Bill Gates To Stanford Grads: Don't (Only) Focus On Profit 284
jfruh (300774) writes "The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems."
Also focus on (Score:5, Funny)
Destroying your enemies.
Re:Also focus on (Score:5, Insightful)
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and pick their pockets.
Bonus points for letting them live long enough to get all the change out of their pockets.
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Typical 20th century thinking.
Bill got to be one of the richest men in the world by understanding that you do not "destroy" your enemies, you embrace them!
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you embrace them!
Group bear hug!
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Oh, is that a knife in your back? How did that get there?
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Bill got to be one of the richest men in the world by understanding that you do not "destroy" your enemies, you embrace them!
To quote DS9:
Gul Dukat: A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place. To force them to acknowledge your greatness.
Weyoun: Then you kill them?
Gul Dukat: ...Only if it's necessary.
Re:Also focus on (Score:4, Insightful)
As well as hearing the lamentation of their women.
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I am totally fine with simply hearing the lamentations of their women.
First you must crush your enemies and see them driven before you, then you can hear the lamentations of their women.
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I came to this thread with one mod point left, and here you are, practically begging for it - so no, you can't have it, i'm gonna save it and come back to mod myself -1 off topic instead. And Steven Zoltan Brust is fantastic.
Water is wet (Score:5, Insightful)
the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems
That's because it causes most of them.
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Plus you have to repay a Stanford education's worth of student loans before you can start thinking about 'profit'.
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What is worse, with lot's of profit you get to buy the solutions you want, regardless of how many more problems your solutions cause other people.
Just to be clear profit solves no problem, the creative thinking of many minds thoughtfully applied by many hands, solves problems. With lots of profit you just get to take credit for it all, without doing much of anything, neither thinking of the solutions nor applying them, just paying for them and pretending you did everything and reinforcing it by paying PR
Re:Water is wet (Score:5, Insightful)
Kleinrock and others have explicitly said that economic gain was not a motivation for the beginnings of the internet. And Berners-Lee wasn't interested in profiting from the World Wide Web. How much did Mendel profit from his theory of inheritance? Why didn't Pasteur pursue profits instead of basic research? Were Watson and Crick thinking of money when they thought of the double helix structure of DNA?
Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.
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While I agree in part with what you wrote the reality is none of the value of those inventions would have been realized without profit. Hell, if someone hadn't made a profit and donated it to Mendel's monastary he would have died in the street instead of inventing genetics.
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You're confusing "profit" with "money".
St. Thomas's Abbey was almost certainly paid for by the tithes of working people. You have to have a pretty twisted view of the world to consider a peasant's meager wages to be "profit".
Re:Water is wet (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is you have to compare the internet before it was profit driven against after it was profit driven. Sure, the TCP/IP suite is good and all, but without an underlying infrastructure it's kind of useless. That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.
A few things to take into consideration:
1) The original e-mail SMTP implementation was designed under the assumption that it could very well take multiple days to deliver an email. This is because the internet was mostly volunteer driven, and some links weren't open until the volunteers took the time to make them available. (Otherwise why even have SMTP? Why not just send your email directly from your client to the destination server? Keep in mind the spam problem didn't exist back then, so there were no anti-spam motivations for doing so, rather it was purely due to what was a discontiguous internet.) It wasn't until there was a profit motive of an ISP to provide "always on" peering arrangements.
2) Recall numerous times when those behind it said that the original design was never intended to be as big as it is now. That is because before there was big money to be made, most WAN links were pretty damn slow. Where we now have Frame Relay and ATM, there used to be X.25
3) Completely state of the art WAN equipment is hugely profit driven. HFC traders are well known to have some of the fastest and by far the most reliable links that they (not governments, not nonprofits or volunteers) commissioned to be built, which they also lease to other third parties (although these third parties get lower priority QoS, they still benefit from overall faster communication than had they used other links.) Some of the most state of the art networking equipment is also profit driven (like them or not, Cisco has done a HUGE service to the internet with all of the contributions they've made to networking on well more than one occasion, and they're very profit driven. They also provide emergency volunteer services as well though, see Cisco's TacOps team.)
4) You think the Emerald Express transatlantic cable would be under construction by purely volunteers? Look at the kind of work required to build that.
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Volunteer driven? Is this true?
After the military involvement it was mostly educational involvement.
