Heh, I hadn't noticed that. I suppose what I mean is that simplistic statements are almost always too simple to be accurate, but in my attempt to find a more pithy formulation I did pretty much what I criticised. In substance though I still stand by my point.
The Gates are a positive example, among the rich. Relatively speaking, they aren't that much more charitable than the 99%. So your question is addressed at the wrong audience.
That's not true, and the article you link makes it clear that it's not true: the poor give a greater proportion of their wealth to charity, which is different to giving more to charity.
It's also important to consider who receives the money. The Economist recently had an article analysing charitable giving in America, and found that the majority of charitable giving among non-wealthy people was to religious institutions that they personally attended. I'm loath to suggest that there are different "classes" of charitable giving, but I would also be hesitant to say that it's more generous to give more money but to things more closely connected to yourself.
As for your relative generosity point, that's surely just bonkers: your link claims that the "99%" give 4% of their income; Gates has given away around 50% of his net worth since 2007, and (according to Wikipedia) has pledged to eventually give away 95%. I don't see how you can look at those figures and arrive at the conclusion that he's not bee much more charitable than the ordinary person.
With an armed populace the government fears the people. This is freedom. With an unarmed populace the people fear the government. This is tyranny.
Really? So in the US the availability of firearms means that the government fears the people? It doesn't simply mean that the police are more militarized and heavy-handed, while the Government is no more accountable than it otherwise would be? Presumably Russia and Mexico are other bastions of freedom, while in most of Western Europe the populace lives under the heavy yoke of tyranny. Does it work in increments? China has less restrictive gun laws than much of Western Europe, so is it freer?
Enough sarcasm - there is a wider point here. Simplistic statements like the one you made are always wrong; the world is simply more complicated than that. The biggest problem with the debate on firearms ownership is that so many people on both sides are committed to a radical position that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but that is never questioned.
Michael Sandel in his Reith Lecture makes the point that if the objection to homosexual marriage really sprang from the standpoint usually claimed - that marriage is a Christian practice and that Christianity only supports marriage between a man and a woman - there would be a very simple solution: the state could get out of marriage entirely and offer only "civil unions"; marriage could then be a purely religious matter with no standing in law. That this solution is anathema to the vast majority of opponents of same-sex marriage betrays the real reason: state recognition confers a privileged status on people who marry. Opposition to same-sex marriage largely comes from people not wanting the state to acknowledge that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals. Or to put it colloquially: they just don't like gays.
It is enabling legislation - a statute that allows particular laws to be passed by secondary legislation (also called a statutory instrument - basically legislation that is 'passed' by a minister or a committee of ministers rather than the entire Parliament). It may sound undemocratic but it's inevitable - Parliament could not possibly scrutinise and pass enough legislation to deal with the pace at which the world changes. The power has to be devolved somewhere, and devolving it to Ministers at least has the advantage that someone visible is accountable for it, which means that the power is generally used sensibly and sparingly.
In this case the power, to my mind, seems more extensive than is appropriate for secondary legislation - I'm not defending it, just explaining why it is being done the way it is. There is some comfort in the fact that the Bill is still in the very early stages of the process and extensive secondary powers are the sort of thing that are often removed or curtailed during the debates.
Is it really necessary to explain that this is the first time anyone has offered a CS degree online in the history of humanity?
We're talking about a course about computing offered entirely over the internet. Surely if it hasn't been done recently we can be pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks didn't beat us to it?
A good primary and secondary education is necessary for an increasing proportion of jobs, including almost all professional or high-paying jobs. It is required for someone to go to college or university, or to enrol in many apprenticeships. It is also an opportunity to try different sports and hobbies, to be exposed to different points of view and, for many children, to get their only real meal of the day. With these things in mind it should require a very strong countervailing interest before we deny a child access to the school system. While I recognise that there is some inconvenience involved in not eating peanuts I do not believe that the interest of the other children in eating peanuts during school hours is sufficient to outweight the child's interest in a school education. Note too that for a large proportion of children the alternative to a state school education will be no education at all.
I think the larger point here, though, is that we need to recognise that this is a measure dealing with schoolchildren, not adults. Avoiding doing things that we know can harm those around us - even though we may want to do that thing - is a very basic form of politeness, and politeness is treated differently with adults than with children. We hope adults will be polite, but ultimately they are free not to be and will be punished only by social disapprobation. Among children, however, we enforce politeness, partly to teach them how they should behave and partly because children are not yet mature enough to consider the effect of their actions on those around them.
