Bill Gates Pledges 5% of His Wealth to Africa's Health and Agriculture (qz.com) 73
"American billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates has pledged to use 5.4% of his net worth to finance Africa's health and agriculture sectors," reports Quartz, "which he believes anchor the continent's progress."
Since landing in Nairobi on Nov.15, Gates has visited both rural and urban parts of the country, including primary healthcare centers, medical and agricultural research institutes, and smallholder farms to understand "what approaches are making an impact, and what obstacles remain."
His tour culminated in a town hall meeting with hundreds of students at the University of Nairobi on Nov. 17 where he announced $7 billion funding to help Africa fight diseases and boost agricultural capacity in the next four years.
"The big global challenges we face are persistent. But we have to remember, so are the people solving them," said Gates. He added that his foundation will keep finding solutions to improving the two sectors "and the systems to get them out of the labs and to the people who need them."
His tour culminated in a town hall meeting with hundreds of students at the University of Nairobi on Nov. 17 where he announced $7 billion funding to help Africa fight diseases and boost agricultural capacity in the next four years.
"The big global challenges we face are persistent. But we have to remember, so are the people solving them," said Gates. He added that his foundation will keep finding solutions to improving the two sectors "and the systems to get them out of the labs and to the people who need them."
Re: It's a lot (Score:2)
Small dent (Score:2)
A small dent in poverty that will help a lot of people. But since it is only a drop in the bucket of what is required, statistically blind fools, who have never donated or done anything to help, will still ask: he supposedly spent all a lot of money so why is there still poverty?
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Because he didn't spend a lot of money donating to the poor. He spent a lot of money investing in high profit ventures related to helping the poor, but also related to making a lot of money.
This is why many years after announcing that "he's giving away a lot of money via his foundation", he's wealthier than he was when he announced that.
Honestly, as long as one follows the other, this would be a great thing. Sadly, it often isn't. Instead a lot of it is about corruption and PR. Which is also something you h
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Because he didn't spend a lot of money donating to the poor. He spent a lot of money investing in high profit ventures related to helping the poor, but also related to making a lot of money.
This is why many years after announcing that "he's giving away a lot of money via his foundation", he's wealthier than he was when he announced that.
Honestly, as long as one follows the other, this would be a great thing. Sadly, it often isn't. Instead a lot of it is about corruption and PR. Which is also something you have to do when working in corrupt backwater nations that form most of the African nations today.
Perhaps Africa is just a wrong place to invest into? Asia has more poor people, and more economic potential at least in terms of geography, as does South America.
I understand his wealth increased in the last 20 years mostly due to the stock market soaring and with it his MS holdings.
Both he and Warren Buffett's wealth has substantially grown since they announced their donations over 10 years ago -- both directed the foundations not to sell the shares until the cash is ready to be spent.
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Actually, much of his wealth is now in completely unrelated things. Everything from being the single largest farmland owner in US to having significant investment in Big Pharma (see user below listing an example of his links to Astra Zeneca as an example).
But unlike the user below, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's much better to establish a self perpetuating cycle of doing a little good at a time than dump everything into on big good and then have no follow-up. I.e. profitable ventures th
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Indeed. The so-called charity organizations of the rich are nothing but legalized tax evasion schemes, with the added benefit of a great PR cover for blatant corruption. Bill is still the same Machiavelli that made him rich in the first place. It's just that these days he is building an intellectual property empire and buying up farmland. He's not giving away anything, he is bribing officials and politicians the world over and buying up our future at garage sale prices.
To get an idea of what the charitable
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After the "helping" that Sri Lanka got, i'm sure other countries in Asia will be somewhat hesitant...
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This is why many years after announcing that "he's giving away a lot of money via his foundation", he's wealthier than he was when he announced that.
Good for him. Charitable foundations are supposed to be self sustaining. Sometimes they do that by collecting donations of their own from others, sometimes they do it by profiting on investing in things that are still a public good. Sometimes they simply keep their initial capital investment forever and only donate whatever income they earn from that and no more.
If I was lucky enough to be able to start a charitable foundation, I would expect it to be structured to be able to fund contributions to goo
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That's not what I was criticizing. In fact, if you stopped knee jerking at the first line and read on, you'd find this:
>But unlike the user below, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's much better to establish a self perpetuating cycle of doing a little good at a time than dump everything into on big good and then have no follow-up. I.e. profitable ventures that genuinely help uplift the poorest people little by little that can sustain themselves are a good thing.
https://slashdot.org/commen [slashdot.org]
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What I am criticizing is that he claimed he was going to give his wealth away through his foundation. And then he did the opposite.
That presumes he is finished. I rather suspect he is not.
"The Giving Pledge is a movement of philanthropists who commit to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes, either during their lifetimes or in their wills."
https://givingpledge.org/faq [givingpledge.org]
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Yes, that is what the pledge was changed to after PR value from the initial promise was extracted and explanation to why the initial promise to start giving money away changed to making money while enjoying significant PR and tax benefits of supposed philantropy it was acquired from.
Most people forget that the initial promise was the start giving immediately, not "make lots of money and then give it away".
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Poverty is caused by one thing and one thing alone -- low intelligence. No amount of money can make someone smarter, no amount of money can make someone behave like a civilized human being.
You're implying gene editing as a solution? I get it, but that is nonsensical. If poverty is cause by low IQ, how do you explain the wealth difference between North Korea and South Korea? They are from the same genetic stock. Therefore, political leadership must play a role. I mean, Bermuda is black majority and their per capita is on par with western nations. Therefore, maybe education and other things can help.
