Bill and Melinda Gates 2016 Annual Letter
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
Like nuclear fission? Or how about solar?
Anyhow, while I think the intentions are good, my experience in 3rd world countries has me convinced that all the charity in the world won't help.
In general, the problem in 3rd world countries isn't education, or sanitation, or lack of capital, or mosquito nets, etc...
The problem is corruption and safety. I've seen it in my wife's country - savings rates are generally high, there's lots of labour, a ton of entrepreneurial spirit and the barrier to entry is more or less zero. The problem is, the second you start any sort of enterprise, someone will rob you. Police will demand bribes. Politicians will demand bribes. If you don't give in, they'll send their criminal friends after you. Even if you do give in, they may anyway. Bandits will come rob you in the night, and if you're unlucky enough to be there at the time, they'll shoot you. If you're lucky, they just take some cash. There's literally zero incentive to do anything, lest you get robbed and/or killed. That's reality. You want to fix the 3rd world, you need to start with law and order. Nothing can happen until people feel safe, and feel like doing something will actually improve their life.
After that, it's infrastructure. Power, roads, emergency services, bridges, etc... Infrastructure enables travel, it enables businesses, lights, and so on. When you have infrastructure you can bring your products to market. And so on (most people know the economic benefits of infrastructure).
In my experience, families in the third world often have the equivalent of thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars saved. Witness how much money Syrians and Afghans pay to get smuggled into Europe. They won't invest that because they don't feel safe, but they have no qualms giving a smuggler thousands of dollars.
So much charity is just a band-aid, or worse, gets siphoned off to corrupt entities. You fix corruption and safety issues, and the third world is the new first world. But no, we give charity with one hand, and with the other are propping up horrible dictators, overthrowing democracies for choosing the wrong ideology, and encouraging corruption and oligarchy. Given what's happened in the world since I've been old enough to follow the news, I'm more convinced than ever that the developed world simply wants to keep the third world as dependent colonies.
tl;dr - long rant, something something corruption.
"One of the most common stories about aid is that some of it gets wasted on corruption. It is true that when health aid is stolen or wasted, it costs lives. We need to root out fraud and squeeze more out of every dollar....
"We should try to reduce that. But if we can’t, should we stop trying to save lives?"
In the mean time I think Gates wants to do something rather than nothing and things like mosquito nets apparently do save lives. The people whose lives are saved may not be able to prosper, but they're most likely grateful for not dying of malaria.
It's not malice or conspiracy or even stupidity. It's simply the way the US's political, economic, and industrial systems (alternately known as THE MAN) co-evolved.
Yes I wrote 'seem', not 'is', because I can't prove it.
As long as for-profit companies are running the reactors, they’ll end up saving everywhere, and, like we’ve seen before and before, it ends up in meltdowns (for example, due to refusing to maintain the emergency generators properly, see fukushima).
Any way you try to handle this issue, someone will abuse it. Make it a governmentally funded operation, people will end up corrupt and use money for themselves. Make it a for-profit company, they’ll try to get around every regulation and save money.
No matter what you do, you end up with a potential disaster.
Nuclear power and uranium mining is far cleaner and safer than coal, oil/gas, even hydro. Coal mining, hydro accidents, and the various deaths from oil/gas extraction, power plant accidents, etc..., far outstrip deaths from nuclear power plant accidents. Not to mention the health costs that coal has inflicted on the world, the amount of people displaced and ecosystems destroyed by hydro, and so on. Nuclear power gets a bad rap, but statistically speaking, is rather safe.
And especially the waste issue isn't easily solvable.
Yet, in the actual world Nuclear power kills so many fewer people than any other kind of power - solar included - that's it's not even in the same ballpark.
Areas where nuclear waste or faulty reactors contaminated tap water, and people were never told about it until the leukemia rate reached several hundred times of the normal rate.
Just counting direct deaths is misleading.
There were 6 cases of leukemia in Elbmarsch, and it's not clear if they have anything to do with the reactor. Asse II has not hurt anyone. Southern Bavaria is not specific enough to google.
6 cases, and no one died as far as I can tell.
> Areas where nuclear waste or faulty reactors contaminated tap water, and people were never told about it until the leukemia rate reached several hundred times of the normal rate.
What areas?
> Just counting direct deaths is misleading.
Go for it. Count leukemia if you like - Nuclear still comes in far ahead.