The difference is that right now, they're children. We try to soften things for children because they don't have the emotional or mental maturity of an adult; stress that would be minor for an adult can leave children in tears or result in depression. There will be plenty of time for them to learn how horrible the world can be when they're adults even if we try to take the edges off a little while they're growing up.
As I have said in another reply, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on peanut allergies. I would imagine, though, that there would be a gap between an allergy that could be triggered by someone eating peanuts in the same room as you and one that would be triggered by your having eaten them before school.
I don't see how the fact that children cannot be made totally safe has any impact on whether, at a school attended by a child with a serious allergy to peanuts, it is reasonable to ban peanuts. Doubtless they will still not be completely safe. But the question the school is trying to answer is whether they can reduce the risk to a child in their care using a measure that is not disproportionately onerous or inconvenient. Not allowing students to bring peanuts for lunch is inconvenient, but not enormously so. I'm not qualified to say how far the risk to a severely allergic pupil is reduced by prohibiting peanuts, but I'm not going to second-guess the school if they have decided (quite possibly with medical advice) that the reduction outweighs that inconvenience. Nor would I criticise them for erring on the side of caution.
I'm not an expert on peanut allergies. I have certainly heard it said that allergies are more common and more frequently serious than they once were. That said, today it is not the case that every school today bans peanuts. Some schools do because they have discovered that one of the pupils at the school has a severe allergy to peanuts. I can't imagine that anyone would consider that to be unreasonable.
As for your comment about workplaces, it is trite to say that children and adults are different. A working adult is better equipped to take care of him or herself, both because they are more mature and because they are free to eat where and what they please, unlike a child who must stay in school for lunch. Similarly eating lunch at work is nothing like lunch-time at a school with a thousand or more pupils. Moreover it is not a question of banning peanuts from all workplaces, just as it is not a question of banning them from all schools. If you ever work with a person with a serious peanut allergy I suspect that peanuts will effectively be banned - either officially by the employer, or unofficially because the person in question simply explains their allergy and asks you not to bring peanuts in. At a previous job a colleague explained to me on my first day that she had a serious latex allergy, and asked me not to wear anything with latex in or bring any latex-containing products in as she would go into shock; she also showed me how to use an epi pen in case she did. Needless to say I did not reply by telling her that she could simply isolate herself since she was the one with the problem.
A very serious peanut allergy can mean that having peanuts near you can send you into anaphylactic shock. Isolating the child therefore has to mean really isolating them - if almost everyone goes to the cafeteria at lunch time and they can't they will be left out every day. Children are very sensitive to being left out, and a child with a serious allergy will already be excluded from a lot of events because they are held at restaurants that use peanuts. Even then there is the risk of cross-contamination, snacks being eaten outside the cafeteria, or children still having bits of peanut on them, any of which could lead to a shocking and potentially fatal attack.
A lot of schools simply reason that it is better to slightly inconvenience the rest of the school if that means not having to exclude the child with the allergy and reduces the risk that the child suffers an anaphylactic shock - which as well as being potentially fatal for the affected child, would be extremely traumatic for the children around them.
I know this is a joke, but actually it makes a point that is worth making in response to the rather alarmist headline.
Quoting from the preface to the bill:
Nothing in these proposals will authorise the interception of the content of a communication. Nor will it require the collection of all internet data, which would be neither feasible, necessary nor proportionate. We will extend existing safeguards regarding data retention, access and oversight. And we will remove other statutory powers with weaker safeguards under which communications data can currently be accessed by public authorities.
This bill would mean that:
-ISPs have to store "communications data" (what you connect to, for how long etc - not the content of any communications) for a period of up to 12 months
-The ISP must give the police access to the data if this is
-Required for one of a number of prescribed reasons (most notably, prevention or investigation of crime), and
-Authorised by a senior police officer
The bill does not directly require judicial approval of a request for information, but as with other powers devolved to senior police officers the decision will be judicially reviewable. The bill would also allow the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to investigate use of the powers.
