The Books Bill Gates Enjoyed Reading in 2021 (gatesnotes.com) 83
Last night we asked what books you'd enjoyed reading this year.
Here's how Bill Gates had answered the same question on his personal blog Gates Notes: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction. Paul Allen and I would spend countless hours discussing Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite.) There was something so thrilling to me about these stories that pushed the limits of what was possible.
As I got older, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. I was still interested in books that explored the implications of innovation, but it felt more important to learn something about our real world along the way. Lately, though, I've found myself drawn back to the kinds of books I would've loved as a kid.
My holiday reading list this year includes two terrific science fiction stories. One takes place nearly 12 light-years away from our sun, and the other is set right here in the United States — but both made me think about how people can use technology to respond to challenges. I've also included a pair of non-fiction books about cutting-edge science and a novel that made me look at one of history's most famous figures in a new light.
I read a lot of great books this year — including John Doerr's latest about climate change — but these were some of my favorites...
Gates' picks include a dystopian science fiction novel by nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun) and Project Hail Mary. ("It requires a leap of faith, but it's got a lot of science in it...") The nonfiction titles included Walter Isaacson's book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker and Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains.
Gates reveals his recommendations in a fanciful video where Christmas-y window displays include icons from his recommended books — including William Shakespeare.
Here's how Bill Gates had answered the same question on his personal blog Gates Notes: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction. Paul Allen and I would spend countless hours discussing Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. I read every book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite.) There was something so thrilling to me about these stories that pushed the limits of what was possible.
As I got older, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. I was still interested in books that explored the implications of innovation, but it felt more important to learn something about our real world along the way. Lately, though, I've found myself drawn back to the kinds of books I would've loved as a kid.
My holiday reading list this year includes two terrific science fiction stories. One takes place nearly 12 light-years away from our sun, and the other is set right here in the United States — but both made me think about how people can use technology to respond to challenges. I've also included a pair of non-fiction books about cutting-edge science and a novel that made me look at one of history's most famous figures in a new light.
I read a lot of great books this year — including John Doerr's latest about climate change — but these were some of my favorites...
Gates' picks include a dystopian science fiction novel by nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun) and Project Hail Mary. ("It requires a leap of faith, but it's got a lot of science in it...") The nonfiction titles included Walter Isaacson's book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker and Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains.
Gates reveals his recommendations in a fanciful video where Christmas-y window displays include icons from his recommended books — including William Shakespeare.
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If you think enjoying a book about a sentient computer helping space Australia become an independent nation makes you a psychopath I think it says a good deal more about you than anyone else.
Did you read it when you were eight? Cause then that's why you may have remembered it as being about "space independence" instead of a preachy gospel any 10-year-old should find ridiculous.
Particularly when it twists itself into knots made out of strawmen to "prove" that because commerce, "freedom of choice", mob rule and scarcity of pussy in space - there can't be such a thing as rape so no laws about it are needed, because "men won't permit", because such is the custom.
Which is also why an adult fucking a
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Well, it's a favourite of mine, too, but didn't drive me to Libertarianism, though it is this fantasy where Libertarianism just somehow works.
When "Defund the Police" became this controversial statement last year, I'd haul out the bit in Harsh Mistress where "justice" was about to be done by a lynch mob, but they are "good kids" so they pay for a trial, run by the nearest familiar-and-respectable passing citizen. I don't recall any reviews that went "That would never happen, they'd just lynch him, and a
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As I was saying before I got modded down by someone either in love with Big Bill or who fell in love with Heinie-man's shitty psycho-philosophy later in life and not as a dumb and ignorant child...
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite
He basically confessed that he is a psychopath, right there. Unless he was like... five to nine.
The video linked in the summary though is him definitely confessing that he is a megalomaniac who sees human beings as objects, whose only value is his amusement.
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Bill Gates has done damage everywhere he has been involved. We would all be better off without him.
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Keep shaping our perceptions, BIZX. Just a few years ago, Bill Gates was the antichrist on Slashdot. Now anyone who dares to oppose him is downmodded to Terrible karma.
Not me. I make enough karma points that I can afford to criticize our supposed betters, especially career criminals like Bill Gates.
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"your" obviously a product of common core. Yay Gates!!
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> what have you done in this world?
What's that have to do with the price of beans?
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None of the evil people who comprise the upper class can ever come clean, the guilty would be overwhelming. These greedy, selfish and irresponsible people need to remain living in their affluent fantasy just so they can live with themselves. Otherwise they'd have to face the fact they've wrecked the planet and fucked over humanity. This is all just classism, welcome to our plutocracy.
Remember, it's our greed that enables this all to happen.
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Do you think Jeffery Epstein liked to read sci-fi? Maybe he and Gates had other things in common.
