Bill Gates' Donation of Thousands of Chickens Rejected by Bolivia (theverge.com)

HughPickens.com shares an article from The Verge: Bill Gates' philanthropic efforts are usually greeted with near-universal praise, but a recent attempt by the US billionaire to donate 100,000 chickens ruffled some feathers. The leftist government of Bolivia...has refused the donation, describing Gates' gift as "offensive." "He does not know Bolivia's reality to think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce," said Cesar Cocarico [Bolivia's minister of land and rural development]... "Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia, and once he knows more, apologize to us."
Gates' "Coop Dreams" initiative partnered with Heifer International, a group which fights poverty by delivering livestock and agricultural training, to deliver 100,000 chickens around the world, mostly to sub-Saharan Africa, as a way to improve the lives of people making $2 a day. In a blog post Gates noted that chickens are cheap and easy to take care, while selling flocks of chickens can be a profitable business, and raising chickens offers other benefits to children and families. "Our foundation is betting on chickens..." Gates writes, adding "if I were in their shoes, that's what I would do -- I would raise chickens."

Comments

Here we come to save the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Happened in Africa with food aid. What do you think the effect on an agrarian economy would be if you came in and flooded the market with free food?

Re:Here we come to save the day

[ShanghaiBill]

What do you think the effect on an agrarian economy would be if you came in and flooded the market with free food?

This would not "flood the market". 100,000 chickens is less than 0.1% of Bolivia's annual chicken production, and only a small portion of the 100K chickens would go to Bolivia. Most are going to Africa. Anyway, this is not about "more chickens", it is about chicken redistribution. It is not like crates of chickens are going to flown from America. The chickens will be purchased locally and given to a handful of the poorest families. The reason that BG is doing this is because there is actual data that shows it this program has helped similar families in the past.

Re:Here we come to save the day

[Anonymous Coward]

640,000 chickens should be enough for anyone.

Re:Here we come to save the day

[Anonymice]

The primary consequence of flooding a market with a product is temporary, the secondary consequence is the destruction of the market for the local producers, thereby putting them out of business.
This is why China's public subsidising of their exports is pissing off other countries. This is one of the reasons why Uber is causing such controversy.

The difference here is that the foundation isn't importing the product, but buying them locally & redistributing, thereby both supporting the local market & growing it by helping other's setup shop.

Re:Here we come to save the day

[Megol]

It is evident he did't believe it (given well documented development from MS supported by Gates) so any statement otherwise could only be a joke or an outright lie.

Here's some facts: MSDOS wasn't limited to 640kiB memory, some MSDOS systems shipped with much more memory and the OS had no problem supporting that. What was limited to 640kiB (actually not - but practically) was the early IBM PC systems and that was entirely due to design choices. So it was fully compatible IBM PC clones that had a limitation, not MSDOS. The memory limitation of MSDOS without extenders on 80386 and later is 1Mi+64ki-16 bytes (due to the overlapped segment:offset design of the original 8086).

But the target for most MSDOS compatible software was 640kB, due again to the design choices of IBM. IF Bill Gates ever said that it would logically be as a target specification for MS software... But the claims he did aren't credible and illogical.

Trending now...

[johnsnails]

#GATEGATE

Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Lisandro]

Bolivia already produces 115 million chickens a year. The country is not first world by any measure, but people are not starving to death on the streets either.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[dwywit]

Misguided and ill-informed on the part of BG or his advisors, sure - but well-intentioned, and the response was a bit ungracious. Perhaps something along the lines of "Thanks, but we don't really need them. Please send the chickens to country x, and we'd rather have some solar panels or well pumps, or how about some internet infrastructure for our schools?"

That's probably a different scale of funding, but BG has $$$ to spare.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I've spent a lot of time in the poorest Latin American countries (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia), and if there's one thing the region has in abundance, it's fucking chickens. The things are everywhere. Offering chickens demonstrates an utter lack of any kind understanding of the region. It would not be so bad, except that the countries are also full of holier than thou aid workers who cruise around in land rovers and try to tell farmers how to farm... except the aid workers aren't farmers and don't know how to farm, especially given local climates.