I'm not sure, as yet, what to make of this bill. There are obviously privacy concerns in collecting this sort of information, and it would be very easy to simply declare that no intrusion into peoples' privacy is ever warranted. I think though that that would be an overly simplistic view. As more communications take place online there are more circumstances in which there is a good reason for authorities to want access to communications data, whether it's to find position data from the mobile phone of a kidnapped child, or to look for a pattern of communications when investigating organised crime. Neither shutting out law enforcement completely in the name of personal privacy, nor allowing unfettered access in the name of safety, is a sensible response.
My reading of this bill is that it is an attempt to strike a balance by creating a tiered system. Data that is totally public is available to the police without any authorisation at all. Data that is not public, but where the invasion into privacy is less extensive (such as data on use of the internet but not including the content of any communications) requires justification and authorisation, but does not require judicial scrutiny. Where the intrusion is more extensive, as with interception of communications, the justification must be greater and judicial authorisation is required.
I am not sure whether this is the correct balance - although I don't doubt that senior police officers will in general behave reasonably, I wonder how effectively they can be overseen when the person whose privacy is compromised will not know that the measures have been authorised - but it should be recognised that this is an attempt to balance competing issues.
I think you might be becoming overly focussed on one detail. As I said above, even ignoring completely the no-condom allegation there is plenty with which to charge him, in Sweden or in England. The question of whether deceiving someone about whether you will use a condom should be a crime, or whether he in fact deceived her here, is an irrelevant sideshow.
There are four charges: that on 14 August 2010 he committed "unlawful coercion" when he held complainant 1 down with his body weight in a sexual manner; that he "sexually molested" complainant 1 when he had condom-less sex with her after she insisted that he use one; that he had condom-less sex with complainant 2 on the morning of 17 August while she was asleep; and that he "deliberately molested" complainant 1 on 18 August 2010 by pressing his erect penis against her body.
The law in England on consent obtained by deception is complex and unwieldy. I am not an expert, but I don't think lying about whether you are wearing a condom would be sufficient to vitiate consent. Even if that particular charge would not be a crime in England and Wales, however, if the allegations are true he would still potentially be guilty of rape and sexual assault.
No, it isn't. The ID on brass probably won't even be admissible in court for the reason that brass gets reused all the time. Any would-be criminal's defense would be, "I fired those rounds at the firing range, and the REAL murderer retrieved them from the floor, reloaded them and used them to commit the crime."
What is this based on?
The test for admissibility, broadly, is whether the value of the evidence is greater than the risk of it unfairly prejudicing the trial. That doesn't mean that you can't admit evidence that could bear more than one interpretation. Deciding whether the alternative interpretation is a reasonable one - and therefore creates reasonable doubt - is precisely the role of the jury.
A few people have said this. What tax is it that he's avoiding? I find it a bit difficult to follow the logic that would make giving away $30bn to avoid a tiny fraction of that in tax financially viable.
I don't think people are forgetting Microsoft's business practices; it's a matter of priorities.
Outside Slashdot I think if you asked people to weigh the economic harm caused by Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly against the lives of the millions of people who will probably be saved by the Gates Foundation's philanthropy they wouldn't take a second to decide that overall this has been positive.
You're quite right, of course. For some reason I thought he was a writer for PC Magazine rather than being written about in PC Magazine. In my defence I can only state that I'm not American so I'm not familiar with any of the magazines or newspapers he has written for.
Despite my blunder I would stick by my main point: it's difficult to imagine Gladwell writing an article because he hopes that the Gates Foundation will reward him, which was the scenario postulated by the GGP.
As I posted in response to another person claiming that the Foundation is a vehicle for private profit: when making such a serious allegation it behoves you to show your evidence.
One of your claims is demonstrably untrue. Audited accounts for the Gates Foundation show that it makes far greater charitable grants than it is required to: over three times the minimum.
Regarding your claim that it is a tax-avoidance scheme, could you please set out which tax(es) Mr Gates was attempting to avoid?
Regarding your claim that the cash "flows straight back in to Gates' considerable investments in major drug companies", could you please back up the two claims that:
- Bill Gates has considerable investments in major drug companies, and
- There is some reasonably plausible way that he could expect to recoup the sum (approaching $30bn) that he has donated to the Foundation
I have posted relatively extensively elsewhere on Gates' stock holdings, insofar as they are public. Forgive me for quoting myself:
[As far as I can tell, Bill Gates] holds his shares through Cascade Investment LLC, the filings of which are available at sec.gov. There's a digest of its current holdings at GuruFocus - I haven't checked its accuracy. What it appears to show, however, is a portfolio that is not in any way focused on big pharma. I wasn't able to find any pharmaceutical conflicts, either directly or indirectly, by comparing that list to the Foundation's grant history, although I admit that I haven't gone through everything - I simply don't have time. One holding that I imagine will be criticised is Monsanto. I don't know how large that holding is, and while you could find out by going through all the filings I'm not inclined to; if the strongest claim that can be made is that Mr Gates set up the Gates Foundation and gave away something approaching $30bn in the hope that he would somehow make it back on Monsanto stocks then I think the argument rather defeats itself.