Big picture wise, I'm sure it is statistically be safer than fossil fuels (counting the problems of fossil fuel pollution and the environmental problems / lives lost due to the extraction process). But looking at the power plant itself, and focusing on the worst case, the only other form of power I can think of with the potential to create a Chernobyl type disaster is hydro (as dam failures can create pretty widespread destruction and kill hundreds of thousands -- see the Banqiao Dam disaster). Coal / oil / gas plants that explode kill people too, but generally only within the plant boundaries.
Even a hydro disaster won't necessarily make 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for 200-300 years, ala Chernobyl. The only comparable thing I can think of in the energy realm that comes close to that is coal mine fires (ala Centralia PA), and that's at the extraction level, not the plant level.
I'm actually struggling with your assertion that nuclear power has killed more people than solar... peer reviewed estimates of Chernobyl vary between 4,000 and 25,000, is there a solar disaster on that scale that I'm not aware of?
> is there a solar disaster on that scale that I'm not aware of?
And that's exactly the problem! Solar (and coal, etc) kill people slowly, here and there. No big disasters. Nuclear is always a big very public disaster.
Yet the other energies kill in total way more people, but the perception is less. As evidenced by what you wrote.
That makes people think incorrectly about the pros and cons. You have to force yourself to use the numbers, not the perception, if you want to logically make a decision.
> I'm actually struggling with your assertion that nuclear power has killed more people than solar.
You have to calculate deaths per Watt. Solar just hasn't made much energy, yet had a disproportionate amount of deaths (relative to nuclear), roof falls mostly. Nuclear has generated something like half the power on this planet, so proportionally is not as much.
> (counting the problems of fossil fuel pollution and the environmental problems / lives lost due to the extraction process).
Actually, nuclear is better even without counting the environmental problems!! (But yes counting extraction.) If you count pollution, even ignoring global warming, youch, it's not even close.
> Even a hydro disaster won't necessarily make 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable
You'd be surprised at how much land is uninhabitable because of open face coal mining - it's way more than nuclear. And river acidification, and entire areas of land poisoned and basically useless because of 75 year old mines?
Don't forget Chernobyl still has forests and lots of animals. It's just useless for people. It's the same with coal mining - there are plants and animals, but the whole area is useless for people.
Even by this metric nuclear still wins over coal.
Chernobyl proved we can’t trust states to run reactors.
Counter-point: See Onagawa - http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...
Right, because government never cheaps out on massive infrastructure projects...
From my original comment.
So, please learn to read.
And don't even get me started on the rapacious capitalists running Chernobyl...
We ban accounts that repeatedly post uncivil comments to Hacker News, so please don't do this.
Especially when multiple – in this case 2 (!) – people ask the very same question, again and again.
Asking redundant questions is also discouraged in the guidelines.
When multiple people miss the point you're trying to make, it's safe to assume that you haven't made your point as clearly or convincingly as you'd hoped.
In which case it's perfectly fine to respond and further develop your point, but your point will carry much more weight if you're polite and respectful in the way you phrase it.
It's the safest form of power we have.
> In general, the problem in 3rd world countries isn't education, or sanitation, or lack of capital, or mosquito nets, etc...
I don't even know where you pulled that out of. It would be more credible if you could cite some evidence.
My wife is also from a so-called third-world country. A stunningly beautiful one at that. Every time I visit I dream of moving there.
Once I found a Swiss guy, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, who had started a small farm and an operation dealing in a very specific kind of beef cattle, and esp. breeding. He even had an awesome little restaurant serving schnitzel and beer. I think he moved there for a woman, and had to figure out how to make a buck. He was living the dream!
A couple years later he was out on his ass, because as soon as his business was successful, local folks stole his cattle. I found a lawsuit he filed in which he explained that he could actually see the stolen cattle from his land. But the proper palms had been greased, and he was completely up shit creek. He made a pretty big stink, right up to the point where he'd be risking life and limb to go any further. But nothing was done, nobody was arrested, and he never got his cattle back.
And therein lies the rub: nobody feels safe enough to endure success.
> You fix corruption and safety issues, and the third world is the new first world
I like the sentiment, but in many countries, corruption and safety issues won't even begin to be addressed as long as the business of making/selling drugs for Americans is as lucrative as it is.
What foreign aid does is insulate these tribal systems against change. It often supports repression, but also does provide needed medicine or food to people you would otherwise die. That, to me, is the problem.