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Consider also that the Human Genome Project outcompeted Ventner's for-profit attempt.
Actually Celera and the HGP out of Santa Cruz agreed to concurrent publication in February 2001. It's widely acknowledged, however, that Celera's efforts gave the public effort a much needed "kick in the ass", and it's also widely acknowledged that Celera got there first, but didn't publish because they were attempting to use the technicality of the "Bermuda Agreement" to patent a number of sequences, which can't be done in many countries, following publication. The patent must precede publication in the
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IIRC, Human Genome Project didn't really kick it into gear until there was a risk that someone else would actually finish the project, though.
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But the devices that allows everyone to use those devices came into being and became cheaper through the pursuit of profit.
Face it, a lot of people will say things like "Everyone should have clean water". But the idealistic goals are the ones that require the most effort where the less hardcore idealists become lazy and drop out.
Profit/capitalism is just someone putting their money where their mouth is, and allowing someone else to fulfill the drudge work for direct benefit. And yes, capitalism needs to b
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wow, you mean Bill Gates is wrong? How could that be, he is always right. Or is he?
He's not wrong. It's just really easy to tell people not to pursue only profit when you're one of the richest people in the world.
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The problem is that we treat scientists as freaks and wierdos so we kinda get to ignore their wants and needs.
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thats right, no one gives a damn about those fucking scientists, its all about the people paying for their lab. They get paid like fucking crap. There was even an article on the hacker news about it. I wouldn't be damn suprised if the peopl
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The dramatic increase in human life an health of the last 500 years has been driven by the ingenuity and hard work of many people. Many of them have not been motivated by profit.
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bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking.
Lords were seeking to extract the greatest possible profit from their serfs too, that is not new. Most all improvements to the life of the common man has been hard fought for at the expense of the rich and powerful. True, it has been quite successful at advancing science and technology but the world would not have stood still on curiosity, ingenuity and altruism either. And lately the trickle down effect that created the middle class has slowed considerably and the rich are again pulling away from the rest,
People are more altruistic than you think (Score:5, Interesting)
bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way
Untrue. And unlike you, I have citations and links to prove it.
You might have heard of Edward Jenner [wikipedia.org] , father of immunology and the man whose work in vaccination reduced smallpox from a feared fatal disease to a mere footnote today. Did he become rich from it? No. He sacrificed his own practice and in the end had to be bailed out with public funds.
Or we can look at Louis Pasteur [wikipedia.org], father of microbiology. He
What was was the motivation for his work?
You may be cynical and personally driven by profit-seeking, but don't assume everyone else is.
Re:People are more altruistic than you think (Score:4, Interesting)
Your little list can be easily trumped by Thomas Edison alone...
The context was human life and health. Edison was in the world of science and technology. In any case it was Edison's unsung underlings who made most of the advances. For other science examples, do you seriously think that the likes of Newton, Bacon, Galileo and Einstein were motivated by profit?
We need to distinguish between profit and salary. Many scientists and medical pioneers want a comfortable, or at least a livable, salary if only so that they can concentrate on what they like doing. Newton had his allowance as a Cambridge professor, and was later rewarded by the post of Master of the Royal Mint. But he did not make his discoveries so that he could become Master of the Mint. In fact he lived like a monk. Francis Bacon, as Lord Chancellor of England, was already a very wealthy man yet took an interest in science as a hobby, such that he was the founder of the modern scientific method. Bacon certainly did not look or expect any profit from his scienctific work - he did not need it.
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bullshit, most the dramatic increase in human life and health of the last 500 years has been driven by and is the result of profit-seeking. The only solutions to mankinds problems will be produced and distributed that way
Well then, we're right screwed. Profit seeking can indeed bring about benefits aside from the profit, but they are by-products. When profit is the primary goal, other things will be sacrificed to it. Examples abound of companies making inferior products or putting people in danger in order to maximize profit. The financial sector is wildly profitable, but I'm hard pressed to find the benefit of their activities to anyone but themselves.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you. Our capabilities and stand
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Here is wiki entry about a citation. The Wealth of Nations [wikipedia.org].
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Yes, I work in imaging research, trying to bring about medical imaging progress, with hopefully useful results. I'm not at all motivated by profit. I just want enough money not to starve and enough funding to pay my students and equipment. In the end, in the best possible scenario, it's a zero-sum game.