It has been suggested that he acquired some shares in pharmaceutical companies outside his Cascade Investment portfolio in 2002. I suspect that that may be a reporting error; even if it is not, the investments were well under $1bn. It is implausible to suggest that they could ever regain the $30bn donated.
You have made serious allegations about an outwardly philanthropic activity. I would suggest that you should either back up those allegations or recant them.
I find it a bit odd to describe a man as an "unrepentant criminal" and a "supervillain" because he was CEO of a company that was the subject of proceedings for anti-competitive practices. I find it even more difficult to see that that implies that any outwardly philanthropic act on his past must be merely a ploy to make a personal profit.
I don't think your sources are quite as damning as you think. The second one is not reporting an investment by Gates at all - the purchase is by the Gates Foundation not the individual. The other article sounds like it might be referring to the same investment and simply have mistakenly omitted the 'Foundation'; other contemporaneous accounts sound like they are referring to the same investment and make it clear that it is the foundation that invested not the man.
That's not the big problem with this though. Even assuming that the Register article is correct and he did personally invest in pharmaceutical companies in 2002, your account remains inherently implausible. We have to believe that Mr Gates - an experienced businessman - could find no better way to make more money than to give away almost $30bn to try to boost the value of less than a billion dollars of pharmaceutical stock. We have to believe that in the face of the fact that from what we know of his current investments he certainly isn't investing heavily in big pharma. We have to believe that Warren Buffett is presumably in on the scheme. And then we come right back to the big problem again, which is the inherent implausibility of the claim that the richest man in the world would give 40% of his wealth to a charitable foundation in order to make a profit.
Microsoft's business practices, and the extent to which Gates was personally responsible for them, is not the issue. What you said was that the Gates foundation exists to turn a personal profit and that its assets will not be distributed but instead given to wealthy individuals. You went so far as to hint that it might be some sort of extortion:
The first time is free. Just wait until the next health crisis, see what fucking happens.
Restating that he is "engaging in for-profit economic activity that benefits him directly" isn't evidence - it's just the same assertion that you made the first time. I've looked around on Google for information going either way and found nothing of note.There was an article pointing out that conflicts of interest are possible in foundations; the closest I could find to someone alleging that the Foundation is a front for Gates' private profit was an InfoWars article that creates an imagined conflict by confusing shares held by Gates and shares held by the Gates Foundation, before going on to claim that
Bill Gates, son of a top Planned Parenthood official , is in league with a group of wealthy eugencists working to reduce the world’s population,
a claim which, to my mind at least, does very little for the credibility of its author.
I thought previously that there was no information available on Bill Gates' personal shareholdings. However I now find that he holds his shares through Cascade Investment LLC, the filings of which are available at sec.gov. There's a digest of its current holdings at GuruFocus - I haven't checked its accuracy. What it appears to show, however, is a portfolio that is not in any way focused on big pharma. I wasn't able to find any pharmaceutical conflicts, either directly or indirectly, by comparing that list to the Foundation's grant history, although I admit that I haven't gone through everything - I simply don't have time. One holding that I imagine will be criticised is Monsanto. I don't know how large that holding is, and while you could find out by going through all the filings I'm not inclined to; if the strongest claim that can be made is that Mr Gates set up the Gates Foundation and gave away something approaching $30bn in the hope that he would somehow make it back on Monsanto stocks then I think the argument rather defeats itself.
As regards my "honourable" remark, it was a rough paraphrase of a comment made by our Prime Minister, David Cameron, in the House of Commons and which I thought was rather apposite. It wasn't meant to offend - and in any case, if you are concerned about your honour there is plenty of time for you to salvage it by providing evidence of your claim that the Gates Foundation is an attempt for Bill Gates to make a private profit.
