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Re:Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Ga... by dredmorbius on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:54PM (#27031959)
Given the Gateses' roles in the tech world, venture funding, philanthropy, and Big Problems (scroll through BG's Twitter feed for numerous recent examples), including malaria, fresh water, sanitation, COVID-19, nuclear power, carbon emissions, global warming, disinformation, and more, the adjacency to numerous topics highly relevant to HN are high.

I say this as a very long-time critic of Microsoft and Gates, including on recent issues (patents as applied to vaccines).

Reader flags are a useful indicator, but can still reflect a minority quashing of a discussion that seems to badly want to happen.

Flagging also prevents tools such as Algolia from returning results of those discussions. That's sometimes merited, but not, I'd argue, in this case.

Re:Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Ga... by dang on Monday May 03, 2021 @06:57PM (#27031982)
Sure, but what's there really to say about those things on the occasion of them announcing their divorce?
Re:Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Ga... by dredmorbius on Monday May 03, 2021 @07:41PM (#27032327)
One obvious question would be whether high-profile marital status changes have been consequential, and how.

The case of Warrent Buffett. It was the death of his wife, and a sense of his own mortality, which inspired his own philanthropic bent.

There's the question of whether or not oligarchic philanthropy itself is a net good. There's much criticism of this, not the least of which comes from within the NGO sector. (See the Tiny Sparks podcast for significant discussion.)

Events are a foil. Life transitions become an opportunity to focus on what has been and what may be. Divorce isn't obituary, though it functions similarly, with the notable distinction that the principles aren't dead yet, and may yet do more.

(Uninformed speculation on why and wherefore does tend to be tedious, I'll grant that. I'm tugging out of that particular wallow, if possible.)