When a common person needs help from above, he or she turns to the tribe strongman rather than a bribe-seeking policeman or bureaucrat.
While this may look like "corruption" to westerners, it is understandable in places that have different political histories than the west.
One example are insolvency laws.
In most countries, there are three options: creditors and debtors reach an agreement. Liquidation. And Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administration_(law)) ordered by court.
Administration is complicated, and requires complicated laws and competent and honest officials to administer the laws. So countries, especially poor ones, should not offer this alternative.
If the company is worth more alive than dead, creditors and debtors will come to an agreement. (Especially if you remove the alternative of administration, that gives the debtor an out, rendering the creditors threats toothless.)
Hernando de Soto makes a similar case that societies need some cultural achievements unlocked before their market-based economies can work well. Stuff like property rights, fair and impartial courts, contract law, enforced regulatory authority, professional civil servants, etc.
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
Hernando de Soto (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Everywh...
I have friends that work in development who criticize de Soto: a good start, but as one would expect, the story isn't that simple. Alas, I don't recall their upgrades to de Soto's insights.
The thesis of the book I mentioned is exactly that you should very carefully economize on the amount of `cultural capital' required to run your economy. A mostly market-based economy is one way to do that, if regulation is chosen carefully.
Societies that have lots of cultural capital, like the Nordic countries, can get away with more socialism without everything becoming corrupt. (It might still be inefficient for them to go that route, but at least they can bear the costs.)
It's at the heart of the Baha'i approach, which has development as its goal, but starts by training young people in honesty & altruism and developing a community oriented around local service (it aims at adults too, but they're harder to reach unless they are already basically on board). It's a little weird to talk about on a technical forum, since the approach assumes a spiritual view of human nature -- the unifying power of prayer, we have a higher conscience, etc, but I think it's true, and I find it to be systematic and evidence-based.
I think people love being trustworthy, but they tend to develop cynicism about it. They want to be part of a trustworthy society, but they haven't seen it work yet. That makes me think it's possible to grow a society where honesty & justice are the norms, even embedded within a society that is corrupt & cynical, if a small critical mass of people support & encourage each other. They'll attract positive attention and grow, in part because of contrast, if the desire is there among the general population.
It's is a slow process though, and I often feel discouraged because it's the kind of thing that requires generational change, and which I doubt I'll see finished in my lifetime. But when I stop and think about what else I'd work on, I can't think of anything more solid in the long term.
Integration is the idea that we should all have the ability to leave our mark on society. In other words, it means to have access.
Differentiation is the idea that we should be free to be different, that we should not fear for our physical safety. Unless people have the ability to express their creativity without restraint, we will have a society like the old Communist block, and we are headed to that with the latest mass surveillance policies, unfortunately.
An example of a differentiated and integrated society is the Open Source community. Another example is the brain, which has an astounding number of components tightly integrated yet differentiated. A third example would be the free market, where each agent tries to differentiate its offering from the competition and yet also has to be closely integrated with the other agents in order to benefit from the opportunities they create. A fourth example: the ecosystem, where each species is differentiated in order to benefit from a niche yet they also need to be integrated and function as a complex whole.
If we have differentiation and integration in society then our minds can cooperate to build a better future, organically, from the grassroots. In such a society a person would be free to be creative and have a low entry barrier to the market. If we took these two core principles and try to optimize them in society and politics, we'd maximize happiness. A differentiated-integrated system has a superior ability to adapt and find solutions to its problems.
Aspects of these issues can be observed in pretty much every country, no matter how rich or developed. For instance, it is quite clear that because people in the US has no trust for social insurance systems, that puts a cap on how efficient their workforce can get. That doesn't matter economically as long as there is a lot of unskilled labour, but it leaves no possibility for the whole workforce to get skilled and well educated. That could matter at some point in the future.
Corruption is Legal in America [Video]
a) Pay people well enough to not feel the need to take bribes
b) Create harsh enough consequences that everyone thinks twice, and apply it universally. This doesn't mean a police state or even jail, but enough consequences that being corrupt isn't a worthwhile enterprise
My wife's country actually elected a government that isn't too terrible and is trying to change things, but the backlash caused by giving civil servants raises was fairly big. And the old government was undoubtedly corrupt, but prosecuting your political foes can cause issues, even if it's entirely just.