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Heh, I hadn't noticed that. I suppose what I mean is that simplistic statements are almost always too simple to be accurate, but in my attempt to find a more pithy formulation I did pretty much what I criticised.
In substance though I still stand by my point.
They aren't the same thing: one compares the poor to the rich, the other compares the Gates' to the poor. Those are different comparisons.
Wrong assumption there, buddy. Turns out that poor people give more to charity than rich people.
The Gates are a positive example, among the rich. Relatively speaking, they aren't that much more charitable than the 99%. So your question is addressed at the wrong audience.
That's not true, and the article you link makes it clear that it's not true: the poor give a greater proportion of their wealth to charity, which is different to giving more to charity.
It's also important to consider who receives the money. The Economist recently had an article analysing charitable giving in America, and found that the majority of charitable giving among non-wealthy people was to religious institutions that they personally attended. I'm loath to suggest that there are different "classes" of charitable giving, but I would also be hesitant to say that it's more generous to give more money but to things more closely connected to yourself.
As for your relative generosity point, that's surely just bonkers: your link claims that the "99%" give 4% of their income; Gates has given away around 50% of his net worth since 2007, and (according to Wikipedia) has pledged to eventually give away 95%. I don't see how you can look at those figures and arrive at the conclusion that he's not bee much more charitable than the ordinary person.
With an armed populace the government fears the people. This is freedom.
With an unarmed populace the people fear the government. This is tyranny.
Really?
So in the US the availability of firearms means that the government fears the people? It doesn't simply mean that the police are more militarized and heavy-handed, while the Government is no more accountable than it otherwise would be?
Presumably Russia and Mexico are other bastions of freedom, while in most of Western Europe the populace lives under the heavy yoke of tyranny.
Does it work in increments? China has less restrictive gun laws than much of Western Europe, so is it freer?
Enough sarcasm - there is a wider point here. Simplistic statements like the one you made are always wrong; the world is simply more complicated than that. The biggest problem with the debate on firearms ownership is that so many people on both sides are committed to a radical position that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but that is never questioned.
Michael Sandel in his Reith Lecture makes the point that if the objection to homosexual marriage really sprang from the standpoint usually claimed - that marriage is a Christian practice and that Christianity only supports marriage between a man and a woman - there would be a very simple solution: the state could get out of marriage entirely and offer only "civil unions"; marriage could then be a purely religious matter with no standing in law. That this solution is anathema to the vast majority of opponents of same-sex marriage betrays the real reason: state recognition confers a privileged status on people who marry. Opposition to same-sex marriage largely comes from people not wanting the state to acknowledge that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals.
Or to put it colloquially: they just don't like gays.
It is enabling legislation - a statute that allows particular laws to be passed by secondary legislation (also called a statutory instrument - basically legislation that is 'passed' by a minister or a committee of ministers rather than the entire Parliament). It may sound undemocratic but it's inevitable - Parliament could not possibly scrutinise and pass enough legislation to deal with the pace at which the world changes. The power has to be devolved somewhere, and devolving it to Ministers at least has the advantage that someone visible is accountable for it, which means that the power is generally used sensibly and sparingly.
In this case the power, to my mind, seems more extensive than is appropriate for secondary legislation - I'm not defending it, just explaining why it is being done the way it is. There is some comfort in the fact that the Bill is still in the very early stages of the process and extensive secondary powers are the sort of thing that are often removed or curtailed during the debates.
Is it really necessary to explain that this is the first time anyone has offered a CS degree online in the history of humanity?
We're talking about a course about computing offered entirely over the internet. Surely if it hasn't been done recently we can be pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks didn't beat us to it?
A good primary and secondary education is necessary for an increasing proportion of jobs, including almost all professional or high-paying jobs. It is required for someone to go to college or university, or to enrol in many apprenticeships. It is also an opportunity to try different sports and hobbies, to be exposed to different points of view and, for many children, to get their only real meal of the day. With these things in mind it should require a very strong countervailing interest before we deny a child access to the school system. While I recognise that there is some inconvenience involved in not eating peanuts I do not believe that the interest of the other children in eating peanuts during school hours is sufficient to outweight the child's interest in a school education.
Note too that for a large proportion of children the alternative to a state school education will be no education at all.
