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Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy
An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he's written an article for Quartz explaining why: "I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century's progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem." He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren't doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions.
Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Having consistent power to refrigerate vaccines and medicines, and sterilize needles is critical to curing diseases worldwide.
Moving to a more decentralized approach of clean power generation allows areas with major health problems from disease to leapfrog past other countries. And because they're not that useful in warfare, if done on a mass produced level and inexpensively, it makes it easy enough to maintain (just train people to fix them and install them, and set them on resupply and maintenance runs, with text messages for "out of supplies" or "power running low" or "diagnostic error code physical problem") using burst relay communications.
Same goes for water. The Gates Foundation has demonstrated they could mass produce clean water supplies from ... basically sewage (human wastes). They just need power supplies to run those. If you roll out solar worldwide in mass quantities you drop the cost to maintain and install low enough. And you can use such devices to charge phones that use low energy communications. Most diseases in poor nations involve lack of clean drinking water. If you can't get clean drinking water locally but you can get it free from one of these devices, you'll use that. Nobody wants their babies to die.
Doesn't matter if it won't charge your phone at night when it needs power to run the fridges, so long as you make it modular.
Very good idea.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.
Carnegie was a horrible horrible human being, he tried to buy his soul back with all the "giving back".
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No. He once ran a company that attempted to push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior, but that wasn't evil.
If you don't follow, remember that in American law, anything that is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. And the only way to know if something is forbidden is to :
1) Do it
2) Be challenged (a) by someone who can show harm
3) Have it upheld by the Supreme Court
Anything else means it's legal, or legal in some part of the country, or technically legal while violating the spirit of the law.
I remember when Bill Gates was evil, but I was ignorant then. I have since learned the law, the constitution, and relevant ancillary information.
Challenge for you: Sadeep Napreeka (based on memory, not intended to be an insult) runs the company now, and Windows 10 kinda seems like a privacy nightmare. Comparatively, billg seems tame.
So if someone should down mod you, it seems natural and fair. Up mod seems kinda shill reinforcing shill.
Or maybe someone does not understand America.
Nothing is illegal. Oh, yeah, that should be. Oh and that, and maybe that recent thing. Oh, and let's add that to the list.
America has allowed numerous terrible behaviours, until they demonstrated social harm.
Land of the free, and all that.
Evil has a spiritual connotation. Care to defend?
this seems like a noble thing to do. So why am I left with this feeling that he is still a crooked, slimy sleazeball? I've said this before but this is straight out of the Robber Baron playbook.
Act 1 - make as much money as humanly possible. If you have to screw people over or even break laws along the way, so be it.
Act 2 - turn into a philanthropist and give some of it back. Note: not ALL of it, SOME of it.
In the end, most people have short memories and will only remember the last act not the first.
I'm not saying that he hasn't done anything good with his money. He has. But he's still a crook.
It does if the power is being used for water purification, or to run simple productive machines like saws and drills. Most of the places that are in desperate poverty have very little productive capacity beyond the healthy person. the goal is a sustainable way to replicate industrial revolution.
Unless you take the money you've made and do something that contradicts conservative dogma (climate change), at which point your previously unimpeachable opinions are all wrong and you are wasting (i.e. dumping) your fortune. Obviously you have had some sort of mental breakdown. You and your projects are then open to endless criticism. All that stuff about the freedom to spend your money any way you want goes right out the window (or Windows in this case).
Hypocritical much?
Why is Snark Required?
You seem to be equating the law with morality. Or you're being really really sarcastic. I'm not sure which. You can be evil while staying within the letter of the law, and you can break the law daily while retaining your morality. The law, as you correctly identify, does not promote or enforce good morals, not does it prevent bad or evil acts, it merely forbids some things that cause proven (and typically financial) harm. So your post could be paraphrased as follows:
(1) I'm going to state that his acts weren't evil
(2) Then I'm going to talk about an irrelevant subject for quite some time
(3) Then I'm going to claim that evil has a spiritual connotation, despite this also being irrelevant even if it were true.
How is anyone supposed to "defend" against nonsense like this? He says billg was evil (not even super-seriously I might add) and you say he was too. That's all we've got here. You haven't really earned a response on the subject at hand.