If you ask Bolivians, they'll tell you the first thing they need is transpotation infrastructure so that they can trade these scads of chickens they have. Spend some time there and you'll see they're right.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[quenda]

Outside the cities, much of the country is dirt poor. If the government will not allow aid distribution, Gates should do a covert air-drop to impoverished villages.
However, to reduce the environmental risks of yet another introduced species escaping and going feral, a native American fowl could be dropped instead. I suggest turkeys.

Re: Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Bolivia not Venezuela, you ignorant american!

Also, those were probably GMO chickens he was trying to donate. Third world people usually don't take kindly to them.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Mashiki]

He would have been better donating them to Venezuela, with the on-going problems and food riots it might have helped a bit. There's also the possibility that it would have simply intensified the problem.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Lisandro]

Again: Bolivia is far from a promised land, but things there are MUCH better than most other places in the world. Their death by malnutrition rates are well below most of Africa, for example: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrition/by-country/.

My point is, in a country which already produces 300,000 chickens per day, offering 100,000 to fight hunger is a bit insulting.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Firethorn]

Oh, because apparently people were confused.

I know this took place in Bolivia, but I'm using Venezuela as an example of where officials are willing to cut their own country's throat to save some face.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Les Nessman :-)

Re: Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Anonymous Coward]

The chickens don't just have GMOs but come with a "free" copy of Windows 10, which they also rejected.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Gavagai80]

Because there's really no chicken fertility crisis, so if they'd wanted 100,000 more chickens they'd have bred them already.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ShanghaiBill]

I know this took place in Bolivia, but I'm using Venezuela as an example of where officials are willing to cut their own country's throat to save some face.

Bolivia is another country where appearances matter more than reality to the government. Bolivia as a whole is not as poor as many countries in Africa, but there are still some very poor people who would benefit from this gift. Instead of refusing it out of pride, maybe Morales should let the individual families decide for themselves.

Disclaimer: I am a non-poor American, and I have chickens (six leghorn laying hens). Chickens are very easy to care for, and mine live mostly on table scraps, garden waste, and bugs.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ShanghaiBill]

There's a lot of them on Kauai, but only because the island has almost no predators.

The Polynesians brought chickens to Hawaii, and all of the islands used to have feral chickens. But introduced mongooses wiped them out on all the other major islands. Kauai has no mongooses, so they survive there. Mongooses cannot kill an adult chicken, but they eat the eggs and young.

Just think of the energy cost of laying an egg on most days.

Feral chickens quickly revert to laying far fewer eggs. The feral chickens on Kauai only lay a few clutches per year, when they are ready to brood.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[gtall]

Maduro would have just claimed it was another gringo plot to unstablize his workers paradise. Then he'll claim anyone accepting one of these Yankee chickens would be investigated for terrorist leanings.

Venezuela is best left to the Venezuelans. I think of it as a drug addict, it must hit rock bottom before it will accept any sort change.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are ignorant as **. If they produce 150 million chickens a year as claimed, even the poorest of them should be able to spare a few cents, buy a few chicks and raise them at home if thats what they want.

The reason they don't do it already is because like in most countries, the population is mostly urban and raising chickens in cities is an unsanitary hell and a huge health hazard. Don't just believe my words, get a dozen of chicks and try raising them in your house and give us your thoughts after a year.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Solandri]

The stuff most aid organizations provide (food, clean water, medicine) aren't really what poor countries need. It's literally putting the cart before the horse, and can even be counter-productive by making life harder or impossible for domestic producers of those things, and allowing these countries' population to grow beyond their ability to self-sustain themselves.

These countries need to develop their own economy first.That's why UN assistance for developing nations focuses on building infrastructure, increasing the number of citizens participating in the economy (education and gender equality), figuring out ways to exploit natural resources, facilitating trade and economic development, and helping set up government programs to help support all these things. Once you get the economic ball rolling, they can grow their own food, clean their own water, build their own hospitals. These things are the result of development. Giving people the end product instead of the means to produce the end product is exactly what the aphorism "give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life" tells us not to do.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[drinkypoo]

Given the number of positive things I've heard about his donations,

That's odd, everything I've heard about his donations has been negative. When he gives health care, it's to strengthen big pharma. You can't get it unless your nation agrees to give strong IP protection to them. When he gives education, it's to create more IT professionals, but it doesn't really improve general education, and usually it actually harms it by drawing attention (and funding) away from initiatives which are actually meaningful. So what positive things have you been hearing about the donations of the Gates foundation?