I think the larger point here, though, is that we need to recognise that this is a measure dealing with schoolchildren, not adults. Avoiding doing things that we know can harm those around us - even though we may want to do that thing - is a very basic form of politeness, and politeness is treated differently with adults than with children. We hope adults will be polite, but ultimately they are free not to be and will be punished only by social disapprobation. Among children, however, we enforce politeness, partly to teach them how they should behave and partly because children are not yet mature enough to consider the effect of their actions on those around them.
The difference is that right now, they're children. We try to soften things for children because they don't have the emotional or mental maturity of an adult; stress that would be minor for an adult can leave children in tears or result in depression. There will be plenty of time for them to learn how horrible the world can be when they're adults even if we try to take the edges off a little while they're growing up.
As I have said in another reply, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on peanut allergies. I would imagine, though, that there would be a gap between an allergy that could be triggered by someone eating peanuts in the same room as you and one that would be triggered by your having eaten them before school.
I don't see how the fact that children cannot be made totally safe has any impact on whether, at a school attended by a child with a serious allergy to peanuts, it is reasonable to ban peanuts. Doubtless they will still not be completely safe. But the question the school is trying to answer is whether they can reduce the risk to a child in their care using a measure that is not disproportionately onerous or inconvenient.
Not allowing students to bring peanuts for lunch is inconvenient, but not enormously so. I'm not qualified to say how far the risk to a severely allergic pupil is reduced by prohibiting peanuts, but I'm not going to second-guess the school if they have decided (quite possibly with medical advice) that the reduction outweighs that inconvenience. Nor would I criticise them for erring on the side of caution.
I'm not an expert on peanut allergies. I have certainly heard it said that allergies are more common and more frequently serious than they once were. That said, today it is not the case that every school today bans peanuts. Some schools do because they have discovered that one of the pupils at the school has a severe allergy to peanuts. I can't imagine that anyone would consider that to be unreasonable.
As for your comment about workplaces, it is trite to say that children and adults are different. A working adult is better equipped to take care of him or herself, both because they are more mature and because they are free to eat where and what they please, unlike a child who must stay in school for lunch. Similarly eating lunch at work is nothing like lunch-time at a school with a thousand or more pupils.
Moreover it is not a question of banning peanuts from all workplaces, just as it is not a question of banning them from all schools. If you ever work with a person with a serious peanut allergy I suspect that peanuts will effectively be banned - either officially by the employer, or unofficially because the person in question simply explains their allergy and asks you not to bring peanuts in. At a previous job a colleague explained to me on my first day that she had a serious latex allergy, and asked me not to wear anything with latex in or bring any latex-containing products in as she would go into shock; she also showed me how to use an epi pen in case she did. Needless to say I did not reply by telling her that she could simply isolate herself since she was the one with the problem.
A very serious peanut allergy can mean that having peanuts near you can send you into anaphylactic shock. Isolating the child therefore has to mean really isolating them - if almost everyone goes to the cafeteria at lunch time and they can't they will be left out every day. Children are very sensitive to being left out, and a child with a serious allergy will already be excluded from a lot of events because they are held at restaurants that use peanuts.
Even then there is the risk of cross-contamination, snacks being eaten outside the cafeteria, or children still having bits of peanut on them, any of which could lead to a shocking and potentially fatal attack.
A lot of schools simply reason that it is better to slightly inconvenience the rest of the school if that means not having to exclude the child with the allergy and reduces the risk that the child suffers an anaphylactic shock - which as well as being potentially fatal for the affected child, would be extremely traumatic for the children around them.
I've heard of this happening where there is a child with a very serious peanut allergy.
In fairness that is a particularly bad example. I wouldn't say the food is brilliant but in general it's a lot better than that.
I was responding to a post asking whether the charges would be criminal in the UK.
Incidentally, the position as you state it in terms of withdrawing consent is also the position in the UK. Consent can be withdrawn at any time.
I know this is a joke, but actually it makes a point that is worth making in response to the rather alarmist headline.
Quoting from the preface to the bill:
Nothing in these proposals will authorise the interception of the content of a communication. Nor will it require the collection of all internet data, which would be neither feasible, necessary nor proportionate. We will extend existing safeguards regarding data retention, access and oversight. And we will remove other statutory powers with weaker safeguards under which communications data can currently be accessed by public authorities.
This bill would mean that:
The bill does not directly require judicial approval of a request for information, but as with other powers devolved to senior police officers the decision will be judicially reviewable. The bill would also allow the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to investigate use of the powers.
