Bill Gates's Plan To Improve Our World 445
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates has written an article in Wired outlining his strategy to improve people's lives through philanthropy and investment in technology and the sciences. He says, 'We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns. That means tackling the world's biggest problems and funding the most likely solutions. That's an even greater challenge than it sounds. I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women. ...I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning to computers. But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor. ... We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face.'"
Fan of capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course someone who made a lot of money helping a lot of other people make a lot of money helping millions of people have jobs to do. While pissing off the largest portion of the readership here due to quality of the product. I'm pretty sure this isn't going to get a fair shake here on Slashdot.
Things have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the hate for Microsoft was due to their monopoly status; not so much anymore. That monopoly let them sit on their laurels and collect money without needing to produce the best product quality. Today, MS the _underdog_ in a lot of hugely important markets. Furthermore, Gates is only a Chairman at MS anymore and has little or nothing to do with day to day operations. He's spent a an enormous amount of time, effort, and money sincerely trying (and in many cases succeeding) to make things a little better for humans everywhere. People need to let go of the hate, it's no longer useful in this context.
Re:Things have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates can talk about being a do-gooder when he renounces patent trolling, or more aptly sells his stock in monsanto, and denounces that too.
Re:Fan of capitalism (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft hating is soooo 90's, and we didn't know how good we had it back then. With the NSA around, why bother to get upset about bad software?
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because microsoft is complicit in helping the feds set up monitoring.
If Bill Gates wants to end capitalism it starts with microsoft and the exploitation of tech workers.
I don't take anyone seriously who wants to end exploitation, but won't end or denounce the exploitation they participate in, or solicit first.
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I'm pretty sure this isn't going to get a fair shake here on Slashdot.
No, no, I'm willing to be fair about this. Now that the web has such rich functionality, let's say he takes an important flagship product and makes the core functionality available easily to the poor over the web, so anybody could use it as long as they have some basic internet access.
It wouldnt need a lot of enterprise features, just something that people can use to perform basic functions. Start with a word processor and a spreadsheet, and make it possible for poorer users to maintain data without ha
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I don't know if you're familiar with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but he's aiming at people a couple of rungs farther down on Maslow's pyramid than that. I don't give too many fucks about the performance of Office365 when I have fucking malaria, you know?
Exactly. Products like solar-powered cell towers that also keep vaccines and medicines cool so that people can be immunized and low tech solutions to deal with the impacts of malaria are quite useful when most of your kids don't make it to adulthood, or even 5 yo.
Re:Fan of capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have with Bill Gates is essentially the broken window fallacy. Microsoft had a stranglehold on the computer industry. They held back the computer industry by years. A decade even! In the web development industry alone, we're still shaped by the impact Internet Explorer 6 left - which was released in 2001, twelve years ago. What economic value would Be Inc. have brought? What charitable donations would have resulted from that company? Or Netscape? Or any of the tens of thousands of companies Microsoft had a deleterious impact upon?
He has since spent some of the money he earned holding back some of the most important industries in the world trying to help people. That's good. He didn't have to do that. But people judge that work as if it stands alone. It doesn't. The work he does with the money he has comes at the expense of the tens of thousands of companies that were held back or destroyed by the illegal and monopolistic actions he took.
I think it's unlikely that, economically speaking, the actions he took were a net win for society. Yes, once he had the money, he did good things with it. But the cost to society for him to obtain that money is far too high in my eyes. Higher than the value he brought.
Essentially, he took it upon himself to be Robin Hood. He stole from the rich - Western society - to give to the poor. However I don't see any reason to believe that the theft he perpetrated - the value he stole from society - was less than the value he brought to society. And I don't think it was his right to commit those crimes to do those things.
By all means, judge him for what he has brought to society. But you should not do that without judging him for all that he has took from society as well.
Re:Fan of capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
[Gates] didn't rob from anybody, He exchanged value for value.
He robbed me by making me pay for pre-loaded copy of Windows when I bought a PC, a copy I did not use. No "value-for-value" there.
The only transactions that are not a net win are when one is at the point of a gun. Bill Gates never pointed a gun at anyone.
You don't need a gun to force people to do things. Like "buy Windows or you can't have a PC"
If there was no value in Microsoft products then people wouldn't buy them.
People can buy things because they are forced to (see above), or because they are ignorant. You should read this The Grantham Grocer Fallacy [demon.co.uk]
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If you got Windows pre-loaded, there's a fair chance that you paid *negative* dollars for it. Using made-up numbers, if Dell puts Windows on the PC for $25 bucks, then gets paid $10 for each piece of crapware they pre-install on it, and they put 3 items of crapware there, the cost to Dell was -$5, so the cost to you should be down, not up, and you didn't have to suffer any of the crapware because as you say, you didn't use Windows in the first place.