Re:Water is wet (Score:5, Insightful)
If you work for money you have my sympathies, perhaps you should re-evaluate your assumptions.
There is the option, especially prevalent within academia, of working for your pleasure. You still make money, and have to deal with financing, but it's not the point - if you weren't getting pay you'd make money elsewhere and then want to do the same work out of your own pocket as a hobby. Because the work is it's own reward.
Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it. Make your choices carefully. Or at least consciously. Don't let yourself become a cogg in the machine whose life has been optimized to serve the economy.
Re:[need YMMV] (Score:5, Insightful)
Have a look at the post you replied to:
Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, increased income has very little impact on happiness, while the things you have to do to get that money can often be quite damaging to it.
Please point to the part where you came up with "lovey dovey feel good philosophy doesn't pay the bills" from? That is an absolutely true statement. Once you have enough money to cover your needs (Needs depend very heavily on your expectations and accepted standard of living), there is no improvement to your quality of life. You do not require to be rich to have financial security to do what you love.
You think widget makers in the widget factory want to build widgets in their off time?
Absolutely!
My father is a cabinet maker. He spends all his working hours working on the factory floor and he is not rich in any sense of a word. However at home he has a shed with a work bench, wood and a hell of a lot of tools. After he comes home he makes stuff just for the pleasure of it. All our friends got custom chairs/tables/drawers/bookshelves that he built out of his own time and money just for fun and a thank you.
My grandfather was a plumber. For his whole life if any of his friends had issues in their home he would fix it up for free. I can assure you, he wasn't rich either.
There is so much more to life than money! Do you think that every single volunteer out there is rich?
Re:[need YMMV] (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps my examples are not the best. Plumbers and cabinet makers are professions that pay well eventually. The point I was trying to make that people do indeed spend their free time doing thing what they do for a job.
Stating that craftsman do not work for money (and its benefits) is ridiculous.
This is the part that I just don't understand where both you and the grandparent post got from.This whole thread is about working for pleasure ONCE the income from that activity covers the cost of living. Again the quote from the original post is: "Once you have enough money to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head". Quote from the post above that is: "Yes, I work in imaging research, trying to bring about medical imaging progress, with hopefully useful results. I'm not at all motivated by profit. I just want enough money not to starve and enough funding to pay my students and equipment." (Emphasis mine).
No one that I can see has stated in this thread that anyone works for absolute free. We do not dispute that! Your bills needs to be covered first. But beyond covering your needs, profit need not be the motivation!
For example: You have a choice to stay doing a job you love, but only covers your expenses or do what you don't like, but earn triple the amount that you need. In BOTH cases you are NOT working for free! In BOTH cases your living expenses are covered.
What this thread is about is that choosing the former is better for your quality of life than the latter. This is the interesting and complex part that is being discussed. Not simplified "Be a hippy to be happy!" nonsense that you are reading into the discussion.
Re:Water is wet (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that very *very* many people believe that having more money will make them happier - it's a belief that our culture instills in many subtle ways the entire time you're growing up, and gets reinforced by virtually every piece of advertising we see - a media form largely dedicated to generating a previously non-existent or negligible desire, with the implicit promise that sating that desire by giving Company X your money for their product/service will make you happier.
And it's completely false, as evidenced by a huge amount of psychological research around the world. Once you have shelter and plenty of food it doesn't actually have much impact on happiness whether you're eating beans and rice in a comfortable hovel or caviar in a mansion - other factors that have very little to do with money become the dominant factors in your happiness: things like close friendships, job satisfaction, and stress levels. All things that an unpleasant job can have serious negative impacts on. Income becomes relevant to happiness only insofar as your income compares to your peers - so long as you're not considerably less wealthy than your friends your income will have negligible impact on your happiness.
The evidences shows that we're virtually all really bad about judging beforehand what will make us happy, and rarely question our underlying assumptions. Meanwhile our culture is saturated with indoctrinating influences that tell a story soundly disproven by science. In such an environment I believe we have an ethical duty to point out the lies we're being told about ourselves, and encourage people to ask themselves what really matters in their life: what do you already do, today, that makes you happy, and why are you neglecting that in order to make more money to buy things that almost certainly won't make you the slightest bit happier after the initial rush of acquisition has passed?
