So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.
>Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?
I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.
Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.
That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.
Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)
Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.
Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.
But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth.
He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.
Evil is, as evil does.
Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.
Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.
Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/bill-gates-big-philanthr...
Like, actual facts.
FWIW, Bill Gates is one of the people I would have pointed to as one of the less disreputable modern billionaires, and finding out that Melinda divorced him over his Epstein connections really soured my opinion of him.
I think OP has a point, it's very difficult to accumulate vast wealth without behaving ruthlessly and being kind of an asshole when it comes to making tough profit-over-people decisions.
Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.
Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.
Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/bill-gates-big-philanthr...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
One would have had to try very hard to avoid ever hearing about Microsoft's behavior in the '90s.
Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).
So really it's a two pronged thing:
* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).
* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.
But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
Yes, I don't love that he puts out hits like that on solar and wind in his effort to promote nuclear as a sole solution, but I still find his larger arguments around the dynamics of environmentalism as a movement persuasive.
I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
I'm sure the government will accept donations. Just pay extra as you think they are worth it.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people.
He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.
I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities.
2. Don't abuse children.
3. Stay off Twitter.
Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
Evil is, as evil does.
Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.
Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.
Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/bill-gates-big-philanthr...
Using words like "Big Pharma" to make working on vaccines look like something awful is also a poor rhetoric device.
It would be nice if you had a second source on the trials you referenced in India as it is not clear who the blame lies with.
Capital research isn't a serious source as they clearly have their own anti-vax agenda.
>Saying that Gates "has no qualms in killing children..." is quite a stretch.
Nah, you can whitewash an unscrupulous billionaire's sins all you want, but you cannot hide the truths.
> Using words like "Big Pharma" to make working on vaccines look like something awful is also a poor rhetoric device.
It is an undeniable fact that Western Big Pharma companies and partners are doing illegal or unethical clinical trials and rogue experiments on underprivileged communities in poor nations. If you really want to poke that bear, I will share horror stories (with links) of what Western Big Pharma is doing in Africa and elsewhere, but it will have to be a separated conversation, since this thread is about the crimes of Bill Gates.
> working on vaccines look like something awful
The dilemma is not who is working on vaccines. The real question is : are they safe, and are they even proven to work?
First go take a deep dive to understand what "clinical trial" of a drug is all about. It is Development stage of the drug. This means the drug is risky because it is unproven and untested on a wider audience.
The HPV experiments in India by Bill Gates organizations (BMGF and PATH) have been indicted in Parliamentary committee investigation & report and local/police investigations. Links below.
> It would be nice if you had a second source on the trials you referenced in India as it is not clear who the blame lies with.
HN users have become lazy to do the research homework on topics they argue about, it's sad. But I'll ease your comfort further, see the citations/official-links and relevant info below.
-------
The facts are all already proven. Since you find it hard to do research homework on subjects you argue about, let me ease your comfort further by sharing more links and evidence.
---------
It's all Documented in the Indian Parliamentary committee report on HPV vaccines. It is all in public domain.
Indian Parliament Comes Down Hard on Cervical Cancer Trial: https://www.science.org/content/article/indian-parliament-co...
PDF - Full and Final Report of PATH - HSRII: https://www.hsrii.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/72.pdf
"The Committee finds the entire matter very intriguing and fishy. The choice of countries and population groups; the monopolistic nature, at that point of time, of the product being pushed; the unlimited market potential and opportunities in the universal immunization progammes of the respective countries are all pointers to a well planned scheme to commercially exploit a situation. Had PATH been successful in getting the HPV vaccine included in the universal immunization programme of the concerned countries, this would have generated windfall profit for the manufacturer(s) by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses. It is well known that once introduced into the immunization programme it becomes politically impossible to stop any vaccination. To achieve this end effortlessly without going through the arduous and strictly regulated route of clinical trials, PATH resorted to an element of subterfuge by calling the clinical trials as “Observational Studies” or “Demonstration Project” and various such expressions. Thus, the interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and selfservicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but a serious breach of law of the land. The Committee is not aware about the strategy followed by PATH in the remaining three countries viz. Uganda, Vietnam and Peru. The Government should take up the matter with the Governments of these countries through diplomatic channels to know the truth of the matter and take appropriate necessary action, accordingly. The Committee would also like to be apprised of the responses of these countries in the matter."