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ScentCone]

That's odd, everything I've heard about his donations has been negative.

That's called confirmation bias. You hate him, so you only seek, find, remember, and pass along information that allows you to feel good about that position. Maybe you should check with someone who doesn't have malaria, but otherwise would. Or someone in a developing country that has unprecedented education opportunities they'd otherwise have missed out on. They'd question your priorities. Ask someone in Cameroon, who literally went from rural village life to being a well paid consultant in a rapidly growing tech-centric urban economy if they'd rather the Gates Foundation had closed up shop. I know, you think it's either apocryphal, or that whatever strings are attached are too onerous. Having had just such a formerly impoverished rural boy from Cameroon move in as the young man next door, and watch him, over the course of just a few years, buy three houses in the neighborhood for his extended family (the children of which rotate through schools in Europe and trips back to Africa to further broaden their horizons), I think your smug disdain for the Gates Foundation is a bit of Shakespearean protesting too much. What's the problem, really? Just frustrated that it's not the Clinton Foundation that my Cameroonian friend praises for wildly improving the lives of nearly everyone in his large family?

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[h33t l4x0r]

It costs money to breed chickens. A meat chicken is harvested after 2 months. Breeding can't happen before 6 months. So if you're living month-to-month, where does the extra 4 months of feed plus the lost revenue from the meat come from? Bolivian food-stamps? They don't exist.

Re: Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[Bing Tsher E]

The current chicken farmers probably don't want an outsider to come in and 'crash' their market by widely distributing breeding stock to the entire populace. That would be a game changer if it gave the whole population a respite in the form of enough chickens to start breeding them on their own, instead of only having enough of them to eat.

Just my conjecture, not anything known for certain.

But the President of Bolivia is just being a politician and grandstanding against the Big Bad Westerner.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[swillden]

Disclaimer: I am a non-poor American, and I have chickens (six leghorn laying hens). Chickens are very easy to care for, and mine live mostly on table scraps, garden waste, and bugs.

This is interesting to me. I've been considering getting some chickens, but other family members who have them say they're actually quite expensive to feed, and argue that the resulting eggs, while good, are far more expensive than those from the grocery store. What's your take?

Re: Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ShanghaiBill]

They are cleaner and easier to care for than my dogs.

I have chickens. They are cleaner than dogs. But in some ways they are harder, and in other ways easier to raise. If I forget to feed my dog, or her water dish is empty, she will come and let me know. With chickens, I have to remember. But you don't have to walk a chicken, and they will scrounge and scratch for some of their food. Also, dogs don't lay eggs. My daughter had parakeets for several years, and the chickens are definitely less trouble than those.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ShanghaiBill]

This is interesting to me. I've been considering getting some chickens, but other family members who have them say they're actually quite expensive to feed, and argue that the resulting eggs, while good, are far more expensive than those from the grocery store. What's your take?

You are NOT going to save money unless you consider your time to be worthless. You can't compete with factory farms. You should just think of it as more of a hobby. Here are some benefits:

1. You will have fresh eggs everyday. More in the summer but a few even in the winter. Roughly 300 eggs/year/hen.
2. Your kids will learn that food doesn't come from factories, and they will learn responsibility.
3. You will know that your eggs came from humanely treated chickens, and not from a warehouse of hens crammed into battery cages. Go visit a factory farm. The stench alone will make you never want to eat store-bought eggs again.
4. They will eat almost anything, including watermelon rinds, apple cores, carrot peels, etc. and convert all of that into protein nodules. You will still need to supplement that with some commercial feed.
5. The eggs taste much better, especially if they have access to a lot of insects and worms. I use a pitchfork to turn over part of the compost heap so they can get to the wrigglers.
6. When the zombie apocalypse comes you can feed the human corpses to your chickens, or if you prefer, you can let the bodies decompose and feed the maggots to your hens. You will survive while others starve.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[ScentCone]

That's nice. So what about the money they spend on advertising and marketing?