I'm not sure, as yet, what to make of this bill. There are obviously privacy concerns in collecting this sort of information, and it would be very easy to simply declare that no intrusion into peoples' privacy is ever warranted. I think though that that would be an overly simplistic view. As more communications take place online there are more circumstances in which there is a good reason for authorities to want access to communications data, whether it's to find position data from the mobile phone of a kidnapped child, or to look for a pattern of communications when investigating organised crime. Neither shutting out law enforcement completely in the name of personal privacy, nor allowing unfettered access in the name of safety, is a sensible response.
My reading of this bill is that it is an attempt to strike a balance by creating a tiered system. Data that is totally public is available to the police without any authorisation at all. Data that is not public, but where the invasion into privacy is less extensive (such as data on use of the internet but not including the content of any communications) requires justification and authorisation, but does not require judicial scrutiny. Where the intrusion is more extensive, as with interception of communications, the justification must be greater and judicial authorisation is required.
I am not sure whether this is the correct balance - although I don't doubt that senior police officers will in general behave reasonably, I wonder how effectively they can be overseen when the person whose privacy is compromised will not know that the measures have been authorised - but it should be recognised that this is an attempt to balance competing issues.
I think you might be becoming overly focussed on one detail. As I said above, even ignoring completely the no-condom allegation there is plenty with which to charge him, in Sweden or in England. The question of whether deceiving someone about whether you will use a condom should be a crime, or whether he in fact deceived her here, is an irrelevant sideshow.
According to Wikipedia:
There are four charges: that on 14 August 2010 he committed "unlawful coercion" when he held complainant 1 down with his body weight in a sexual manner; that he "sexually molested" complainant 1 when he had condom-less sex with her after she insisted that he use one; that he had condom-less sex with complainant 2 on the morning of 17 August while she was asleep; and that he "deliberately molested" complainant 1 on 18 August 2010 by pressing his erect penis against her body.
The law in England on consent obtained by deception is complex and unwieldy. I am not an expert, but I don't think lying about whether you are wearing a condom would be sufficient to vitiate consent. Even if that particular charge would not be a crime in England and Wales, however, if the allegations are true he would still potentially be guilty of rape and sexual assault.
No, it isn't. The ID on brass probably won't even be admissible in court for the reason that brass gets reused all the time. Any would-be criminal's defense would be, "I fired those rounds at the firing range, and the REAL murderer retrieved them from the floor, reloaded them and used them to commit the crime."
What is this based on?
The test for admissibility, broadly, is whether the value of the evidence is greater than the risk of it unfairly prejudicing the trial. That doesn't mean that you can't admit evidence that could bear more than one interpretation. Deciding whether the alternative interpretation is a reasonable one - and therefore creates reasonable doubt - is precisely the role of the jury.
And for massive tax avoidance.
A few people have said this. What tax is it that he's avoiding? I find it a bit difficult to follow the logic that would make giving away $30bn to avoid a tiny fraction of that in tax financially viable.
I don't think people are forgetting Microsoft's business practices; it's a matter of priorities.
Outside Slashdot I think if you asked people to weigh the economic harm caused by Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly against the lives of the millions of people who will probably be saved by the Gates Foundation's philanthropy they wouldn't take a second to decide that overall this has been positive.
You're quite right, of course. For some reason I thought he was a writer for PC Magazine rather than being written about in PC Magazine. In my defence I can only state that I'm not American so I'm not familiar with any of the magazines or newspapers he has written for.
Despite my blunder I would stick by my main point: it's difficult to imagine Gladwell writing an article because he hopes that the Gates Foundation will reward him, which was the scenario postulated by the GGP.
As I posted in response to another person claiming that the Foundation is a vehicle for private profit: when making such a serious allegation it behoves you to show your evidence.
One of your claims is demonstrably untrue. Audited accounts for the Gates Foundation show that it makes far greater charitable grants than it is required to: over three times the minimum.
Regarding your claim that it is a tax-avoidance scheme, could you please set out which tax(es) Mr Gates was attempting to avoid?