The people distributing crapware got boned, though.
This w
Aimed at US readership (Score:5, Insightful)
All of us know that whosoever dares criticise the "free market" in any form or way whatsoever in front of a US audience will automatically be branded a 'Bleeding Heart Liberal', a 'Socialist', if not 'Communist' by that same audience (depending on their mood and how threatened they feel) without further investigation of what he actually has to say.
Practically the only way a US audience will pause long enough to actually listen is to bring impeccable credentials as a 'Capitalist' and to start off by clear endorsements of Capitalism in general. Only then is it considered acceptable to point out one or two weaknesses or deficiencies of the system and suggest improvements.
This is what Bill Gates has done, and he's one of the few people alive who can not only say something like that and still be listened to, but who *wants* to point anything like that out to the world. I guess that Warren Buffet is another, but I wouldn't know many others. That's why he said that.
And please note that the quality of MS software or its competitive practices have no bearing on the issue.
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Try again. He's shed a large chunk of his wealth into charity. If I remember correctly, most of his wealth is invested to make money to give to charity and provide a continuous income stream for charity.
http://www.davemanuel.com/net-worth/bill-gates/ [davemanuel.com]
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Try again. He's shed a large chunk of his wealth into charity.
Tax write-offs are beautiful things, ain't they?
I'll believe the philanthropy when he puts all but a maybe one or two million bucks into charity (and even then only to live off that as a pension).
I thought that was his original stated goal way back when he first started raking in the billions.
I'm not going to deplore his charitable actions, but there are a couple of alarms that go off. For example: " I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems." No, and as such, he's also admitting he doesn't have a magic formula for solving the world's problems.
Which is honest of him. but the corollary to that is that while he may not have the perfect (or even best) answer, he has a lot more
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His aid does not cross borders if the government has decided public research paid for by taxpayers should not be locked up by mega-corps.
Citation needed.
If you look at what the Gates Foundation does, and where they do it [gatesfoundation.org] I think you will find yourself guilty of a cheap shot of the most misguided kind.
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So you didn't read the link I posted, just used it as a ladder to climb up on your soap box?
Some of the biggest components of the Gates Foundation are Birth Control and Education.
You know, people have been predicting that we will exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, and be forced to put more marginal land under the plow since Thomas Malthus, about two hundred years ago.
Yet we are using LESS land these days, growing more food, and growing it cheaper. There is not a world wide shortage of food. (There
Socialism vs. Capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
The argument can be made that capitalism widens the divide between rich and poor. The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure like those seen in Scandinavian countries better address and more quickly narrow the divide.
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Yeah, like he said in the summary. But you were rushing in too quickly with your "government solves everything, even though it's made up of the people we think are too greedy to handle their own money properly, much less other people's" ideology.
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Because anarchy will just make things better, of course.
Seriously, stop buying into this "government is evil!" propaganda -- governments have problems, like anything else, but they're the only mechanism we've really come up with to control any of this stuff. About the most that can be sanely argued is that the current governmental structure is poor, so we need a new one.... Which is pretty much what the GP said, when referring to the political institutions seen in parts of Europe being preferable in their o
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> I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest.
The argument can be made that capitalism widens the divide between rich and poor.
Oh, please. Even addressing that point seriously is just stupid. Of course he's a fan of capitalism - it made him the richest man on the planet for many years.
People at the top are significantly more likely to be fans of the system than people at the bottom. What a surprise!
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silly me, I thought capitalism made a middle class in my country
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I don't know which country is your country, but the middle class continues to dwindle in the USA.
Re:Socialism vs. Capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
How many times will misinformed people trot out this crap? Scandinavian countries are, to the last one, all capitalist free market economies. Capitalism and the laws that protect private property enable those countries' people to generate the excess wealth with which to fund their social welfare programs.
Scandinavian countries are actually examples of "capitalism and philanthropy" being "better at addressing woes"
Re:Socialism vs. Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not actually claiming capitalism does such a thing.
Good, because there is no evidence for it.
I'm just don't see why "the gap" is a problem in and of itself. A smaller piece of a larger pie can be better than a bigger price of a small pie...
Two reasons. First, nobody believes your hypothetical any more than you do. Second, when income disparity goes beyond a certain point, many people start to think it's unfair. There are even theories that a dislike of unfairness is innate to a large degree (toddlers display it, including acting fair towards their peers), and a sense of fairness serves a social purpose. If you think that's childish, consider this. Your rich Uncle Ned dies, and his only heirs are his three nephews. You're one of them. You and Bob each get $1k. Dave, who always treated Uncle Ned like crap, gets $1B. Do you have any cause for complaint? If so, why? You are $1k better off than you were before.