What about it? Do you own a business, or work for one? Have you considered how well you'd fare if nobody was allowed to promote your business or try to find new customers, or remind people why your product or service is a good alternative to something else? Do you understand that private companies have to actually generate revenue or they can't do anything, because they'll be bankrupt?

Actually, Medicare is a financing program that pays private providers, not a health care provider itself.

Except in order to use that financing program, you have to find doctors and facilities that are willing (usually at a financial loss) to conduct their operations and even their patient-by-patient, case-by-case decision making and prioritization according to Medicare's rules. That generally results in doctors losing money, which brings us to...

However, in terms of overhead, it's quite as good as any number of private providers of insurance and better than many.

No, it's not. It's rife with fraud and waste. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth.

But the VA? For all the complaints about it, it has high satisfaction rates when it comes to care

Once you GET care. Or IF you get care.

IOW, good stewardship of your tax dollars. Do you want to change that?

Good stewardship of my tax dollars would have seen at least ONE person lose their job over the truly terrible conditions and processes exposed year after year as third parties and the VA itself review how awfully run the agency is. Vets waiting months and years to be seen. Do you understand that?

It's more cost effective to get Bill Gates to stop.

Yeah, better to just let all of that medical care and education grind to a halt. You hate him so much you'd rather see other people suffer than see them enjoy a shred of improvement through the billions of dollars his foundation spends on helping people. If the goal is to express your hatred, then yes, it might indeed be more efficient to let a lot of people die or go without education just to give you the satisfaction of shutting him down. In the meantime, why aren't YOU providing health care and education through your own foundation? Be specific.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[lgw]

When you find yourself defending the VA, it's time to stop talking. Seriously.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[lgw]

So, then, buying some chickens from local farmers and giving them to some poorer folks, so that they can participate in the economy themselves, that would be good, right? This isn't about handing out Chicken McNuggets, it's about letting a few new families become chicken farmers.

There are plenty of aid organizations focused on the exact things you describe: education in skills directly useful in the community, making it safe for girls to go to school, helping people get a small capital stake to move beyond subsistence to some sort of small business, that sort of thing. The Gates Foundation pours millions into such organizations.

Re:Well, that sounded extremely patronizing.

[NotAPK]

Chickens are modern dinosaurs and will gladly eat meat.

We have a few sturdy wooden boxes into which we regularly throw animal carcasses. The bodies are mostly scavenged from the road-side, others from shooting.

After a half week the body is crawling with maggots. We tip the whole lot out into the chicken coop. The little bastards go crazy for the wrigglers, but what may be surprising to many is that after a few days the bones will be stripped clean: the chickens happily eat the lot.

Very good for the chickens, and we feel good about keeping the neighborhood roads clear of road kill.

Translation

[mentil]

Keeping our citizens at the brink of starvation is how we maintain power. Increasing access to food weakens our political position.

Re:Translation

[tomhath]

You obviously have never seen real poverty in a Third World country. That link talks about "food insecure" people in the US, it doesn't talk about children starving to death.

Re:Translation

[ShanghaiBill]

what about?

Poverty in rich countries is not comparable to poverty in poor countries. The root causes are totally different. Poverty in poor countries is mostly caused by government mismanagement, and lack of opportunities. Poor people in rich countries are surrounded by an ocean of opportunity, but fail to take advantage of it, often because of substance abuse, mental illness, or simply bad health. Those are much harder problems to fix.

Re: Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as "simply bad health", and the rest of your comment is also bullshit.

Rich countries usually have much better and more accessible medicare than the US.

Maybe Bolivia should donate some chickens for the needy in the US and see whether they get accepted in the ocean of opportunity.

Re: You are not chickens

[Anonymous Coward]

You're mistaken. The lack of funny and lack of sense does not arise from you being new.

Customs!

[Elentar]

Well, I'm sure they really would have taken them, but the customs paperwork is just SO unpleasant, you know? And there is the matter of the 17% import duty on livestock, and there needs to be proof that someone will feed and house the chickens so that they don't become a burden on society. We can't have foreign chickens just coming into the country whenever they want.