Education can help, but then again, it's not everything, and if there's no demand for educated labour, people drop out anyway.
People need to look at the least corrupt states in the world - we may bitch about it, but our politicians are paid very well, and while some are still corrupt, most aren't, and the scale of corruption here is far less than most countries.
And notice that while still useful in some cases, charities and NGOs didn't play a major role in taking a billion of Chinese out of poverty. Mostly they were given a stable enough environment and did it themselves.
[Edit] And infrastructure, yes again. That's very stunning, when comparing China and, e.g. India.
It's not that simplistic and whatever happens, there is a significant voice against interventionism, except when another faction wants it.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/microcredit-muhammad-yunu...
I've read a few articles mentioning how Africa has been inspired by China in recent years who focused on infrastructure as a base for domestic growth instead of just exports or raw materials.
I can't imagine the struggle it must be to survive without access to energy and clean water. Our household recently had our pipes burst from freezing and were nearly at a breaking point after three days without water. Worse yet is the occasional black out. So I'm very sympathetic to this cause.
Bill and Melinda are doing some great work.
Sidenote:
> Changes in weather often mean that their crops won’t grow because of too little rain or too much rain. That sinks them deeper into poverty. That’s particularly unfair because they’re the least responsible for emitting CO2, which is causing the problem in the first place.
Is this really true? I thought farms were responsible for the most generation of CO2 and pollutants? At least in North America livestock accounts for something like 50% of the pollution (aka "cow farts"), even more so than oil/coal. The worlds obsession with meat is actually more harmful to the environment than cars/gasoline... but this is never popularly advertised thanks to efforts of the livestock industry and willful blindness by government agencies.
That's true for intensive farming with machines and powerful fertilizers and so on. Many people in Africa practice subsistence agriculture which is much less efficient.
Because, the opposing party would be the ones to reap the rewards, and praise from the populace.
They'd instead focus on building new roads instead of maintaining existing ones, building new schools instead of improving existing ones, starting new high sounding schemes instead of continuing projects the previous regime begun.
And btw plants convert CO2 to O2.
The planning horizon does not stretch further than the next election. For long term projects, private entities do much better.
The lack of accountability in a dictatorship might offset that. I have no way of evaluating that.
Well without going into the specifics of which industry outputs the most CO2, I think it's a fairly uncontroversial statement to make that (particularly on a per capita basis), the poorest people on the planet output the least CO2. Whereas we, the richest, output the most CO2, but will not be hit as hard (at least in the short-medium term) by climate change.
I think that's the gist of his statement.
In places like Mali or Malawi, the CO2 emissions are roughly 2 orders of magnitude lower than some of the highest places like Qatar or the US, in China it's roughly one order of magnitude. And that doesn't even factor in that China doesn't 'consume' a significant portion of the end products that generate the emissions. i.e. it emits a lot, in part, because it produces for consumers in the west, meaning they're really our offshored/outsourced emissions.
http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.htm...
http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.htm...
UN and IMF say it's around 18-51%:
Maybe he's thought about it, and as a famous geek thinks that the number one thing he can do is champion tech innovation.
But he specifically talks about increasing energy efficiency. An obvious opening to talk about carbon taxes that bake efficiency decisions into everything we buy (and provides a ready made market for new, low-carbon tech).
Or he talks about coal, again a great opening to talk about removing subsidies from that industry and getting the workers retrained in something else.
And he seems dismissive of solar, like those will only help African farmers when the sun is shining and so are barely worth even thinking about.
In general he seems too focussed on getting carbon to 0, and not enough focussed on the low hanging fruit which, if solved with todays existing tech and policy instruments, would extend the runway we have to find breakthrough tech before our world descends into anarchy and global warfare.
Just swapping natural gas for coal gives us much ability to burn fossil fuels, since it halves the carbon per energy output. Might not be as cool as a fusion reactor, but every carbon molecule counts.
I'm sure Bill supports anything that can reduce CO2 emissions, but I expect his feeling is that we don't need more encouragement to look for little efficiencies; rather we need to find a big solution. Or maybe we need encouragement on both fronts, but he didn't want to dilute the main point of this particular essay by focusing on existing tech.
(That said, he does talk also about improved energy storage and power lines and such, things that would build on existing clean energy sources.)
Significantly, he's trying to do practical things to improve the lives of poor people in the third world, as opposed to founding libraries or building more William Gates computer buildings at elite universities.