Whups (Score:5, Insightful)
'We want to give our wealth back to society in a
... BURN THE WITCH!
No, seriously. As a percentage of net earnings, the rich contribute far less as an aggregate group than the poor. There's an inverse relationship between income and charity. The more you make, the less you give, proportionally speaking. You can outline all the reasons why it would be better if this wasn't the case... I doubt you'll find much disagreement here. But making the case for it doesn't mean anyone's going to adopt it; A concept Mr. Gates and the company he used to captain both seem ill-equipped to grasp. Simply understanding the problem better doesn't result in a solution; It is one of the oldest delusions humanity has to offer... that knowledge will lead to action.
Instead, we need to figure out why people give proportionally less, and address the issue within that cognitive framework. And the Just world phenomenon is a great place to start: The belief that you deserve whatever is happening, or has happened, to you. Fundamentally, I think you'll find the reason the rich give less is because on a subconscious level, having adopted the belief that they earned their wealth rather than simply having won a cosmic lottery, they then build on that with confirmation bias. That is, every action that comes after that in some fashion just confirms that they're more deserving than the next guy... and eventually, that makes them not very charitable. Afterall, if I did it, you can do it, right? It's such a basic failure of reasoning that entire books have been written on the subject, and yet... here we are... still not getting it.
Re:Whups (Score:5, Insightful)
"Instead, we need to figure out why people give proportionally less"
Seems to me it's probably because poor people can better empathize with what it's like to not have enough, and they likely remember how much they appreciated it the last time somebody helped them out.
Re:Whups (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems to me it's probably because poor people can better empathize with what it's like to not have enough, and they likely remember how much they appreciated it the last time somebody helped them out.
That does not explain how people who were previously poor, and then became wealthy, also follow the same pattern. Not everyone who becomes wealthy changes their social class, but most do. Put another way, once you're rich, you don't hang around with poor people much. And thanks to socialization, it's not very long at all before those old behaviors and worldview fractures and dissolves. Does it happen to everyone? No. But it seems the only people resiliant to this are those that suffered a significant trauma prior and usually early on in life that became a core belief.
It's not a coincidence that when you read about people who ran into burning buildings to save a bunch of children, or saw a car run off the road, lept from their car to go assist... everyday heroes tend to have one thing in their background: They grew up in a small town. Go look it up. And surprise, most people who join the military also come from small towns. Their personalities are no different than those in the city, but their social environment imparted certain values -- specifically, that they're not just a face in a crowd. In the city, we choose our own subculture, our own groups to be a part of. In a small town, you have to learn how to be part of a community you may not strongly identify with. Avoiding certain types of people isn't an option. So as a consequence of that, we get people who later move to the big city or whatever, and retain that sense of community... so when they see someone in trouble, they don't have a tribalistic view.
We are social creatures; And our desire to help others is based directly on how much they are like us. They have to be part of our tribe. It's how we're wired. And social class is a big division -- when you surround yourself with rich people, you start to think like rich people do. It seems like a really obvious thing to say, but then I see people like you say things like this and I realize... you're not understanding this tribalistic element of human behavior.
Re:Whups (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the previous poster is correct to talk about the "just world fallacy". Without getting into too much of an argument as to who is "right", we all create a world view that helps to prop up our own ego.
It's common for rich people to believe (or want to believe) that we are all in control of our own lives, and the reason they have so much is because they deserve it. They think that they're either inherently superior people, or at least that they've done better things and made better choices. To believe otherwise would induce a lot of angst.
Meanwhile, if you're poor, it's much more ego-soothing to believe that we are powerless in our own lives, and the reason you have so little is either because of luck, or because someone has screwed you over. To believe otherwise would imply that you are somehow inferior to everyone who makes more money than you.
If all that is true, then it would help to explain why poor people would give more, proportionately. You have one set of people who believe that poor people are unfortunate, and another set which believes that poor people deserve their problems. Which would you expect to donate more to charity?
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This is becasue the poor tend to be more devote* and as such easier to manipulate into tithing.
*got have some reason for being in a crappy situation
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Add in the fact that a good portion of the rich, in addition to believing they're more deserving of wealth, have also taken moral and ethical shortcuts to increase that wealth. These ethical and moral lapses are very contrary to charitable giving.
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As a percentage of net earnings, the rich contribute far less as an aggregate group than the poor.
But that hardly seems to apply to Gates (damn, second time I'm defending him, truth is stranger than fiction).