Re:Customs!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

We can't have foreign chickens just coming into the country whenever they want.

Aren't chickens on the "no fly" list already anyway . . . ?

Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[drmaxx]

Not sure if chickens are the right thing to deliver, but Bolivia certainly does not know how to feed their population properly: https://www.wfp.org/stories/10... or http://www.unicef.org/bolivia/... I am always baffled, when pride is willing to kill people.

Re:Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[Dutch Gun]

It's a lot less baffling if you understand that the prideful people in power who are refusing the gifts are not the same folks that are going hungry.

Re:Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[bruce_the_loon]

The idea isn't for the chickens to be eaten, it's to bootstrap a chicken farm for the person in their local area. So you'd probably get 10 hens and 2 cocks and some training on how to feed and farm them for meat, how to get the hens fertilized and laying, then how to hatch and raise the chicks. It's an attempt to get a self-sufficient cycle going. How good an idea or how feasible it might be is left to your discernment.

Re:Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem here is that the cycle is already going. Bolivia has many problems, but lack of chickens isn't one of them. Every Bolivian can, in principle afford to buy some live chickens and start breeding, there's a chicken surplus, and chicken-based dishes are really popular in Bolivia. The trouble stems for the fact that the same surplus makes for low margins, lack of good infrastructure hampers trade in some areas, and a measly 100k chickens isn't going to do very much. The number is dwarfed by the total chicken production already in place and the cost of delivering them alone (not to mention the supporting materials required for starting small-scale farms) is enormous compared to the Bolivian market value of those same chickens. If you want to help Bolivia, invest in critical infrastructure for example.

Re:Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[Attila Dimedici]

Of course they would accept anonymous checks. The people in power in Bolivia would be able to get that money into their own bank accounts with no fear that the poor would be able to use it to become more politically powerful.

Re:Almost 20% of Bolivia is malnourished...

[Attila Dimedici]

The problem with someone like Bill Gates offering to "build infrastructure" in Bolivia is that most of the money will end up in the pockets of the politically powerful in Bolivia, and very little infrastructure will get built.
You might want to re-read the summary. These 100,000 chickens were going to be delivered by Heiffer International, which has a track record going back to WWII of delivering livestock to the desperately poor in third world countries. Having worked with a different charity that works with the poorest of the poor in third world countries I can tell you that a small investment in the lives of the very poor can have big results. Projects which invest a small amount of money making a difference for the very poor are much more effective at improving the situation than projects which invest a large amount of money in a "big" change.

Re:Seriously?

[Falconhell]

Thems the brakes.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously... to hell with that. I'll start:

"In breaking news, Microsoft once again lays an egg."

"Bolivia to Gates: We don't give a cluck."

"After airdropping 100,000 chickens on Bolivia, Bill Gates was heard to say, "As God is my witness, I thought chickens could fly.""

"Bill Gates thought that a chicken in every pot was a great idea.. until Bolivia then requested 100,000 pots."

"Bill Gates planned to ship the chickens by sea to Bolivia. When informed that Bolivia was landlocked, and did not have any ocean ports, Gates placed an urgent call to the head of Bing Maps. "It does, now.""

"In a gesture of appreciation, the Bolivian President promoted Colonel Sanders to General. On hearing of the effect of 100,000 free chickens being distributed to the poor on the national economy, the President then demoted him to cluck private."

"Gates explained his concepts about charities personally to the Bolivians, and gave the United Way as an example. He then went on to say that this was a Henway. When asked "What's a Henway?", Gates responded "Oh, about three pounds." He was shot the following dawn."

We live in a wealthy world. So wealthy.

[Iamthecheese]

The theory (I'll call this The Theory) goes like this: If you give free food to Africa, you'll price out African farmers who will starve because they have nothing else to do. And then the people will starve when you stop donating food.

That complaint seriously misses the point. Let me tell you why: African farmers don't need to farm. They need to do something that pays for what they need. Any work will do, really. As long as an unskilled person can do it. So there are three possibilities here: Industrialization is impossible for African nations (so there can't be other work) OR there isn't enough investment to drive industry (so the farmers can't get other work) OR technological unemployment now makes unskilled work insufficiently profitable to support a person.