PDF - Trials and tribulations: an expose of the HPV vaccine trials by the 72nd Parliamentary Standing Committee Report: https://biswaroop.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Trial-Tribu...
Final Report of the Committee appointed by the Govt. of India, (vide notification No. V.25011/160/2010-HR dated 15th April, 2010,) to enquire into “Alleged irregularities in the conduct of studies using Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine” by PATH in India: https://www.icmr.gov.in/icmrobject/static/icmr/dist/images/p...
"A Global Project, titled “HPV Vaccine: evidence for Impact”, a population based, post-licensure study of HPV vaccine for prevention of Cancer cervix has been being carried out by PATH (Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health), an international NGO, in the districts of Khammam of Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Vadodra of Gujarat in India since 2007. It was implemented in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research and State Governments of AP and Gujarat. Besides India, the project has also been carried out in Peru, Uganda and Vietnam. The project is funded by a grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and donation of HPV vaccine by the manufacturers, viz. GSK and MSD to PATH."
---------
And the consequences on Gates Foundation have also happened in India.
India’s Ban on Foreign Money for Health Group Hits Gates Foundation: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/world/asia/india-health-n...
Now as for your dear hero Bill Gates, and "whether there was indeed a hushed up medical disaster in India caused by the Gates foundation", just hear it from the horse's mouth..
"Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has landed in hot water after referring to India as “a kind of laboratory to try things” during a podcast with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. His remarks, while intended to highlight India's progress and its collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have revived a controversial 2009 clinical trial -- funded by Gates' foundation -- which killed seven tribal schoolgirls and left many others severely ill."
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/bill-gates-laboratory-remark...
"In 2013, India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare, comprising of members across political lines, held the BMGF-funded Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) guilty of violating regulatory and ethical norms laid down by the Indian and U.S. governments for clinical trials. The committee investigated the role of the BMGF and PATH in the trial of HPV vaccines on children in Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh and Vadodra district of Gujarat, during which seven children died. It uncovered ethical failings in the study and the subsequent investigation. The government of India responded by restricting the BMGF from country’s immunization program."
https://www.newsweek.com/foreign-funding-threatened-india-mo...
There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.
I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.
Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery
Bill Gates is a piece of shit.
At the time they met in 2011, Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008.
How did he help him and call him a friend?
He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.
The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.
Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of of such victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
Hypocrisy News.
Karma will have its way, and its say.
It is as if Gates's team are lurking here in HN, to immediately downvote any comments that reveal the truths about him. Hmmm.
No wonder his wife divorced him. She should have done it long ago.
But she too (as part of their Foundation) is culpable for the deaths of those tribal children given those illegal vaccines.
But Bill Gates has been using his vast wealth as a weapon and Think Tank for Big Pharma - he is actively using his wealth and clout (under guise of charity) to harm and kill poor people and innocent children (by doing experiments on them with unproven/dubious drugs as "clinical trials") without their consent.
Now that is pure evil.
People remember that Bill Gates played the game and won, and the damage he caused was mostly limited to the economic sphere and to other people playing the same game. That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
He was a Harvard dropout, but not some poor kid.
Bill Gates was always rich. But with Micro$oft's success, he became a lot lot richer later.
His mom sat on some major committee at IBM. She had significant clout there.
That's how Bill even got the chance to pitch a new OS when the IBM big bosses were looking to unleash their new PCs.
Do you really think they just yanked a school dropout from the streets into their boardroom to decide important business future for their company?
Paul Allen had started Microsoft with Bill Gates. It was Bill's mom who pitched Microsoft as a potential partner to IBM's CEO John Opel.
Bill Gates scouted and found a chap (Tim Paterson) having a working prototype called 86-DOS. And Bill purchased it (with his family money), rebranded it as PC-DOS and sold it to IBM (but he cunningly kept the copyright as he rightly figured that other manufacturers would clone the IBM PC hardware and would need a DOS for their PCs (thus, he later licensed the new OS to non-IBM PCs as MS-DOS)). I daresay his mom was instrumental in such cunning dealmaking.
>That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good. The problem is that he is using his wealth for some shady stuff, so it is not good.
Bill Gates's name is mentioned in the Epstein files, for some unsavory links to that child molestor.
And his BGMF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) got banned in India from funding local NGOs, because a Parliamentary committee indicted BGMF's involvement and funding for shady and shoddy vaccine trials on tens of thousands of poor Indian tribal children without informed consent and under false aegis.