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As a percentage of net earnings, the rich contribute far less as an aggregate group than the poor.
It's worth pointing out that this statistic takes into account all spending by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over a decade. The Foundation was started in 1997. Sixteen years of fairly spectacular giving by the Foundation has failed to move that bar. I haven't seen the most recent statistics that would take into account Warren Buffet's mammoth donation of Berkshire Hathaway stocks to the Gates Foundation, but I suspect the rich still contribute a lower percentage.
I don't think knowing why wi
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I like his choice in where to focus (Score:2)
In the old days when this was a small town calling itself a city, I'd frequently be at a play with Bill or some other event.
I like his focus on where we need to fix it, but the cold hard fact is he lives in an area where the ultra-rich are taxed much less than the poor, and he goes to great lengths not to pay taxes on many levels.
Capitalism is no problem - but Adam Smith, the Father of Capitalism, railed against Mercantalism that Bill worships at the head of.
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Why do you care that they're paying fewer taxes, when they're getting the wealth to the people who need it more directly?
Exactly right.
Giving money to government is the LEAST efficient way to improve the lives of the poor.
Look at the graphic on this page: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258 [cbpp.org] as to where your federal tax dollars go.
Compare that to where the Gates Foundation spends their money [gatesfoundation.org].
It quickly becomes apparent that the Gates foundation can get more money and programs into the hands of the poorest people
in the world by completely bypassing government at all levels. Apparently WillAffleckUW thinks that Gates
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* Indeed, in the USA, the poor not only avoid all federal and state income tax but they receive credits;
false. The poor pay a hire real amount then rich people do.
Not to mention it cost more to be poor.
See: Vimes boot theory of economics.
Also
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/06/the_secret_tax_on_the_poor/ [salon.com]
A reasonable critique of Gates's philanthropy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is worth a read:
http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/ [newint.org]
TL;DR
Gates's and others' philanthropy prolongs poverty by sowing as it does the seed of more inequality (in Gates's case, through the formation of health policies in the third world that make it easier for Western drug companies to open up markets for treatments there). They give away the fruit, but never the trees.
As Oscar Wilde observed of the philanthropists of his era: ‘They seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.’ Then and now, as Wilde said, ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.’
This is really the question that needs to be addressed: why is poverty still possible - and why can it even get worse - after 200 years of Gates's capitalism? Surely by now if capitalism was the answer, we'd not be where we are today.
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But yet there is still truth in the expression:
"Capitalism is the worst economic system devised by man but its better than anything else that has been tried."
If everyone in the world were still subsistence farming, then we would have equality for all, but it would still be worse than what Capitalism has generated.
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But yet there is still truth in the expression:
"Capitalism is the worst economic system devised by man but its better than anything else that has been tried."
That statement is obsolete. Look here [wikipedia.org] for details.
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The reason Capitalism is breaking is that a core underpinning is being broken by technology. For the longest time the reason that labor had value is that the skills necessary were held behind a paywall - lack of ready communication, then guilds just after the printing press, then unions in the industrial era, now ... labor has nothing. Education via communication is becoming cheaper and work is being done by automation or easily moved somewhere with no rules / cheaper labor. We are nearing singularity an
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Well said.
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This is really the question that needs to be addressed: why is poverty still possible - and why can it even get worse - after 200 years of Gates's capitalism? Surely by now if capitalism was the answer, we'd not be where we are today.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.
--Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara
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why is poverty still possible
The problem is that there still remains too much socialism and regulation of free market activities in much of the developing world. A graph [myopera.com] of economic freedom versus per capita GDP tells the story. Countries with lower economic freedom [heritage.org] tend to have lower GDP per capita, correlation=0.67.
The good news is that the adoption of less socialism and more capitalism (especially in India and China) has lead to less global income inequality: [isn.ethz.ch]
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Because government is in the way. Let the market regulate itself and poverty will disappear.
How about we start with Microsoft? (Score:2)
I don't have a magic formula for prioritizing the world's problems. You could make a good case for poverty, disease, hunger, war, poor education, bad governance, political instability, weak trade, or mistreatment of women.
All of those things are good causes, but since Gates is struggling to find a place to begin, I'd like to suggest that he starts by fixing the blight-on-humanity that he created. Microsoft screws many of us over on a regular basis. It hurts the economy. It hurts technological progress. How about pushing his company to be more cooperative? How about pushing for open standards? How about pushing back against terrible patent and copyright abuses, insane EULAs, and absurd licensing fees? How about open so
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Microsoft screws many of us over on a regular basis.
Much as I hate having to use Microsoft products, I don't feel too sorry for myself compared to people living with endemic malaria.
self-interest serve the wider interest. (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone forgot to tell Bain Capital.