It's fair to judge what he does against what he could do, but it's unreasonable to judge him for what he can't do.
I do think, however, that it does make sense to question whether he might be wasting resources and effort.
The website says: "Some of the projects we fund will fail. We not only accept that, we expect it — because we think an essential role of philanthropy is to make bets on promising solutions that governments and businesses can’t afford to make. As we learn which bets pay off, we have to adjust our strategies and share the results so everyone can benefit."
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...
Aaron : What drove the decision to go start a business?
Paul : Poverty.
Aaron : Poverty.
Paul : I was tired of being poor. I was working as a freelance programmer, and it was this sort of boom/bust thing where I would get money and then I would run out of money, and then it would be a disaster, and I just got tired of it. And then I thought, “I’m just going to work until I won’t run out of money.”Paul got tired of being broke. When you're tired of being broke, but you're educated, young, healthy, and/or from a privileged class-- you go to school, open a business, hustle, whatever.
People living in poverty live the lives they do for various reasons-- born into poverty, low education, mental illness, substance abuse, poor health, elderly, single mothers raising children, or some political or historical context (e.g. slavery, discrimination, unequal access to education/healthcare, language/cultural barriers, recent migration).
Poverty (in my mind) means you are stuck on an island where every nation around has guns pointed at you so you cant leave and there are only dirty cookies to eat.
> Poverty (in my mind) means you are stuck on an island where every nation around has guns pointed at you so you cant leave and there are only dirty cookies to eat.
Idle thought is when a human spends time thinking to no end purpose.
This thread is about Bill & Melinda Gates' opinions on how to fix things. You're here speculating on Paul Graham's opinions & then slamming your carefully constructed strawman. It is thought pollution.
You (and some of the children of this thread) should scrutinize your personal values and evaluate just what you think you are hoping to achieve by proposing up this kind of unsubstantiated tangent.
Its neither a strawman nor an unsubstantiated tangent.
I don't care about your free advice about my personal values.. You should examine your own narcissistic Holier-than-thou messiah complex that makes you think that you go around giving random strangers advice about "personal values". You are nobody to me to give me advice, isn't that just common sense? Has nobody mentioned it to you ever?
More specifically, when nuclear works well, it works very, very well. When it fails, however, it fails especially spectacularly.
As I said: IPCC's SRREN gives mortality/GWh statistics, and nuclear is not the safest, by that measure. Data included Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but not Fukushima.
Actually, I've previously discussed both here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/267e5e/what_are...
NB: Conca is a rather partisan pro-nuclear advocate. I've found his credibility wanting and bias quite evident in past.
The IPCC's report: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/
Risks are in one of the appendixes (I'm not on a device which makes sorting this out trivial at the moment).
And yeah, I know it's long....
And p. 745: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf
History shows that nuclear power is very safe as long as you don't build the plants in tsunami-prone seismic zones, operate them for decades beyond their intended service life, or allow a bunch of unhinged Russians to play "Hold my vodka and watch this" in the control room.
...and waste.
We've also learned that disposal of radioactive waste isn't a problem as long as you mix it with carbon-combustion products and spew it into the air, like coal plants do. Out of sight, out of mind appears to be the optimal way to deal with deadly pollution.
Not all harm involves glowing green blobs of radioactive doom on CNN.
Now back to that Reader mode thing. Firefox and IE have them too.
Can anyone guess why clean energy hasn't been solved? Look at the chart in the 1950's and 1960s. We were barely doing any damage compared to today.
Private Security is an extremely established service in countries such as mine (Uruguay), and even bigger in others like Brazil.
One link mentions 4 million security guards in Brazil alone (compared to less than a million policemen).
Other links speak of 1.5 million of legally registered security guards.
Compare to 600.000 security guards for the entirety of Europe.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/flavie-halais/spe...
https://www.oas.org/dsp/documentos/Publicaciones/PUBLIC%20SE...
Answer here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...
There is so much wrong with their thinking it's sad. Here's one example:
"If you’re an American, three out of four moms at your school have a job. Your father probably does at least some cooking. There’s a 35 percent chance you live with one parent"
She mentions these things in passing and goes on to claim how women do more 'unpaid' work and that that needs to change.
Really Melinda?
You think 'equality' is more important than not having the choice to stay at home and raise your children?