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Maybe that BIZX thing has people keeping and eye and downvoting here.
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This doesn't count because he read an advanced copy in 2019?
https://www.amazon.com/COVID-1... [amazon.com]
COVID-19: The Great Reset - by Klaus Schwab
He could be an author (Score:1, Flamebait)
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And yet here we are, scrutinizing what he decided to pack into his grey matter this year.
Because he has great insight into the world? No. Because he is entertaining? No.
Because he's rich beyond comprehension. It's celebrity gossip for the WSJ crowd.
Hate the system that created him (also Trump and Clinton). He's just a symptom.
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I'm not going to give him a pass for his crimes just because he made stupid amounts of money. Even if it's "the system" that enabled him, he's still responsible for his and his subordinate's deeds in his name. You could well argue every dollar he raked in with his destructive practices represents a few dollars more of real damage to the economy. He, or well, a better person, could've done much better without materially affecting his personal wealth, but he didn't.
If you have so much money you can give 99%
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It could be argued that it wasn't the system that produced Bill Gates, but rather Bill Gates who abused the system itself. It's kinda like saying banks are bad because the bank robber got away.
Sadly, the DOJ failed to break up Microsoft like they should have for the ways Microsoft found to smash competitors. It might even be argued that single DOJ failure has now led to technology titans restricting traditional freedoms that we have taken for granted in traditional public forums because it suits their ends
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Just the system?
Fuck that.
He has agency, he chose to do all the illegal and scummy things he did.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I mean, really, who cares? (is this a paid "article"? Is Gates still trying to make his history look good, in spite of all he did?)
Clearly you do. I mean you were triggered enough that you came and commented about the story. Judging by the low number of comments on it you seem to care more about this than most people.
May I recomend next time just keep on scrolling?
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You should be more concerned about the commies hiding under your bed than some rich billionaire who isn't at all interested in you. Clearly you've been ignoring him. If you're in the west then he doesn't give a shit about you. Are you living in a 3rd world without electricity?
Good to know what to stay away from (Score:3, Informative)
It was pretty clear while he was with MS, but it has gotten even clearer since then: The man is an idiot. The only talent he has is selling substandard crap and making people believe it is a great product. Sure, you can get rich with that, but that is about it.
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I disagree, he was very strategic business-wise. He purchased/stole and bundled the right products at right time. The products were almost always "good enough" at a decent price. It's sort of like the same reason people stop at McDonald's while traveling: you'll never get cuisine, but it's also not Bob's Roadkill & Grill.
Some say he simply rose up on the PC's coattails, but other business entities failed, such as Gary Kildall, or Lotus Inc., who were even better positioned. Failures of promising startu
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I disagree, he was very strategic business-wise. He purchased/stole and bundled the right products at right time.
With a little help from his mom, and a lot of lying ("it'll be great when it comes out!") and other anti-competetive trickery. The guy's shady as fuck, as his highschool class mates.
The products were almost always "good enough" at a decent price. It's sort of like the same reason people stop at McDonald's while traveling: you'll never get cuisine, but it's also not Bob's Roadkill & Grill.
I disagree: It is pretty much Bob's Roadkill Grill except it got IBM's seal of approval (fie and pox on IBM for that, idiots), so the managerial class bought into it wholesale.
The rest is network effect, inertia, and more ignorance. Oh, and the Unix wars didn't help. The hardware was cheap compared to better computers and it se
Re:Good to know what to stay away from (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll split the difference and point out that Bill Gates was a strategic businessman that also made some shady choices on products and services Microsoft offered. Network effect, inertia, and consumer ignorance helped considerably.
Microsoft Excel was perhaps Microsoft's most popular product prior to it being bundled into their Office suite. People didn't much care for MS Word but it worked well enough for people. WordPerfect was a much better product and sold quite well for a time, in spite of the inertia for "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" that was launched off inertia from IBM and deals with Microsoft on DOS and Windows. Microsoft grabbed IBM's coattails then forced a split that gave us MS-DOS vs. PC-DOS and Windows vs. OS/2. Microsoft pulled hard on those coattails, got a toehold in IBM's back pocket, a grip on the back of their collar, followed by a kick in the back of the head, then they just ran as IBM stumbled.
The Microsoft Office bundle killed WordPerfect by leveraging Excel's popularity to get people to choke down Word. Bundling forced people to make a hard choice, buy two word processors, abandon their investment in skills and processes built on Excel, or hold their noses and use Word. Bundling their web server with their server OS, and some legalese in the licensing, meant people had to choke down IIS, pay for licensing on two web servers, or abandon their investment in skills and processes built around the Windows server OS. When Microsoft got in some legal trouble around the "web browser wars" they tried making the legal cases moot by licensing their browser to EVERYONE. The joke was Microsoft Internet Explorer would be included with every compiler, terminal emulator, flight simulator, mouse, book, and breakfast cereal. Microsoft could not legally include it with their operating system so they included it with everything else they sold, and forced anyone that licensed anything from them to also license Internet Explorer.