I personally know someone who worked for a mid-sized IT firm out of Texas. They were small but growing and successful. Then Bain Capital stepped in, waived some money around and purchased the company. The day after the deal was finalized, everyone was fired and the company was liquidized - sold of bit by bit. The poor lady is now in the Mid-West working in a call center.
Capitalism for the wider interests my ass. When the wider interests are served, it's incidental. Capitalists only care about the 99% when it means making more money off of them, and they wouldn't serve the wider interests if they didn't have to. Granted, they often do, but it's not because they are on the moral high ground. Perhaps Bill Gates really truly is trying to say that the evils of capitalism truly equal good for the people, but I don't think that makes it a good system - it's open to mutation and a future where we see the raw, unabashed, exploitation of the people. Like I said, it's incidental. We are carefully watching the US government become dystopian, while corporations are more quietly doing the same. Bill gates might be a true philanthropist, but he is nearly alone in his level of giving and is kidding himself if he believes all capitalists have the greater good or wider interests at heart.
Re:self-interest serve the wider interest. (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally know someone who worked for a mid-sized IT firm out of Texas. They were small but growing and successful. Then Bain Capital stepped in, waived some money around and purchased the company. The day after the deal was finalized, everyone was fired and the company was liquidized - sold of bit by bit. The poor lady is now in the Mid-West working in a call center.
Seen vs. unseen...
First, if Bain Capital was called in, it is likely the company was in trouble, so she would have been laid off anyway.
Secondly, the owners of the company felt it was worth it to sell out to Bain, so they benefitted versus possibly having their investment worth nothing.
Thirdly, the company had assets, and these assets have been redeployed to more profitable use, likely employing new people who you don't know.
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Such a low id, such faith in Capitalism !
I have a low ID because I was in the Internet industry in the early days. I saw the value of angel investors, venture capital, public markets, and private capital organizations make this incredible network that we are communicating over right now.
I was part of building the first e-commerce web sites. I was part of the first Internet video transmissions that now represent over 50% of Internet traffic, and let grandparents see their kids on the other side of the coun
Philantropy for dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
'We want to give our wealth back to society in a way that has the most impact, and so we look for opportunities to invest for the largest returns.
Well, Mr. Gates, here's how:
Don't take away their wealth in the first place.
It's well-established fact that the poor make the best use of money. There is less waste and more immediate progress than with any organisation or institute. Micro-credits are a blasting success wherever they are granted in the interest of helping people. (they fail when the same banks that caused the housing bubble/burst get in on the game hoping to make a quick buck, because they don't screen the applicants).
Monopoly rent is known to damage the economy disproportionately. For every $ you give to charity now, Mr. Gates, you've already taken two away.
"Don't be a greedy bastard." is a much, much better formula for helping other people than giving away even most of your money. Because it's not a zero-sum game, it's not just redistribution of wealth, the 1% gain most of their wealth not just by taking it from the rest, but by causing damage in excess of their profit.
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Micro-credits are a blasting success wherever they are granted in the interest of helping people.
Micro-credit exists where a functional banking system for the poor is regulated out of existence...it is more a symptom of an over-regulated & poor economy than a solution to one.
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Micro-credit exists where a functional banking system for the poor is regulated out of existence...it is more a symptom of an over-regulated & poor economy than a solution to one.
Where do you get your information from? Some of the countries that have the highest success rates with micro-credits have pretty much no regulation whatsoever in banking.
Banks don't do what micro-credits do, period. If they would, they had a century to prove it and failed. Interestingly, after micro-credits were successful to the point of attracting the interest of the Nobel Price committee, several banks tried to move into this sector, smelling good business. They failed miserably.
If nothing else, that pro
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"It's well-established fact that the poor make the best use of money.
no they don't. They can't becasue ti takes money to us e money wisely. The poor do what they can to maximize the moment, and in the long run that is far more expensive.
"There is less waste and more immediate progress than with any organisation or institute. "
No. for the same reason as above.
You want to help the poor? the best way I can see is double min. wage, and force them to put 15% away in a saving fund for 5 years.
Another way would be
Re:Philantropy for dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the role of a CEO. I've worked closely with the C-level executives in the #3 company in its sector in my country for 8 years.
The typical Cxx works long and hard and I've seen first hand that some have sacrificed family and marriages for the company. I never said they aren't worth a solid salary.
But what exactly does the CEO do that justifies one thousand times the salary of an average worker in his company? That's why the Switzerland proposal is interesting. They don't deny that the CEO is worth several times a low-grade worker. They just say that there's a limit. That he can be worth five, six, ten or twelve times as much, but not 200, 500, or 1000.