If even one person reads these posts and decides they should spend a little more time with their friends and family appreciating the simple joys in life, instead of working overtime at a job they dislike so they can buy a nicer car/bigger house/newer TV/etc, then the total amount of happiness in the world is increased. And I for one think that's a worthy cause to fight for.
So says the richest man in the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cartoon lightening should hit gates in his weedy little head. What a hilarious hypocrite.
Tell you what, Gates... after I hit 70 billion I'll stop making it all about the money too. What a giant joke.
Yes, gates does a lot of very nice charity work around the world... and that's lovely. But he didn't just hop on a couch airplane and then do relief work in africa for years. The man amassed an insane fortune and then casually jet sets around the world making appearences for his charities. Don't get me wrong... he writes checks that clear. But that's his contribution to all these issues... writing checks. And that's very important... but to do that you have to have money. If you don't you can't do that.
So... I'm a little confused about his message. Because if I judged him by his actions... the sensible thing would seem to be... make billions of dollars by any means and then retire to run various charities and tell people what a good person you've always been.
I don't know... this charity kick that some of the super rich go off on seems like more of a donation to the "Everyone love me" fund. I frankly respect the anonymous donations more in most cases simply because you know they actually care more about the cause then they do about what people think of them.
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Re:So says the richest man in the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe he started out with a ruthless bloodlust for destroying all competitors and slowly grew up. And retired and tried to do something useful.
And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.
Hey, it could happen. Maybe.
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It's actually very common. (Score:3, Insightful)
As people get older they experience death anxiety. People who spent their lives accepting death as inevitable and believing they had come to terms with it discover the reality of existential crisis once the reality of death begins to draw near.
A very common reaction to this is a rapid shift of values. People who spent most of their lives seeking some form of hedonism start to want meaning in their lives instead. They want to make up for lost time, too.
Lots of rich robber-barons became philanthropists nea
Nope, Gates still uses the MSFT business approach (Score:5, Informative)
First off, Gates only contributes as much money to the foundation as can be written off.
He "generously" gives to school districts. In exchange the school must only use Microsoft products. We will pay for the computers and initial licenses, but then you get locked into an agreement to pay Microsoft Licensing Fees, which means the Gates Melinda Foundation will pay %40 of the cost, and the schools have to pick up the back end 60% in a few years time. Gates still has substantial shares in Microsoft.
Some places they have built water treatment plants to treat the water that has been polluted by the factory built up the river. In quite a few of the cases, the factory built up the river was made by a company with investment money from the Gates Melinda Foundation.
They have also developed Common Core, to teach English and Math in the way that Bill Gates thinks it should be taught. Adopted in 46 states so far partially due to the $76 million to help adopt their philosophy. Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point instead of Shakespeare. Freakonomics instead of Poe. Bill and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the future through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives. Regardless if you agree with this or not, the "charity" is making sure with its money, this is what your children are being taught.
Re:So says the richest man in the world... (Score:5, Informative)
And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.
Negative on that. He runs his charity much like he ran MS. In fact, several other charities are complaining how he's driving out the "competition" - which even though it's not about profits does have the same result we all know from MS: A lot of the aid programs now depend on his foundation in one way or the other. Especially in his most public work against malaria, he's made the pharma companies he works with near monopolies (and, surprise, he owns stock in them).
He's doing good now, but his methods are still the same.
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If you look at his wealth historically you can see if he had some sort of revelation and is now feeling bad about how he fucked people over. His wealth is increasing annually, not decreasing, so there is no reformation.
Same old same old in my opinion. If he got no tax breaks for doing charity work, he would not be doing charity work. I'm not his CPA, but I'm guessing that his "charity" ends where the tax breaks end. His charity work also happens to be largely philanthropic, but I don't agree with his ver
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
You gotta be shitting me. Apple is doing way worse things today than Bill Gates ever did in the 80s or 90s.
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What a hilarious hypocrite.
Most hypocrites do not realize that everyone else considers hypocrisy a bad thing.
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Its not that hypocrisy is bad so much as its frequently contradictory.
Their words do not match their actions and that has to be reconciled if they're giving advice.
For example, if you're a heavy smoker and want to caution against smoking... say "I've been a heavy smoker for most of my life and regret it... don't be like me."...
