In others words, we're extraordinarily lucky that this particular ultra-wealthy person has decided to do good things with (some) of their money. But grounding moral and humanitarian progress on a steady stream of luck seems shortsighted.

It's most certainly not a fluke that the mega rich are solving problem governments can't or won't.

There is no "can't or won't" on a global scale: some countries have, others haven't as a function of their means. The fact that ultra wealthy individuals have better means than entire countries is an indictment of the state of affairs, not praise.

Edit: To elaborate on the above: eradicating polio isn't something that democratic, liberal countries are uniquely good at. Autocratic and despotic governments have also historically been good at it and have aggressively pursued it, because paralyzed citizens just aren't very useful. Countries that don't pursue eradication are historically ones that just lack the means (whether that's money, or infrastructure, or whatever), not ones with specific political structures.

That is exactly "can't or won't". The USA or China certainly "can" fix these issues in Africa if they want to but they "won't". But the African countries themselves obviously don't have this capability thus they "can't" fix it.

> The fact that ultra wealthy individuals have better means than entire countries is an indictment of the state of affairs, not praise.

Why is this an indictment. This is not self evident at all to me. The opposite is true from my perspective. This story and initiatives like the giving pledge very clearly show me that that the mega rich are doing things no country is doing. And thus these problem would remain unsolved if they would not be here.

However, The Gates Foundation tends to fund programs in developing countries where those countries's governments are not capable of funding it themselves.

While I can understand and in some sense agree that it's unfortunate our current best solution to tackling some of these problems is for someone with a lot of resources and no bureaucratic entanglements to focus on solving the problem once and for all. I can also recognize that few governments are capable of solving it regardless of political philosophy.

I'm more than happy to celebrate a solution that works today over a hypothetical solution that hasn't been successfully deployed yet. Maybe I'm too pragmatic.

The UN? They (to me / personal viewpoint / citation needed) don't seem to have any power, influence, means or goodwill to handle a problem like this. I mean they have never been as silent as they are now, while China and the US have literal concentration camps, Russia is assassinating political opponents and is encroaching on other countries - directly (Ukraine) or indirectly (influencing governments, heavily influencing destabilizing decisions like Trump's election or Brexit), the US is in a civil war and on a crash course towards a fascist dictatorship, currently working towards a sham election, actively undermining postal services so mail voting will not work so that Trump can go "Well shit is fucked, I'll just stay on a bit longer to fix this for you" and declare national martial law so that the army can beat down whoever objects.

But that harm was done to competitors, on the business field. The people who became collateral damage could always go and get jobs at some other company. The companies suffered and sometimes died but such is the way of capitalism.

If the upside was that his money gets redistributed to the genuinely poor and needy, who don't have any opportunity to earn for themselves in some cushy IT job, then I'm personally OK with it.

(I forget the specifics, but a piece of ancient code we wrote included a dummy assignment to a variable called BILLGATESBOLLOCKS, to get around some MS devilment).

Citation required.

But the problem is that we are those rich people. We as tech people have suffered under the microsoft monopoly. Heck, we still suffer, from the horrors of windows 10, to browser incompatibilities, etc.

So we hate Microsoft. So it's hard to love Bill.

So what if he did "terrible" stuff 25+ years ago? I am sure no-one in this thread would give 90%+ of their personal wealth to humanitarian work such as these. People just like to complain.

Not true, for what some people want is power and they continuously dish out money to get it.

It's often used as a vector to create a lot of the world's problems. I'm pretty happy to see it used the other way. A win is a win.