Think about it. Some of the CEOs of large companies earn more than an entire factory, combined. If you seriously claim that that's what they are worth, then you are the one making the extraordinary claim and thus you are the one who needs to provide evidence for his claim.
The worker seldom does anything not rote, and a mistake means he's broken a widget.
Only if your definition of "worker" begins and ends with burger flipping at McD.
I've been and worked with regular employees whose responsibilities and skills were essential to the company. I've been in a position were a company of 150 people could have shut down if me and two others had left. I've seen employees sweat over tasks because mistakes would cost the company seven-digit figures.
Oh, and next time you fly: That pilot who has your life in his hands, he's a "worker who seldom does anything not rote", too.
Re:Philantropy for dummies (Score:4, Informative)
Do you realize that doubling the minimum wage will also result in a net loss of jobs?
For someone who complained about lack of citations and statistics the sentence before, you sure make bold claims with nothing to back them up.
Loss of jobs has been the #1 agenda item for those against... uh, actually pretty much anything that might help the low-income people, be it minimum wage, unions, employee protection laws or really anything else.
Rarely is there any evidence for it. Two recent papers show that there is no significant impact:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4509 [nber.org]
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf [berkeley.edu]
Now pony up your evidence or accept you've fallen for cheap rhetorics.
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I don't get why you weren't moderated up.
Yes, it is great that at least he's giving something to charity.
I will still continue to diss him, because calling him a good person now also means accepting how he acquired the money he now gives away. There's even a term for what Gates is doing: Whitewashing.
I stand by my words: The better thing would have been to not take this money first of all. Giving it away now is better than keeping it, yes, but only marginally so.
Why? Because it is not a zero-sum game. Econo
No thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
Really Bill? (Score:2)
Airplanes got invented by individuals - the french were gliding down hillsides and the Wrights read about that and said "fuckin' cool lets do that" and then did it better than anyone else. Only after did they try to commercialize it and ca
A Free Press Foundation (Score:5, Interesting)
Cognitive Dissonance For Bill (Score:3)
Capitalism is all about maximizing profit, so using the world's IQ toward devising solutions for people who cannot afford to buy products is a horrible capitalist strategy. It's taking resources that could be spent on maximizing profits by developing products for more profitable demographics and shifting them towards something systemically unprofitable. I'm not trying to take anything away from the hard work that Bill is doing - he seems determined to use his money to make the world a better place, but I can't help but see some cognitive dissonance going on in his defense of capitalism.
Billy Gates (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hard for me to see Bill Gates beyond being a spoiled, insecure boy. He talks about all these grand visions (The Road Ahead, et al) yet clearly is out of touch with the real world and the realities of human nature to the point that he dreams up these fanciful dreams of utopia that only get taken seriously because he happens to be insanely rich. It's hard for me to see Bill Gates as machiavellian or otherwise diabolical (not that he doesn't throw a good capitalist tantrum now and again), because he's so clearly scared of being caught for what he isn't -- a man in charge of his own fate. He can't possibly be able to imagine living a life not saddled to his silver, free to be bold like many of the "not haves". If he were to no longer "have", then he'd lose the very thing that defines him -- massive wealth. His ego must be terrified at the idea that he is nothing more than paper and ink.
So he props up these grand visions and philanthropic ventures as a way to give validation to his existence, never manning up to working out his own inner deficiencies. And since he lacks the real world understanding to do so himself, he allies with Warren Buffet types to guide him on what he should do, swallowing completely their belief in the supremacy of the capitalist ethos. But his "plans to improve our world" always come off as childish and unworkable. Indeed, can anyone here enumerate the number of grand plans Bill Gates has put forth that have fulfilled their objectives in improving our world? (that's an honest question, by the way)
InBloom (Score:3)
I was getting a better opinion about Bill Gates with his charitable efforts and then he went and created InBloom (along with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp). For those who don't know, InBloom was created to help school districts manage data. To that end, they are collecting hundreds of data points on students. Examples include home addresses, SSN, medial diagnoses (autism/deafness/emotional disturbance), whether they were disciplined and how much including any jail time, and whether the student gets pregnant. To make matters worse, they are storing it in the cloud. (We all know cloud storage is 100% secure, right?) Not only don't they need parental approval (the law governing schools protecting student information was amended to allow the schools to participate), but parents can't even opt out. Yes, if you have kids in Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or New York, your childs' information may already be in the cloud.
Thanks, Gates for seriously compromising my son's personal information and leaving me nearly powerless to stop it. (I can protest, but the politicians here have all drunk large amounts of InBloom Kool-Aid and think us parents are just annoying pests to be ignored.)