You think 'equality' is more important than the alarming number of single parents?
How many Americans are obese? Are they really happy with themselves? Not for long if they are. Where is that in your letter?
When you can't get the 'best country in the world' to stop eating itself to death, have failed marriages and constant fear of unemployment which causes financial ruin, not to mention absence of free education and health care - do you really think the priority is 'unpaid work' between men and women?
Unbelievable. Who raised these people? Rich people are so out of touch, even when they try to 'help', it's simply insulting to your average brethren.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div...
Whether things are decaying or not - you can look up how much the prices for the basic human necessities like housing and food have gone up in relation to wages. From what I recall there's no question the middle and lower classes are getting screwed right?
Anyhow one can be wrong with 1 instance out of 10, the overall picture remains the same.
What you're doing is referred to as nitpicking :)
On forums and in real life, it is best to avoid inviting a punch to the face. You must have grown up without getting hurt, like Bill and Melinda Gates :)
See how perhaps it is you missing my point but thinking I am missing theirs?
Now one way to settle this is for you to tell me what you think their point and intent is, that way we can move past me explaining your privileged arrogance and lack of manners.
For one thing, Melinda was talking a lot about technology and even just proximity to clean water as being a huge opportunity for people in Africa to save time and spend it on education or health.
I'll leave this conversation there. Not sure that comments about punching people in the face having any place on Hacker News.
The way it relates to you is you think I'm wrong, see that 2 more people think so too, and make an arrogant remark that questions my reading comprehension. Many people thinking the same thing does not make it so.
Melinda was not talking about technology a lot - please re-read what she wrote.
Furthermore, even if she did focus on technology (it was actually Bill who did) - technology is not the solution to human happiness, as is shown by the obesity statistics in the USA.
Does that clear it up? If the goal of humanity is human happiness, technology has failed in the USA - the answer lies elsewhere clearly.
I don't see that elsewhere, whatever they think it may be, addressed anywhere. Melinda addresses feminist notions - is that going to fix obesity and the myriad of problems USA citizens face? I don't think so.
So where is the answer?
You'll say 'they're focusing on something else right now', to which I'll say before you go and mess with another country's infrastructure and economy by introducing foreign aid - maybe make sure a third of your own people are not miserable first.
Priorities are important - leaving your own citizens obese with no free health care while helping those half across the world is wrong. Do you see why?
prawn's comment wasn't helpful, but the whole sorry subthread was started by a rant that you shouldn't have posted here in the first place. HN is for civil, substantive conversation, not overwrought outbursts. Please don't post those either.
It's mathematically crazy that, during a mass shortage of food in some parts of the world, we're feeding a net loss of food in order to eat animal produce.
He's even insane enough to support getting more meat, dairy and eggs to Africa, instead of just bringing the nutrient filled crops.
With his attitude about energy and carbon footprint reduction, there's no way, India, China and Africa live sustainably on a meat filled diet.
Not to mention the global environmental benefits, etc.
[1] http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-mi...
Food is more than just a means to an end, it's also a core part of human culture. We can't expect to fix cultural issues with money alone, even if philanthropists made it very easy to live a vegan lifestyle there would still be people who chose to eat meat regardless. It has to be a cultural change to stand a chance in succeeding, it's up to us as individuals to make this change.
I believe a lot of people would quit the luxurious flesh eating habits if someone as Bill Gates says he's a vegan and just states his reasons.
Yes, it would be a pretty hypocritical statement since he's probably having a bigger footprint than most of the people on the planet but still, he shouldn't force his meat-dairy-eggs culture onto the impoverished nations of Africa. He's doing exactly that, stating also that there are enormous health benefits to eating meat - being surely wrong.
From just energy perspective it's level-2 diet. Level-0 would be picking berries, trees, hunting animals etc., Level-1 is raising plants, level-2 is raising plants to raise animals.
From an energy perspective it is entirely irrational of him to support this in developing world.
I don't think you've understood Bill Gates' position in our culture. He's clearly admired as a businessman and as a philanthropist, but I don't see much evidence that people are seeking to emulate his lifestyle choices.
Instead of waiting for Bill Gates to become a vegan, focus your energy on positive changes you can make. For example, want to encourage people to eat more vegetables? Why not start a cookery channel on YouTube that you can use to promote vegan food?
I'm doing plenty of positive changes while waiting and pointing out his irrational argumentation over energy.
