Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by beering on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:18AM
(#5226534)
Damn it, we just went over this article on HN a few days ago. The numbers are wrong, and if you correct the male circumcision number to 18.5 million rather than billion, the total drops by half.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by jobu on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:28AM
(#5226588)
First I've seen this, but that donation jumped out at me immediately. How could a male circumcision program possibly use all of $18 billion?! 18 million makes much more sense.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by eli on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:21AM
(#5226248)
I think the Gates Foundation is doing some amazing work.
But, uh, this blog post doesn't seem very well researched. It lists $18.5 billion for male circumcision in Africa, when the correct number is $18.5 million. Kinda makes me question the other numbers.
That's a single $50 million grant. Back out, create a search for Africa+HIV and you immediately see hundreds of millions of grants, so I imagine the bulk of the misstatement is from conflating HIV programs with those only targeting male circumcision.
BTW, the press release says that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated the money. So this does not necessarily mean that the money came from Bill Gates. Plus, you would count it twice if you count his donations to the foundation and the donations from the foundation ...
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by dfxm12 on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:58AM
(#5226426)
That's not what the pluperfect tense implies in English. It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past [1]. There is still some ambiguity that could lead a reader to infer that Gates is finished donating money.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by jere on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:08AM
(#5226484)
>It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past
True, but that implies that there exists such a moment with particular significance. Otherwise, you wouldn't use that tense. In other words, it leaves you thinking Bill Gates donated 36 billion dollars before X, where X is his death, an alien invasion, the collapse of the dollar, etc.
I don't know if there is a rule of thumb as to what tense to use, but "had donated" in this context feels plain wrong. That kind of dissonance is captured perfectly by this Mitch Hedberg quote:
>I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by dfxm12 on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:36AM
(#5226628)
Like I said, "had donated" is ambiguous, however, inferring that this must mean Bill Gates either died or gave the donated money back is more than a bit of a stretch.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by Osmium on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:37AM
(#5226634)
Just to reiterate the other comments, "had" is wrong because you included "in his lifetime" to contextualise it -- this implies the period of time known as his "lifetime" is in the past, which is wrong because he is still alive, and so "had" is incorrect.
If one had said "Bill Gates had donated over $x [before he was 55]" it would be fine.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by tmrggns on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:42AM
(#5226664)
In languages English is derived from, there is also the presence of an "aspect" to a verb, which denotes when a verb ends. We carry this through in English with the difference between "had donated" "donated" and "was donating", where the action is either completed in the past, ambiguous, or could be ongoing. I don't know if this is the "proper" way to talk about it in terms of English grammar, since I'm not sure there is such a thing for such a diverse language, but it is in Ancient Greek and Latin. Your link does a good job for people who are mixing up the auxiliary verb "had" which can be a main verb, "to have" but is not in this case. The main action here relates to donating, not having.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by nsns on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:13AM
(#5226506)
Gates' donations are invested in problems that should have been dealt with by governments, whose tax money is spent instead on the semi-corrupt self interests of their leaders and their business cronies,[0] an economic-social structure which contributed much to the way in which Gates and other Global business billionaires have made their fortune. It's a twisted system, and conscience-cleansing philantropy by its current and past players only brings back a small portion of what should have been invested in the first place.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by willis77 on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:41AM
(#5226657)
Microsoft clippy? Windows XP update auto-restarts? The Microsoft Genuine Premium Plus Advantage Home Starter Business Pro Certified Product Activator? The Zune?
Are these not some of the greatest atrocities afflicted on mankind?
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by ensignavenger on Friday February 15, 2013 @11:22AM
(#5226899)
"Gates' donations are invested in problems that should have been dealt with by governments"
-- What leads you to believe this? Do you think government is the most efficient way to solve these problems? Do you think Government has a responsibility to solve these problems? Why?
Based on what I have observed, government tends to be very inefficient when it comes to solving problems. Problems tend to be solved much more efficiently when individuals use their own resources to solve them.
Reading the rest of your comment, it appears you are advocating for a different sort of government/economic-social structure- perhaps a form that does not currently exist or has never existed. If so, you could simply state what you are advocating for, rather than criticizing the current system while offering no alternate solutions.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by jbigelow76 on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:51AM
(#5226723)
If governments use, in your words, tax money on semi-corrupt self interests then how would have taxing Bill Gates at a higher solved any of the problems you think should be handled by government? If governments are going to be inefficient and corrupt with a little money they are going to be inefficient and corrupt with a lot of money.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by rednukleus on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:46AM
(#5226365)
Windows has been a good product for the average user since 1995, and has been great since Windows 7; it's just their business practices that were a problem. And to be honest, they were hardly the worst offender there either.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by kamjam on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:22AM
(#5226558)
it's just their business practices that were a problem
Yes, agree. But everything is relative, right. All of a sudden the stuff they were doing doesn't seem that evil, and the hip kids from the block are suing the pants off everyone else that comes to play in their playground.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by fdw2 on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:57AM
(#5226417)
An interesting, speculative discussion would be to examine if the harm (if any) that came from Microsoft's monopolistic activities is out-valued by the good done by Gates in his foundation.
Where would the value captured by Microsoft and Gates have been redirected if MS didn't have a monopoly on the PC industry until recently? My guess is not fighting tropical diseases- but where?
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by danielweber on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:01AM
(#5226439)
This is a bad way to measure philanthropy, and I think Bill Gates would agree.
Anyone can dump money on a problem. But Bill Gates's money is still finite, and he has tried to make his money be the most efficient at solving given problems. He measures the stuff he does and sometimes finds out he goofed.