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Why stop there? If you posit that religion is the single cause for most of those problems world-wide, then you must also see that certain religions are highly correlated to many of those issues, while other religions have a low or inverse correlation.
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True. Your point?
Re:Most of the problems listed have a single cause (Score:5, Insightful)
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Religion is just one form of control.
In world history and human behavior, religion provided a common moral framework which allowed a society to retain some level of stability as it grew in size. A large society without any common moral framework will become increasingly domestically unstable, and ultimately become ungovernable as a single sovereign entity without a civil war & mass slaughter if nothing changes.
Of course, religion has also been used by tyrants to create fanatics and spark wars. But the fact remains that the beginnings of ea
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Atheism is not a "tenet". It is simply the lack of faith in the supernatural.
There are quite a few irreligious societies, in fact if not in name, that are doing quite well -- the Japanese, for instance, and some European countries (~20% religious).
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Like it or not, the thing that atheism has in common with religion is that both are belief systems.
Does your brain hurt when you try to formulate a sentence to justify garbage like that?
READ MY LIPS. Being skeptical of weird stuff is not a "belief system" just a rational mind doing its work.
Not falling for supernatural scams is not a "lack of faith", it's not a lack of anything, just a rational mind doing its work.
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Don't forget money.
Nothing is ever that simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Terrible acts done in the name of religion are symptoms of deeper, more intertwined problems in how we relate to one another, terrible teachings symptomatic of human needs for order, control, and normalcy. Absence of religion would not simply make the world a better place on it's own, something else would take the place, both good and bad, that religion serves . "If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him"
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The needs belief fulfilled don't exist anymore. We don';t need to grasp blindly and any reason for something, we have science.
Science has particularly unsatisfactory answers to "Why am I here?", "Where am I going?", "Why do bad things happen to me and not others?", "Did I do ok with my life?", etc. It pretty much lacks any sort of philosophy as to how one should live their life. Add in that many people probably don't want to spend that much time thinking on such and the societal need for exactly that to continue functioning smoothly, and you have why atheism just doesn't appeal to human nature. Mankind has had philosophy for much
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Science has particularly unsatisfactory answers to "Why am I here?", "Where am I going?", "Why do bad things happen to me and not others?", "Did I do ok with my life?", etc.
So it's just like religion then.
It pretty much lacks any sort of philosophy as to how one should live their life.
That's a load of cockery. Science tells us how we should live our life if we want to accomplish particular goals. For example, if we want to continue to have a climate which supports our existence, we have to stop shitting all over our environment.
Add in that many people probably don't want to spend that much time thinking on such and the societal need for exactly that to continue functioning smoothly, and you have why atheism just doesn't appeal to human nature.
I'm a human. Atheism appeals to my nature. Atheism appeals to human nature. Some people have been scared into thinking that they need religion, though.
Mankind has had philosophy for much longer than science, and it is more important to mankind than science.
Just because we weren't calling it science doesn't mean we didn't have science. P
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I know a lot of people are going to downvote the hell out of this, but it is a sad truth.
A lot of the countries that suffer from these problems have a hugely corrupt religious following throughout them, or many warring religions.
And often times these groups have a pyramid approach where the "more important" people get most of anything and the "poor peasant turds" get the scraps. I remember we got past that corruption of nobility nonsense back in the stupid ages.
Religion itself is not bad, but without regul
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I know a lot of people are going to downvote the hell out of this, but it is a sad truth.
Did you forget what site you are on? This is Slashdot, any pro atheist comment gets +5 informative/insightful and anything discussing not just a Religion, but contemplation of a "Creator" gets you -234 Flamebait/Troll.
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Or it represents the majority opinion, but you surely wouldn't allow yourself to accept that now, would you
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Such a bullshit response.
You have to be completely blind to 20th century world history and quite ignorant on top of that, to truly believe that the elimination of religion would actually solve even some of the world's problems.
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Mod parent up.
The knee-jerk response that Religion is the source of all problem indicates a very poor grasp of history of the last hundred years.
Religion is at best used as an excuse, but was never the principal cause of any major conflict since the Crusades.
Re:Most of the problems listed have a single cause (Score:5, Insightful)
1. statistically, poor people likely to have a lot kids, whether religous or not. well off people do not, whether religous or not. most well off people in first world countries have a religion, but they don't even have enough kids to maintain population
2. people do what they want and justify it whether they have religion or not, it's human nature
3. Many religions have hard work and self-improvement as commandment
4. Atheists also engage in crazy talk and actions, and have even outdone Hitler in body count on at least two occasions
5. Science, engineering, medicine, psychology and philosphy have been used as basic for being self-righteous just as much as religion
Humans are troublesome creatures, the problems will persist with and without religion
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Religion.