Now African farmers are already doing something otherwise (effectively entirely) done by machine in first world countries. A farm in Europe requires far, far less human labor. A European farmer's job is more in the line of managing machines, scheduling planting, organizing finances, and so forth. You won't see him on his knees weeding a patch of land. You won't see him with a scythe in his hand at harvest time. You won't even see him helping a pig give birth or tending a sick cow* An EU farm averages "...an average size of 16.1 hectares per agricultural holding. An average EU farm has less than one person see here. 12 million farms, 10 million farmers.

If the above theory about farmers going out of work is to be believed then it's impossible for farming to make up a significant percentage of employment. Otherwise the complaint would be invalid. So the farming singularity has not arrived in Africa. I'm going to beg the question that a strong industrial economy and a service economy also haven't, I think it's obvious. This leaves the third possible support for The Theory completely without support. In Africa unskilled labor can still pay what passes for a living wage. On to the first possibility.

The statistics here tell us that Africa has averaged a 3 to 6 percent increase in GDP for the last decade. This is despite AIDS, Malaria, pants-on-head retarded or just evil actions by African politicians, revolutionary wars, and otherwise being the unwashed asshole of the world. More to the point, this increase represents industrialization. For evidence see this economic diversification report.

It may not be enough yet, or even certain but it is happening.

Going back to africaneconomicoutlook.org if we look at table 10, foreign direct investment we see that the middle objection to food exports to Africa is quite strong. Africa has averaged 51 billion dollars per year of direct foreign investment. For a whole continent that's shockingly small. As shown by continual growth through massive problems... problems that are going away one by one, Africa is at the cusp of a new era. All that needs to be done is entice a rational amount of foreign investment (say, 400 billion dollars per year) by parties interested in money, not power (actual economic investment, not strings-attached economic manipulation) and it will industrialize at a clip only seen so far in China's rise to power.

If that happens:
1. The Theory's complaint will be rendered moot very quickly by African farmers reaching par for productivity.
2. Food can be freely given on the basis that the vast majority of

Re:We live in a wealthy world. So wealthy.

[Blaskowicz]

I was going to make an opposing case.

Africa land is poor, because it didn't have glaciers crushing and moving the land etc. fertilizing it dozens of times. Lush forests are amazing but sustain on thin humus on top of worthless soil.
Huge stretches are water poor.
It's huge, like twice it looks like due to Mercator projection bias on maps.

I'm sure it might turn out a lot better, still.
I don't know about drawing borders on ethnical boundaries. No idea what the many cultures there think. Ethnical or tribal boundaries often are a US talking point : the US has wages multiple wars in the Middle East to dismantle and balkanize countries and it has been a huge disaster. A side victim was Libya, one of the better African countries to live in, which doesn't exist anymore.
I'm more familiar with the French version of what a state is so I see half or more African country-states as French speaking and English speaking ones. Language that help with mutual intelligibility but also could help develop industries such as solar panel manufacturing, nanotechnology, batteries and reverse fuel cells or whatever is useful, manufacturing and operating satellites and drones, whatever.
What if France was stuck on ethnical/regional boundaries : it would be like 15 or 20 countries each with their own languages, ditto Italy or Germany. Of course I'm applying what I know to a foreign whole continent so that has its limits.

They may leapfrog into a facebook (sigh) society. What will happen then? I don't know and I hate to think about that. Shitscared that it would lead to surveillance societies where the powerful target people to "disappear" and torture at will.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

[MrKaos]

Look at least he is not trying to give them Windows 10, that would really be insulting.

Re:Seriously?

[sumdumass]

Kudos for the wkrp reference. I doubt most will get it but it was the only one i actually laughed at. It made the rest tolerable.

Re:Thank you 0.1-percenter!

[Scutter]

So, your opinion is that the 0.1 percenter who has done more humanitarian work with his money that you could possibly dream of while you sit behind a keyboard and bitch about it should keep his mouth shut? I think I'd rather have him talk about his projects and why he stands behind his decisions. Honestly, I wish you'd make up your mind. You either want the billionaires to share their riches or you don't. You can't demand that they share and then complain when they do. I don't think he should have to apologize to you because he had a plan that you didn't like.