Be careful whom you consider your heroes. They may not be all they seem to be.
Think about it as a noble way to spend your HN karma
I have been using HN for some time, but I don't really know how it works.
People seem to be downvoting my comments that reveal some hard truths, but I don't see any downvote button when browsing HN conversations.
Anyway, I don't intend to downvote anyone. Let people have their own opinions and say, but is there anyway I can find out who is deliberately downvoting my comments?
But I feel that if my account gets restricted or suspended on HN because of downvotes on my comments that merely state some hard truths, then so be it.
It would be a judgement on HN, not on me.
I will simply go elsewhere to speak up the truths..
Someone has to speak for those innocents whose voices have forever been silenced by evil people.
The truths are there for those who wish to see.
I type fast though, LOL. Bad habit from my early days as a programmer and blog writer. ;-)
Very, very often this is some form of lashing out and has no basis in any reality.
One time I joked about blocking a domain which would have embarrassed a notorious colour revolution organisation and the next day the domain was snatched up by the named gang.
And that particular Reddit account got banned.
Even whole subreddits are taken over by shady admins, and totally weaponised. e.g., r/India is filled with anti-India hate posts and malicious misinformation, because that subreddit is controlled by Pakistani admins.
I was actually glad when my Reddit user account got banned for speaking some truths about history of my nation, LOL.
Lot less stress on HN, it is more peaceful, simple, and informative, I like it.
The heart-wrenching laments of the families of healthy innocent children who died in such evil unscrupulous experiments by these evil billionaires and greedy evil Big Pharma megacorporarations, shall be heard across the world.
Karma will have its way, and its say.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
I am sure the sweatshop kids work under informed consent too and were given a choice between 996 in the textile factory and education.
300 million Americans are incredibly deluded about their place in a world of 8 billion.
America operates with a monopoly on unethical labor practices.
None of you are in the streets to put each other on the hook for your own healthcare or extend the offer to your neighbors. That's how much money obsessed Americans care about their own existence; happy to roll the dice they don't get some illness and lose it all to medical debt versus ask their neighbors to get their back.
Meanwhile every other modernized country has single payer.
Cosplay rugged individuals who don't need the help, while codependent on sweatshop labor.
Such an unserious people.
Bush Sr. and Jr. openly did wars for oil, under fake excuses like "WMDs".
"Gentleman" Obama too has a dubious distinction - he's the only two-term American President who kept his country directly involved in wars throughout those tenures, including wars he himself signed off to start. Yet he shamelessly went and collected that Nobel Peace Prize.
And Trump was so miffed at not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, that he unleashed tariff wars on all allies, and then arrogantly invaded a sovereign peaceful nation (Venezuela), and he's now threatening to seize Cuba (he's already stopped all oil going to it, in order to cripple this struggling nation that CIA destabilized since decades), Greenland, Columbia, Canada and whatnot.
AFAIK, no American president has bothered to take serious efforts to prevent gun shootings in American schools and colleges. USA has maximum mass shootings and maximum school shootings compared to rest of the world, the statistics are really shocking. (The evil that happened as the Uvalde school shooting, where the shooter was protected and aided by the police themselves - such avoidable tragedies on innocent children just breaks my heart.)
It seems that healthcare and safety of children are the least of the worries of the Americans, as they keep voting for such fakers and warmongers to be their President.
Interesting you don't mention Iran. Trump has been building up forces in the region for a few weeks and is on the verge of invading, in an exact mirror of Russia invading Ukraine.
From the article: an already-approved vaccine (by FDA and others) was given to children via a trial run by an NGO (PATH) and was funded by BMGF. The trial was apparently run unethically, and in addition a year or so later it was found that girls administered the vaccine had possibly experienced adverse events, some very serious.
(Based on the article alone) it’s very likely that BMGF would have been totally hands off in overseeing the trial, and would certainly have had strict agreements with PATH. If there were indeed ethical breaches, I’m sure BMGF was very unhappy about this. Moreover, while we of course shouldn’t ignore the safety findings, attributing events causally to the vaccination against the standard background rate of events in a particular population is rife with uncertainty.
And of course, the trial potentially being unethically run doesn’t make the (already- and still-approved) vaccine more dangerous… but does make it easier to whip up sensation and clicks for articles, especially if there’s a big rich US Foundation also tangentially involved.