Gates and company would buy up the competition when they could, and when they could not then they bundled a popular product with a less popular product to leverage one to sell the other. I recall someone pointing out that the only original Microsoft product was Microsoft Basic. MS Basic was the original leverage point, from that they'd try different bundling tactics to grow their market share. If one bundle didn't sell, got complaints from licensing partners, or got too much attention from regulators, then they'd shuffle the bundles around until they got it right.
That original inertia from IBM meant they could make a few mistakes along the way and still stay ahead. Some wise business deals, and shady as fuck bundling and licensing, brought them considerable profits.
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You know what, I don't disagree with the description so much as think that it does not describe "good strategic business" (nor ~man nor ~ decisions).
It's always "hooshit this is popular? let's get in on this game!" any which way they think they can get away with. It's never on merits, never on good software, never on delivering on the promise, but always on trickery, coercion, bullying, abuse, or if all else fails, throw money at it (remember bing's pay-for-use?).
And that's the guy's business acumen. His
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The Office bundle took over my corporation (4000 desktops then, 10000 now) despite almost nobody knowing Excel. I was this pretty good hand with Borland Quattro, if you wanted a better spreadsheet than 123 (v3).
Nope, Microsoft just leaned on them that they had to have Windows (and after Win95, yeah, you did) and both Windows and Office would be much, much cheaper if you just gave Microsoft a single-source contract for all software.
After that, you had to prove, not that your alternative to an MS product w
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WordPerfect could have made a bundling deal with Lotus or another spreadsheet to be competitive with MS's bundle, but they didn't, and Lotus liked to charged too much. The other players could have played the bundling game also, but didn't, and shrank because of it.
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he didn't steal shit - he / Paul Alan brought 86-DOS from Tim Paterson.
doing so they had DOS for the IBM PC
sorry - internet - make shit up as fact
Go read knowledge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's true, he paid for it. It's also true that he had already made the deal to sell it again before he bought it, and knew what he was doing. It was legal, but it was shitty.
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Robert X. Cringely had a great word for the MS business model: "sharp dealing". "Sharp dealing is legal, but it's the kind of business where nobody ever does business with you again, at least no voluntarily".
As Bond noted about Aurid Goldfinger cheating at golf, 'the only way to deal with a cheat is to not play with him again - unfortunately, that wouldn't work here'.
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They stole the GUI. Rumor has it they eventually settled with Xerox and Apple, but it was after they already established Windows as the office GUI.
Some suggest they stole BASIC itself, which was supposed to be open source, although under a poorly formed license.
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HE stole government computer time.
Re:Good to know what to stay away from (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft crushed Lotus through anticompetitive practices. Nice example.
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They could have countered if they worked with other software vendors.
Re: Good to know what to stay away from (Score:2)
They could have countered with what?
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He wrote very compact/efficient code.
Gweihir logic: (Score:2)
- I won't read something because someone else read it.
- The man is an idiot, he was just genius enough to get rich by making something substandard no one wanted.
Dude if you were a robot your mind would explode given the logic you employ.
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- I won't read something because someone else read it.
- The man is an idiot, he was just genius enough to get rich by making something substandard no one wanted.
Dude if you were a robot your mind would explode given the logic you employ.
Well if my mind worked on _your_ simplistic level, that may be a problem. It does not.
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Well if my mind worked on _your_ simplistic level, that may be a problem. It does not.
Says the man who can't spell his own username ;)
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/G... [fandom.com]
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Well if my mind worked on _your_ simplistic level, that may be a problem. It does not.
Says the man who can't spell his own username ;)
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/G... [fandom.com]
Bullshit. I am well aware of the spelling difference and I _was_ aware when I selected the name. Apparently you are so dazzled by my intellect that you frantically have to find things I may have done wrong. Pathetic.
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It was a good-natured joke, oh self-proclaimed genius, but really ...
Is your name G.W.Eihir? Perhaps you are advertising a shop that offers "Wig Hire"?
Another book for this year (Score:2)
How about reading this book Mr Gates?
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-B... [amazon.com]
How much did that video cost ?! (Score:2)
He paid for and made a full-on video production, featuring multiple skating santas *to tell us his reading list* ?!
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You forgot living mannequins and an astronaut.
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You forgot living mannequins and an astronaut.
And was that someone pretending to be William Shakespeare?
