounts of gain maybe. But even then, look at star athletes- most lay people in this world seem to have no problem throwing their hard earned dollars at the sports industry and placing athletes on pedestals: good athletes can make tens of millions of dollars in a few short years, (is any human really worth $40 million just because they're good at throwing a ball around ??) but are they oppressing the fans by doing this? Not if the fans *willing* pay silly prices for tickets and are willing to endure all kinds of advertising to watch someone do that. Beats the hell out of me why they do, but they do.

Profiteers

[EzInKy]

Profiteers make their money on the innovations and discoveries of others. Their whole purpose is to thrive off the work of others. They are parasetical in this regard.

Re:[need YMMV]

[iNaya]

He's saying they needn't work for money. Many do, many don't. It's about what you want out of your life.

Bill Gates

[skovnymfe]

Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies

Bill Gates has also had 58 years and countless billions of dollars to figure out why money doesn't always work.

Typical of old folks

[Rigel47]

You see it time and again.. that dickbag uncle who wants to get in touch now that the final curtain is drawing near.. ruthless, monopolistic Gates now discovering that being #1 doesn't really mean much at the end of the day and often makes for a shitty person. I don't have much sympathy in either case. He had a lifetime to think about what kind of person he wanted to be. Sure, it's nice that he's parting with some of his ill-gotten gains but he probably did more damage to technical innovation than any other person alive.

Re:Fuck the world

[OakDragon]

What do your educational apps teach about capitalization?

Re:[need YMMV]

[Sarius64]

Well, I admit I grew up with a father that dropped out of life and thought drugs and alcohol were the path to happiness. There's a lot of altruism in my heart, but growing up working since I was 11 to feed myself definitely embedded a responsibility to make sure I didn't impose that life of poverty on my family, and especially my children.

I've worked with many research facilities in the SoCal area and your "emphasis" would not be the norm, sir."

Re:[need YMMV]

[Yunzil]

Once you have enough money to cover your needs (Needs depend very heavily on your expectations and accepted standard of living), there is no improvement to your quality of life

Oh, I dunno. I think the quality of my life would be better if I had a Lamborghini.

Re:Fuck the world

[ArmoredDragon]

I've only ever noticed hobos and scammers do that. Fortunately both are pretty easy to ignore.

Hypocrisy of the evil

[Amando13]

What a hypocrite asshole. Young wolves, please leave me collect the cash you be good empathetic kids 'cause you know me and my kind we are sick, we suffer from incurable chronic afluenza and it is so painful unbearable, only 10 digits cash injections can alleviate this horrible, gruesome pain in our chest.

Or maybe Do as I say, not as I did

[alispguru]

That way you'll never be in my position of wealth and generosity, and my reputation will have less competition.

That's Gates for you - always competing.

Re:Fuck the world

[Opportunist]

Now try with patent and copyright trolls.

Re:[need YMMV]

[flaming error]

Do explain. Other than making you a novelty at parties, I don't see how your ride would significantly impact your life.

copycat

[xgeorgio]

Even in this, he tried to mimic the big rival (Steve Jobs).
The guy never learns.

Re:Fuck the world

[Hognoxious]

Profit will solve MY problems.

Did those little bastards steal your underpants too?

Global poverty

[NewYork]

To alleviate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... every https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... Currency should be pegged to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... Oil for 4 years till https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... is resolved.

Re:[need YMMV]

[Sciath]

I think you missed the whole point. That being life can be rewarding without being wealthy. A seven figure annuity? Really? Like that is the measure of a life well lived? It only demonstrates that those individuals made far more than what was suitable for a relatively comfortable lifestyle. There is a phenomena in economics that has yet to be falsified. That being, the more one person is paid the fewer dollars there are to spread around the economy. It's called "the concentration of wealth" and most economists are coming around to the idea that the concentration of wealth is destructive to society overall. I'm not proposing socialism or communism but I do advocate for a more equitable system of the distribution of a nation's capital. No one in their right mind can rationally assert they are that much of a better person than another to justify possessing assets worth $76 billion dollars Bile Gates) while many other hard working people barely see even 1 million their entire life. Even Warren Buffett has disparaged his own wealth and the wealth of the world's wealthiest families calling it "sinful" . The existence of the Gates Foundation and it's supposed non-profit activities along with other similar foundations would not even be needed if more working people had more disposable income.