BMGF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is funding such evils across the world, this was not some isolated incident that Bill and Melinda Gates were unaware of.
Furthermore, did the Gates do repatriations to the victims of this experimental drug? Nope. Did they even apologize for funding clinical-trials-without-consent of experimental drugs that they dared not test properly in their own country? Nope.
They knew what evil they were doing, and they didn't care.
Bill and Melinda Gates are guilty of mass murders of innocent children. No wonder they were in cahoots with that evil Epstein.
And I'll expose some more of your whitewashing here.
Entire world knows the FDA is in the pockets of Big Pharma, so FDA approval means shit. FDA itself is funded by Big Pharma.
Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% Of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is...
So explain if you dare: why are the clinical trials of unproven drugs by American megacorporations and American billionaires being done on poor illiterate tribals (or underprivileged communities) in India and Africa, rather than on American citizens first?
Don't want your children to die or be affected due to such experimental drugs, do you? Show me where clinical trials of this HPV vaccine has been done on minors in USA.
But you feel it is okay if some healthy children in some poor or developing nation die due to such unethical BioPharma experiments, especially when those experiments are done WITHOUT consent from the children and their parents?!!
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...
"A standing committee on health and family welfare that investigated the irregularities pertaining to the observation studies in India tabled its report.
The committee found that consent for conducting these studies, in many cases, was taken from the hostel wardens, which was a flagrant violation of norms. In many other cases, thumbprint impressions of their poor and illiterate parents were duly affixed onto the consent form. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine. The authorities concerned could not furnish requisite consent forms for the vaccinated children in a huge number of cases.
The standing committee report was a shocker but it became even more significant when it was mentioned that the study was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
When a team of health activists - from an NGO (Sama) that specializes in women’s health - visited on a fact-finding mission, they were told that as many as 120 girls vaccinated with HPV had experienced adverse reactions such as epileptic seizures, severe stomach ache, headaches and mood swings. The Sama report also said there had been cases of early onset of menstruation following the vaccination, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps among many students. The standing committee pulled up the relevant state governments for the shoddy investigation into these deaths. It said it was disturbed to find that “all the seven deaths were summarily dismissed as unrelated to vaccinations without in-depth investigations…the speculative causes were suicides, accidental drowning in well (why not suicide?), malaria, viral infections, subarachnoid hemorrhage (without autopsy) etc.”
The committee said that in the context of deaths of girls classified as suicide, the role of the “HPV vaccine as a possible, if not probable, cause of suicidal ideation cannot be ruled out.”
Where one side provided all the money, the other side provided the direction.
Both were necessary. Weird huh?
How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?
Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
Notably, she played a huge part in how Amazon was structured due to her influence on Bezos.
I do find it very interesting though the apparently common pattern here of ‘woman gives away massive fortune she got from x to make the world better/rehabilitate her image’ or something.
Meanwhile, the men all seem to go on hooker binges. See Bezos, and now Gates (vs Epstein files).
No one, including the people getting screwed at the end, are actually innocent, but some definitely are more guilty than others eh?
Melinda also, of course, did work for their joint foundation before she left. Since leaving, she shifted her philanthropic focus more to US women's health and reproductive rights.
Bill has committed to giving away nearly all his wealth (99%) over the next 19 years. Melinda is still committed to giving away over 50% of her wealth over her lifetime.
I don't see any evidence that Melinda was the primary driver for Bill's philanthropy.
Follow up question: do you buy indulgences?
Him giving her STDs and then trying to sneak antibiotics in her food without her noticing would have been grounds all by itself.
> basically his entire fortune
If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.
But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
I’ll give you the creation of the country but modern democracy was not born in the USA. Your overall point is still valid though.
For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund.
That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power.
Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in.
All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.
I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?).
You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.
Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother.
Now you get it.
He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.
The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company.
I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.
Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
Because it's almost impossible to not help someone if he just throw wads of money at random. What important is how many people weren't saved because he decided to be a middle man in all of it?
At some point it stops being a philanthropy when it makes lives of people he tries to "help" worse. Like his actions have a ulterior motives...
A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.
Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.
I have a kid in school and a math degree so I have some knowledge of this.
Yeah everyone forgets, he killed Hitler. That was a huge win for Germany. But no one ever gives him the credit.