Well, gates isn't doing that. he's basically saying that people should go out to do something besides make money but that's exactly what he did and most people would be very happy to
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Hypocrisy is not always bad though. I smoke, i tell my kids not to and will punish them if i catch them smoking. A neighbor from years ago broke his neck back yard wrestling- after the then WWF said do not do this at home. His then idol, jake the snake roberts did the same shit he did. Luckily, he wasn't paralyzed. I know a guy who dropped out of school but tells kids to stay in school.
Some hypocrisy is good, some inconsequential, and some bad. And most of that is subject to interpretation too.
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1. He's a hypocrite who got filthy rich and now also wishes to indulge his jaded palate in the pleasures of self-righteousness.
2. He learned something, arguably the hard way, when becoming richer than god failed to provide any substantial hedonic benefits that merely being wealthy enough to avoid the overt pains of poverty didn't.
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If "The cost of something is what you give up to obtain it", then Bill Gates has 'spent' very little on his charity work. Not trying to diminish the importance of his charity - I'm sure the recipients of his donations are very grateful. But let's not pretend that this man is a shining example of moral perfection for all to follow.
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All? No. But, you know, most people who do NOT have that kind of money don't even realize that they could have problems like Bill Gates because they're busy worrying about REAL problems. Like, say, how to make ends meet.
Realizing that money can't buy immortality when you hit 90 and notice that the fifth liver transplant failed because, well, you're too old is one thing. Not being able to afford life saving medication at 30 is another one. In other words, the second person doesn't even live long enough to fi
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He seems to live pretty well for a guy ashamed of his money.
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It's voila, not viola.
Actually it's voilà, with a grave accent over the a.
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I don't understand where people get this weird idea that tax write-offs compel people to donate. The math just doesn't work out. Given some level of altruism in a person, tax write-offs do push the equation slightly toward higher giving, but donating still cuts into their personal wealth after tax. If there was no underlying altruism, tax write-offs won't get people to donate without some truly bizarre tax brackets (>100%).
I do believe you are projecting your own sentiments on to billionaires as a whole.
Oh shit, Mr. Gates! (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you suddenly realize that no matter how many children you save from Malaria you will still go down in history as "part of the problem?"
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Clearly Bill Gates is a monster compared to the typical Slashdot user, who would never stoop so low.
Some say (Score:3)
Profit IS the problem adbusters.org
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I don't think even adbusters would argue entirely against profit ... they're anti-excessive profit, anti-corporation, anti-marketing, etc. but even they recognize we can't all go back to subsitence farming. The ability to profit, and subsequently trade those profits to other people for things you can't produce yourself, is necessary for any viable economic system.
just trying to thin the competition (Score:2)
Again.
Oblig Soviet Russia joke (Score:2)
Easy for him to say. (Score:2)
But no wait, in the business world, ethics are proportional to profits.
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FTFY
Like repenting on your deathbed (Score:2)
It's very easy to tell people not to focus on profit when you've already made yours. I'm also adding my voice to the "Fuck Gates" camp. What he gives away is a small price to pay to when you consider what he's got left over. He manages to lose the reputation he should have for poisoning the technology industry in every way he could get away with for his own benefit, and still keep the vast majority of the profits. What a villain.
Gates is right (Score:2)
The general interest is that smart people work to help humanity and make no profit.
The smart people particular interest is to work to make profit.
In other words, Gates defended his personal interest and now defends the general interest by telling people to do what he says and not what he did.
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That's not obvious at all. I am pretty sure I could make more money doing other things, but I enjoy the things I do now more. Your best interest isn't necessarily what makes you the most money.
A truism: Profit is more valuable than charity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.
Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.
Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.
So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.
The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities [ted.com]. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.
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Less than half a second after reading that I thought "what about Ghandi - he did exactly that and ended up running a country of hundreds of millions of people". If that's not "world-changing" then what is?
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Less than half a second after reading that I thought "what about Ghandi - he did exactly that and ended up running a country of hundreds of millions of people". If that's not "world-changing" then what is?
Wait, what?
Ghandi was never elected to any public office. He didn't "run" any country.
Yes, he changed the world -- as an activist, not a politician.
Except when profit actively undermines charity (Score:4, Insightful)
How you get your profit makes a big difference in what net accomplishments your money can achieve. If your earning provides great support to systems that keep poor countries unstable or work against universal improvements for humanity, but then you wish to spend your profits on humanist goals, then what was the point? I'd rather you'd just become a janitor instead of digging holes in human society and then desperately filling them back in, hoping you might create mountains in the process.