Atheism.
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Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people with religion == Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people without religion.
Religion is almost never the driving factor. In the absence of religion, such people would have found other means and justifications to perpetrate their evil. There are many such examples in history.
Unfortunately, the castigation of religion often reveals a hatred of religion more than a hatred of the evil acts.
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Re:Most of the problems listed have a single cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong, the problem today is corruption and people accepting corruption as the normal. Our current shitty state of the union is not due to any Religion, it's due to corrupt people in power. The only thing mentioning Religion does is to show that religion is not above or beyond being corrupted.
Fact: The Catholic Church never taught people that pedophilia was correct, or good, or just. In fact they taught (and teach) their followers that it was bad, illegal, and that they would spend the rest of their lives in hell if they were to commit these acts. Meanwhile a bunch of corrupt leaders sat in a back room committing the crimes or covering up for those that did. That's not "Religion", that is "Corruption".
As long as you have biases and bigotry it's hard to see where the real problems are. While you bitch about "Religion A" being bad, the same corrupt fuckers are sitting behind a corrupted government, doing the same corrupt things. They laugh at how ignorant the masses are, and how easily they are fooled by bullshit propaganda.
"The Noble Lie" is not something that only "Good" can use, it's also something that corrupt evil people use.
Oh, and Bill Gates is corrupt lying fuck that I would not trust with my used toilet paper, let alone tell us what changes we need to make in the world or what sciences we should be studying.
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Fact: The Catholic Church never taught people that pedophilia was correct, or good, or just.
There are two kinds of teaching - the one "by the letter" and the one by action.
On paper, the Hells Angels are a Harley Davidson fan club, you know?
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Poor logic, glad to see you play the game certain people want you to play. You can only teach by example when people can see the example. In the case of Catholic priests raping children, it was actively hidden.
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"l. Our current shitty state of the union is not due to any Religion, it's due to corrupt people in power."
it's SPECIFICALLY becasue of religion. Pay attention.
We have representatives that want the world to be shitty so their second coming will arrive.
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Greed. Which is, of course, based on fear, which, is, of course, the penalty of human awareness. Unregulated capitalism certainly equals any other system in terms of global destruction and hardship for the people at the bottom. The greediest and most psychopathic people rise to the top of any unregulated system.
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The usual retort to that is that it's reversing cause and effect.
Religion does not cause poverty and misery. It's wealth and happiness that leads to secularism, agnosticism, atheism and the sort of bland and bloodless liberal theism which for most practical purposes is functionally equivalent to atheism or agnosticism.
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"Religion does not cause poverty and misery."
telling people to keep copulating and having children or they won't get a place in their heaven causes a lot of poverty and misery.
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Assholes with power and a laundry list of excuses, religion among them, anti-religion too.
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To be fair, you should have seen the mess after the alpacas had their turn.
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Yeah Right -provided you are on the right end the rich interest's end.
Look at it in context. He starts by paying homage to capitalism so people won't call him a blasphemer for saying "capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor" (damn, am I really defending Bill Gates?).
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Bill Gates isn't some evil person. He ran a business, did some thing we don'y like, paid for those mistakes.
Now he is rich and helping the world.
He is a person.
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Like the US and Imperialist Europe and their economic manipulation/hegemony?
It's always so much easier to blame "them", and ignore the problems that many 3rd world countries have created for themselves.
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In developed countries, the welfare system allows people to never work at all during their lives and produce as many babies as possible. So all this does is lead to a population explosion of yet more people on welfare.
Wow, are you living in the past (particularly about the US). Welfare queens driving Cadillacs was a line Reagan pushed in the 80's. In case you pulled a Rip van Winkle, here's an update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act [wikipedia.org]
P.S. Don't say anything good about George III.
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" The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. "
laughably false.
", the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, "
It was rising because the gap was getting narrower.
" not falling the way it is today."
when the gap is increasing.
100 years ago free market enslaved children in sweat shops, poisoned bodies of water, allow real owners to destroy anything in their past. Whole cities would have coal ash in the air all the time, created monopolies th
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While you've been exceptionally polite about just how right you are, I somehow can't feel too bad pointing out a small flaw in your reasoning. The method of calculating his adjusted wealth used there is percentage of GDP, not standard adjusted dollars. In regular old adjusted dollars, his net worth, when he had $1.5 billion sometime around 1930 was about $21 billion. It actually goes up if you go back a bit, but it never goes up above about $25 billion in adjusted dollars. If you think about that in terms o