I was also struck by the effort put into the production. That looked like a lot of work for so little payback.
Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anyone want to know what this dickhead has read?
You are trolling us. (Score:3)
I mean in the best sense of the word, that of making a provocative post.
Aren't you?
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It may be provocative, but that was not my intention. Its a serious point and one worth taking seriously, that what used to be thought of only a few decades ago as the high culture of the West has now vanished from view and even attention. In fact, its a concept that no-one takes seriously any more.
The Great Books courses had their critics, and I was one. It seemed to me that there was a sort of rootlessness about them, a collection of not very related works with nothing much in common with the culture of
"Just science fiction" (Score:3)
"They don't read serious novels. Its all science fiction or... "
The second you made the grandiose and preposterous assertion that science fiction novels can not be "serious novels", I stopped caring about what you and your moronic gatekeeping has to say.
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A few have tried to be serious novels, though I cannot think of any that have succeeded. Perhaps films have done better. Solaris, the original one in Russian, comes to mind, it used the genre to explore some quite deep states of human feeling. But generally if you have read some of the great novels of Western literature attentively and understood what they are doing and how they are doing it, you will no longer be able to get much satisfaction from reading SF.
Its worth taking critics of the genre and wha
2021 Was A Good Year For Bill (Score:1)
John Doerr? I heard that name before. (Score:5, Interesting)
This might be where I heard of John Doerr before: https://www.ted.com/talks/john... [ted.com]
Or perhaps not, I'd likely have better recollection of a video produced so recently. I likely seen this guy in a different TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/john... [ted.com]
This guy talks about lofty goals, big picture plans, but not so much on anything anyone can really use to act on. What bothers me is his very top down view of how to deal with CO2 emissions and global warming. He says a lot on how important it is to vote wisely and influence the few people that have considerable influence on decisions that affect CO2 emissions but says nothing on how to choose candidates wisely, or what information we need to convey to these people that can have an outsized influence on CO2 emissions.
He does get things half right with mention of the need for nuclear fission and synthesized fuels. He mentions a need to weight costs to benefits as we progress to make sure we are on track. The information is out there on where we can start today on lowering CO2 emissions. People wrote books on this and offered them as free downloads on the internet.
Here's one such book: http://www.withouthotair.com/C... [withouthotair.com]
And another: http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
Both give all kinds of numbers on our options. Numbers that can be verified to keep them honest. Numbers that anyone can update over time, and use the calculations provided to make sure everyone is on the right path.
Dr. David MacKay was the subject of a number of videos where he was able to be entertaining and informative, showing us what paths would be most effective in fighting global warming. In his last interview before he died he was quite blunt on what needed to be done: https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
Like John Doerr he advocated for nuclear fission and synthesized fuels. Unlike John Doerr we didn't see Dr. MacKay cheer lead on voting or communicating with influential decision makers. Al Gore is another example of a cheerleader, only with less real data we can use to act upon. We don't need more cheerleaders, especially cheer leaders that can't convey who needs to be cheered on, and what we should be cheering for.
Telling people to write their congressman is not helpful. What is helpful is telling people that solar power and offshore windmills are shit, nuclear fission power is required to keep the lights on, we need synthesized fuels or our economy will grind to a halt, and the best return on energy invested comes from onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear fission. Knowing things like that are helpful. Telling people to act with "speed and scale" is just rephrasing "go big or go home", and that is just cheer leading. Giving people information on what are wise choices, and what are not, is exceedingly helpful. That way when people vote, write their congressman, or whatever, they have the information they need to act and communicate effectively.
I can see why Bill Gates likes what John Doerr has to say, I see many similarities in what they say about global warming. Their knowledge on the subject appears to be quite thin so they fill in the gaps with cheer leading instead of filling those gaps with data.
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I can see why Bill Gates likes what John Doerr has to say, I see many similarities in what they say about global warming. Their knowledge on the subject appears to be quite thin so they fill in the gaps with cheer leading instead of filling those gaps with data.
That lack of knowledge explains why Gates keeps promoting nuclear as a solution to AGW.
That book by Nabokov (Score:3)
Like that old man.
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So what? (Score:5)
He came from a privilege background, with the inside track to the circles of power in key companies - which he then used efficiently. That does not make him authoritative on anything much.
I.e. most of us do not give a damn whatever he enjoyed reading in 2021, or in any other year.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Bill who?
I came to write... (Score:4)
Here you go (Score:1)
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Interesting.
I’ve disliked the man’s ethics since the 80s.
Guess he thought he was onto a good thing when he went to epsteins orgy island.
Melinda must have found out!
Yes! (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress favorite (Score:2)
Politicians need to read this to better understand how decisions can have such long lasting, unintended consequences.