Re:HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @01:49AM
(#19308593)
It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.
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Re:HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @02:28AM
(#19308786)
Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice.
The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.
Re:HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient
by L_226 on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @07:43AM
(#19310135)
> Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not.
something something tax avoidance
Re:HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @10:46AM
(#19311254)
Donations to certain charities can be tax deductions, but once you give the money to the charity, it has to be used for charitable purposes or it's not tax avoidance, it's tax fraud. Having it be used for charitable purposes seems like the thing we should want to happen to it.
Moreover, most of the things traditionally thought of as tax avoidance don't involve charities at all and are more along the lines of warehousing wealth in offshore companies where it can collect interest at low/zero tax rates.