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What I mean is, there are many millions of minds who never get the chance to contribute to technology due to circumstantial or financial realities. There is no telling how much progress we could be missing out on. I think that Open Source has been a decent if not stellar vehicle for addressing this, and I wish that Bill Gates would just take a few minutes to think about
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So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential
New grads aren't at the "peak" of their earning potential. That happens a few decades later.
I think what you meant to say is that it's a problem to encourage new grads to maintain their focus on charity.
May I direct your attention to this? (Score:2)
The other Microsoft story, on the exact same page as Bill Gates telling you not to pursue money at all costs, and instead focus on making the world a better place?
Chinese Gov't Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-Killer Patents [slashdot.org]
Right. We acquired all these patents to crush competition and make the phone market a monoculture. To make the world a better place.
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What if I told you all that happened after Bill Gates left the company?
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Pirates of Silicon Valley (Score:3)
Steve: "Our stuff's better Bill."
Bill: "You just don't get it, do you Steve?"
Just like Murdoch's speeches (Score:2)
Don't Hate (Score:2)
honest profit (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it. Gates made it through monopolistic practices and dirty tricks, mostly in the first world, and mostly profiting from other people's innovations and ideas. In that case, "making a profit" is not useful. But if you actually make a good product that people want to buy, making a profit is a good thing: it indicates that your product satisfies people's needs better than someone else's.
As for Gates, he is trying to salvage his reputation as much as he can.
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"The problem isn't with profit, it's with how you make it"
This has been said over and over again and reality has shown corporations use their profit to negatively harm society.
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Are you sure it's not useful? So he made a big profit and now uses a lot of that money to help the less fortunate. Suppose someone else (or a group) profited from the aforementioned ideas. What would the chances be for these people would be as philanthropic as him? Not many rich people are as generous. Usually, the very wealthy, when they do donate, donate to causes which are more relevant to the rich people, such as endowments to the arts and contributions to politicians or churches. The rich also give to
In other words (Score:2, Funny)
Do as I say, not as I do.
Ugh. I hate it when (Score:2)
the very ruthless and very rich tell us that money doesn't solve problems.
Well, you already got everyone else's money after being absolutely driven to do so for decades. Now you tell us that having tons of other peoples' money is no good anyway when it comes to really important stuff. Hmm...
So rather than sit on a pile of billions that you've tied up after getting it from other people, just give it back if you've now learned that it didn't do all that much good in the first place. No? Well then, you're eith
surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone surprised?
Gates has been on a campaign to whitewash his image for many years now. He probably realized that he has more money than he can ever spend in his lifetime, even if he sleeps on a bed of dollar bills ever day - and burns it in the morning.
But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag. So he did what all the robber barons have done before him, he turned to philantropy and creating a nice new image of himself, hoping that ten years from now people will remember that part of his life and forget the other.
And it just might work, because humans in general are stupid. Too few realize that since he made most of his fortune extracting economic rent, the damage he has done to society is larger than the money he has, so no matter what he does, if he wants to become a net positive for the human race, he has to do a lot more than just give away his wealth.
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Only on Slashdot. The thing that most extremist geek types don't get is that the public as a whole doesn't really care about tech infighting. Nobody but geeks care how Gates got his fortune.
Things people care about / will remember:
- Gates was the richest man in the world.
- He was a geek
- He was a college drop out
- He founded a huge charity
- He gave a bunch of his money to charity.
How Microsoft made money under Gates will be entire
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Pretty much this is what I'd expect from the audience.
Does anyone think these people want to start companies to "change the world"? Or solve the world's problems? They want to solve their own problems. Which are almost invariably solvable by the formula "insert money here, problem goes poof".
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Solving your own problems very often results in solving somebody else's problems. I've seen all too often where somebody noticed an ongoing inconvenience or problem, which they figured out how to solve, and then marketed their solution, which became lucrative.
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Sadly it has become more profitable to be someone else's problem so he pays you to go away.
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Re:Fuck the world (Score:5, Funny)
640 Megabucks should be enough for anyone.
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For now, there are some things money can't buy. Inconveniently for those who have it, they include the stuff of some of humanity's oldest and
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You set the standards high enough that nobody qualifies. He might not be Jesus Christ, but he's done a lot more good than most other people. Why don't you start improving yourself, then trying to bring him down to your level by disparaging him. How many people give away *all* of their money?