I'm not exaggerating when I say he's likely one of the top 5 people in the world at knowing how to spend billions of dollars to help people, because he has the most motivation of anyone in the world to know how to best spend billions of dollars.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by alexrson on Friday February 15, 2013 @12:14PM
(#5227167)
Not anyone can dump money on a problem. You have to have the money first.
To be clear, though, I really respect the Gates foundation's philanthropy philosophy. They are about achieving quantified results rather than just doing something trendy.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by brudgers on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:37AM
(#5226320)
The Gates Foundation has a trust endowment of $36 billion. Through June 30, 2012 it has made grants of $25 billion. Warren Buffet and others have contributed.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by mjn on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:30AM
(#5226600)
He and Buffett seem to share a skepticism of setting in motion a large charitable foundation that will outlive them. Hence, Gates wants to directly oversee the spending, and spend it at a high enough rate that it uses up most of the money in his lifetime, rather than setting something up in a will. Buffett even conditioned his recurring donation to the Gates Foundation on Bill or Melinda Gates still being alive and in control of the Foundation.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by tseabrooks on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:21AM
(#5226249)
How much of the Money donated by B&M Gates Foundation is Bill's personal money vs Money raised from donors? Not trying to diminish his donations, just genuinely curious how much money foundations like that raise form outside donors.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by mjn on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:52AM
(#5226397)
Depends on how you count. The endowment is mainly (all?) Gates's money, but a substantial proportion of the annual spending is funded by Buffett. That's because, rather than donate money to the Foundation outright, Buffett set up a recurring-donation program structured in a way so it feeds directly into the Foundation's annual program spending.
For 2011, it looks like the Foundation spent $3.4 billion total, of which the annual installment of Buffett's donation accounted for $1.5 billion, so a little under half.
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by mdpye on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:00AM
(#5226434)
I don't want to suggest that this has not been a good thing overall, but donations of this sort are a highly political act, and can't escape being in spite of any intention.
An interesting (I found) examination of the the effects of such a volume of donation coming from a single organisation can be found here:
Re:Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime
by hbharadwaj on Friday February 15, 2013 @10:03AM
(#5226452)
Haha - see the comments on the page. I have no idea where their weird twisted logic is derived from. I would much rather see the redistributive efforts occur through the Foundation than let it run through a public choice theory test.
See previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094
But, uh, this blog post doesn't seem very well researched. It lists $18.5 billion for male circumcision in Africa, when the correct number is $18.5 million. Kinda makes me question the other numbers.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants-2008/Pages/Population-...
That's a single $50 million grant. Back out, create a search for Africa+HIV and you immediately see hundreds of millions of grants, so I imagine the bulk of the misstatement is from conflating HIV programs with those only targeting male circumcision.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grants/Pages/search.aspx
The press release for this is here: http://fhi.org/en/AboutFHI/Media/Releases/081124_male_circum...
BTW, the press release says that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated the money. So this does not necessarily mean that the money came from Bill Gates. Plus, you would count it twice if you count his donations to the foundation and the donations from the foundation ...
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_aspect#English
True, but that implies that there exists such a moment with particular significance. Otherwise, you wouldn't use that tense. In other words, it leaves you thinking Bill Gates donated 36 billion dollars before X, where X is his death, an alien invasion, the collapse of the dollar, etc.
I don't know if there is a rule of thumb as to what tense to use, but "had donated" in this context feels plain wrong. That kind of dissonance is captured perfectly by this Mitch Hedberg quote:
>I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
The phrase certainly can be fixed if it refers to some event like 'Bill Gates had donated 36 billion before he left Microsoft'
"Has donated" carries the correct meaning and is unambiguous.
If one had said "Bill Gates had donated over $x [before he was 55]" it would be fine.
[0] http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/index.php/topic,5320.msg22368...
Are these not some of the greatest atrocities afflicted on mankind?
-- What leads you to believe this? Do you think government is the most efficient way to solve these problems? Do you think Government has a responsibility to solve these problems? Why?
Based on what I have observed, government tends to be very inefficient when it comes to solving problems. Problems tend to be solved much more efficiently when individuals use their own resources to solve them.
Reading the rest of your comment, it appears you are advocating for a different sort of government/economic-social structure- perhaps a form that does not currently exist or has never existed. If so, you could simply state what you are advocating for, rather than criticizing the current system while offering no alternate solutions.
Yes, agree. But everything is relative, right. All of a sudden the stuff they were doing doesn't seem that evil, and the hip kids from the block are suing the pants off everyone else that comes to play in their playground.
Where would the value captured by Microsoft and Gates have been redirected if MS didn't have a monopoly on the PC industry until recently? My guess is not fighting tropical diseases- but where?
Anyone can dump money on a problem. But Bill Gates's money is still finite, and he has tried to make his money be the most efficient at solving given problems. He measures the stuff he does and sometimes finds out he goofed.
I'm not exaggerating when I say he's likely one of the top 5 people in the world at knowing how to spend billions of dollars to help people, because he has the most motivation of anyone in the world to know how to best spend billions of dollars.
To be clear, though, I really respect the Gates foundation's philanthropy philosophy. They are about achieving quantified results rather than just doing something trendy.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-fact-s...
EDIT: Found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094
For 2011, it looks like the Foundation spent $3.4 billion total, of which the annual installment of Buffett's donation accounted for $1.5 billion, so a little under half.
An interesting (I found) examination of the the effects of such a volume of donation coming from a single organisation can be found here:
http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-...
Again, not saying it's not a net good, just that it's perhaps not a perfect model to pursue either.