Regarding your claim that the cash "flows straight back in to Gates' considerable investments in major drug companies", could you please back up the two claims that:
I have posted relatively extensively elsewhere on Gates' stock holdings, insofar as they are public. Forgive me for quoting myself:
[As far as I can tell, Bill Gates] holds his shares through Cascade Investment LLC, the filings of which are available at sec.gov. There's a digest of its current holdings at GuruFocus - I haven't checked its accuracy. What it appears to show, however, is a portfolio that is not in any way focused on big pharma. I wasn't able to find any pharmaceutical conflicts, either directly or indirectly, by comparing that list to the Foundation's grant history, although I admit that I haven't gone through everything - I simply don't have time. One holding that I imagine will be criticised is Monsanto. I don't know how large that holding is, and while you could find out by going through all the filings I'm not inclined to; if the strongest claim that can be made is that Mr Gates set up the Gates Foundation and gave away something approaching $30bn in the hope that he would somehow make it back on Monsanto stocks then I think the argument rather defeats itself.
It has been suggested that he acquired some shares in pharmaceutical companies outside his Cascade Investment portfolio in 2002. I suspect that that may be a reporting error; even if it is not, the investments were well under $1bn. It is implausible to suggest that they could ever regain the $30bn donated.
You have made serious allegations about an outwardly philanthropic activity. I would suggest that you should either back up those allegations or recant them.
I find it a bit odd to describe a man as an "unrepentant criminal" and a "supervillain" because he was CEO of a company that was the subject of proceedings for anti-competitive practices. I find it even more difficult to see that that implies that any outwardly philanthropic act on his past must be merely a ploy to make a personal profit.
I don't think your sources are quite as damning as you think. The second one is not reporting an investment by Gates at all - the purchase is by the Gates Foundation not the individual. The other article sounds like it might be referring to the same investment and simply have mistakenly omitted the 'Foundation'; other contemporaneous accounts sound like they are referring to the same investment and make it clear that it is the foundation that invested not the man.
That's not the big problem with this though. Even assuming that the Register article is correct and he did personally invest in pharmaceutical companies in 2002, your account remains inherently implausible. We have to believe that Mr Gates - an experienced businessman - could find no better way to make more money than to give away almost $30bn to try to boost the value of less than a billion dollars of pharmaceutical stock. We have to believe that in the face of the fact that from what we know of his current investments he certainly isn't investing heavily in big pharma. We have to believe that Warren Buffett is presumably in on the scheme. And then we come right back to the big problem again, which is the inherent implausibility of the claim that the richest man in the world would give 40% of his wealth to a charitable foundation in order to make a profit.
Microsoft's business practices, and the extent to which Gates was personally responsible for them, is not the issue. What you said was that the Gates foundation exists to turn a personal profit and that its assets will not be distributed but instead given to wealthy individuals. You went so far as to hint that it might be some sort of extortion:
The first time is free. Just wait until the next health crisis, see what fucking happens.
Restating that he is "engaging in for-profit economic activity that benefits him directly" isn't evidence - it's just the same assertion that you made the first time. I've looked around on Google for information going either way and found nothing of note.There was an article pointing out that conflicts of interest are possible in foundations; the closest I could find to someone alleging that the Foundation is a front for Gates' private profit was an InfoWars article that creates an imagined conflict by confusing shares held by Gates and shares held by the Gates Foundation, before going on to claim that
Bill Gates, son of a top Planned Parenthood official , is in league with a group of wealthy eugencists working to reduce the world’s population,
a claim which, to my mind at least, does very little for the credibility of its author.
I thought previously that there was no information available on Bill Gates' personal shareholdings. However I now find that he holds his shares through Cascade Investment LLC, the filings of which are available at sec.gov. There's a digest of its current holdings at GuruFocus - I haven't checked its accuracy. What it appears to show, however, is a portfolio that is not in any way focused on big pharma. I wasn't able to find any pharmaceutical conflicts, either directly or indirectly, by comparing that list to the Foundation's grant history, although I admit that I haven't gone through everything - I simply don't have time. One holding that I imagine will be criticised is Monsanto. I don't know how large that holding is, and while you could find out by going through all the filings I'm not inclined to; if the strongest claim that can be made is that Mr Gates set up the Gates Foundation and gave away something approaching $30bn in the hope that he would somehow make it back on Monsanto stocks then I think the argument rather defeats itself.
As regards my "honourable" remark, it was a rough paraphrase of a comment made by our Prime Minister, David Cameron, in the House of Commons and which I thought was rather apposite. It wasn't meant to offend - and in any case, if you are concerned about your honour there is plenty of time for you to salvage it by providing evidence of your claim that the Gates Foundation is an attempt for Bill Gates to make a private profit.