Also, we can agree there are plenty of low IQ wealthy people.
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You're implying gene editing as a solution? I get it, but that is nonsensical. If poverty is cause by low IQ, how do you explain the wealth difference between North Korea and South Korea?
Yes, clearly poverty is caused by a combination of factors, but IQ is substantially correlated, both in individuals and populations.
The good news is that intervention *can* raise the average IQ of populations. We see this in the Flynn effect, and the decreasing IQ gap between races in the US.
Improving nutrition and reducing infections during pregnancy and early childhood is the obvious place to start. A more long-term benefit comes from raising the status of women in sub-Saharan Africa. With better educatio
Re: Small dent (Score:2)
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move low skilled cheap manufacturing from China to the African continent.
You think they haven't tried? Unfortunately that is far easier said than done. Some places have had limited success, but there are huge barriers to overcome for any project. Just look at the difficulties of the mining sector in Africa. Mining there can cost more than in developed countries, due to corruption and lack of reliable infrastructure or labour. Nothing is maintained.
Gates 2nd act eclipses some of his 1st (Score:5, Insightful)
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he has led the way for a generation of billionaires to donate their wealth back to society.
As witnessed by Musk blowing $44 billion to collapse Twitter. Not that you'd know about it since /. refuses to post a single story about it.
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Musk blowing $44 billion to collapse Twitter. Not that you'd know about it since /. refuses to post a single story about it.
And thats bad? There are plenty of other sites posting multiple stories daily on that fire, no need to add slashdot to it.
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They just want to avoid cluttering up their site with a lot of braindead speculation like yours. If Twitter actually does collapse, then they will have a story about it.
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They just want to avoid cluttering up their site with a lot of braindead speculation like yours. If Twitter actually does collapse, then they will have a story about it.
Only if the collapse involves Bitcoin in some way.
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How would you propose that he donate, then? Throw a billion or two at the Salvation Army and hope they do right with it?
His approach, whether right or wrong, is at least more committed.
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This started over 100 years ago with the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie and such https://youtu.be/HwYt_Rs1YKQ [youtu.be] personally I am against wealth dissipation, it is extremely hard to accumulate and very easy to just blow on nonsense, like building libraries and giving it to the poor. No amount of hand outs can turn poor into wealthy, it is impossible to do it that way, but it can be used for investment at low interest rates and directed to build more in the economy, it is a mistake to throw away such a diffi
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"just do something" and you will get wealthy. Aha. I do not refer to people who built businesses that supply customers with high quality, inexpensive goods as "rober barons", to me politicians that propose to tax and redistribute are the actual robber barons.
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They all do the same thing.
- yes, they take an idea, scale it up, thus lower prices while creating a much more compelling product than anyone offered before them and then they use their position as a great product provider to take over a large amount of client space. In fact people like Rockefeller have done more to save the environment from pollution than all idiots like you will ever be able by changing the way their product is produced. Before Rockefeller only kerosene was extracted and the rest of the crude was dumped into riv
yeah, think that if you want... (Score:2, Interesting)
Then go look into his vaccine related activities.
I'll not do your work for you, but I'll give you a couple of hints:
1. Look for the video of him explaining why he got into vaccines - he was very open about it at the time and it was NOT out of the goodness of his heart. Think: profits with no downside. Try to find any other product on Earth with legal protections for the makers even if the product is defective and killing/maiming people (don't say "guns!" - a murderer using a gun to kill does not make the gu
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It should be a badge of honor for every multi-billionaire to give most of their wealth back to society. Elon, are you listening?
Empire of Dust (Score:5, Informative)
In short: Everything fails because nothing is organized, everybody is corrupt, everybody lies, and everybody steals.
It is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
These 7 billion dollars will sadly all be wasted, to the last penny.
There may be a tiny bit of infrastructure built, or a few dozen trees planted that will be destroyed a few days after planting.
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Sounds a lot like Chicago.
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Bill Gates is the largest owner of farmland (Score:2)
Also how is he going to pledge any of his wealth. Did he give it all away decades ago?
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He's doing the same in Africa, and has a demonstrable history of failure through the Gates Foundation. The problem isn't money, the problem is the mindset, instead of creating markets that work, all this style of philanthropy does is demonstrate failed concepts and throw more money after them when they fail.
- The number of hungry people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries has jumped 30 percent during AGRA’s well-funded Green Revolution.
- Productivity increased just 29% over 12 years for maize, the most
What's interest rate? (Score:2)
?
USA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe he should contribute more to the USA, where he's done the most damage.
Do you understand signed numbers? (Score:2)
A nation 30+ TRILLION dollars in debt is most-decidedly NOT the "richest country in the world"
Belize has more money on the balance sheet.
Individual Americans certainly have money, but the country (the US government) does not own it, and would destroy the wealth and the productivity required to create it, if it seized it.
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Stealing VMS to create Windows NT was pretty destructive. Look up the lawsuits involving David Cutler's departure from DEC when his pet project got canceled in faavor of another next generation operating system, and look at just how much of his and other people's old work from DEC was used for Windows NT. Between that theft, and Intel stealing the physical architecture of the Alpha to create Pentium chips, it stripped what had been a good company of its primary assets. DEC used to be a good environment for
Love the moderation. (Score:2)
The post is only a tiny, insignificant variation away from, "DUH! BILL GATES BAD!" and it's "insightful".
As long as you buy his GM seeds /s (Score:2)
Promises.promises and Lies (Score:2)
Who? (Score:2)
Who is this guy, and why should I care? Oh, another rich blowhard. Ok, let me know when I can read his obituary.
Why not India? (Score:2)