One is replying here with a unique opinion.
The other is applying my own engineering skills, tied very tightly to logistics (NP-hard optimization).
Bill Gates is a huge driver for startups and people reinventing the food industry. But his posts on energy never include the biggest luxury of all, the mightiest polluter, the strongest destroyer, the most prolific murderer - the animal agriculture industry. Without it + great logistics, the greenhouse gases emissions he's so eager to reduce would reduce immensely.
When animal agriculture footprint becomes smaller than all traffic combined, when it becomes smaller than all of the heating - then I'll concentrate on other things.
Anyone profiling a program would optimize the big percentages, not the small ones. Having a couple of thousand people watching my region centered vegan cooking videos is nothing.
You're wrong. That's what change from the grass roots looks like.
> "The other is applying my own engineering skills, tied very tightly to logistics (NP-hard optimization)."
Interesting. Is this related to promoting a vegan diet?
No, Bill knows what he's talking about. Animal-based foods are the most nutritious foods for humans. Beef liver, for example, is one of the most nutrient-dense foods you can eat, outclassing vegetables in every way save fibre content.
Animal consumption is an evolutionarily and culturally significant behaviour. Arguments about energy usage aren't enough to overcome these things.
My estimate is that it's probably equivalent to several families dining on protein rich, nutrient rich grains throughout the whole year.
Your arguments that appeal to tradition, history, and culture, cannot be considered rational arguments. They also aren't derived from morals (product of rationalism). They are empty.
I wonder how did the Chinese solve their food crisis, I guess it was raising billions of cattle to feed their hungry people beef liver?
It's a luxurious food, not necessary, and given Bill's arguments - he obviously is missing the point. Given the recent WHO report and thousands of papers, including the discovery of mechanistic-molecular processes, causal link to meat consumption and heart disease (LDL cholesterol), they are just papers away from finding the causal link between cancer and meat consumption (sugars found in animal flesh alone). Given the huge amount of evidence it is not rational to call it a healthy food.
Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.
Same will happen with dairy and milk, for dairy there are also hundreds of papers linking consumption with iron and calcium deficiency.
Claiming that meat, dairy and eggs is good food for developing nations is irrational, incorrect and contrary to the majority of evidence available.
Linking cigarettes with lung disease was done decades before they decided to make laws to ban the marketing. Thousands of papers were written, and everyone was denying it, because cigarettes were the cultural thing of the first-world countries. Call to tradition isn't a rational argument.
Cows eat food humans can't. That's the entire point of having them!
In some places they feed them other things, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Given all the evidence there should be no meat, milk and eggs in the diet of developing countries.
How does a growing economy cope with costs of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer?
WHO report said 50 grams of processed meat per day significantly increases chances of colorectal cancer (causation proof). 50 grams of red meat correlates with all-cause mortality (causation being published). White meat is filled with cholesterol which is the main cause of heart related diseases.
This is something that from an economic perspective shouldn't plague the developing countries, ignoring the energy needs.
50 grams daily is 350 grams weekly, about 18kg of meat per year per person. USA consumes ~100kg of meat per year per person. China is 50kg - and has just in the last 40 years risen from poverty. Just imagine India doing the same, Africa.
If you think people are being moderate, they aren't. This luxurious culture cannot be rationally apologized.
Go careful. WHO said we now know that processed meat causes cancer. But the risk was tiny, and the increased risk is still tiny.
Yes, I'm quite aware of the results, and authors of that large scale study, and the paper, the same authors published the all-cause mortality study too (also based on 50 grams), which WHO decided not to reference. There's plenty of evidence, WHO is pretty much years behind that evidence, if not decades.
There's nothing to discuss. Yes, the increase is 17%, which given the low chance of colorectal isn't that much of a big deal but the increase is significant, although, cardiovascular disease increase is much bigger, obesity huge.
The moderate "healthy" amount is really vague.
If I were trying to positively influence the developing world, imposing energy/water/resource hungry animal agriculture business wouldn't be a first step. It's irrational to consider it.
> Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned the egg industry that saying eggs are nutritious or safe may violate rules against false and misleading advertising.
When the evidence for meat and dairy ends up documented in 5000 papers, I guess the same will happen with them, same thing happened with cigarettes after thousands of papers. It takes time, but the evidence provided is sufficient now.
We waste tons of grains to filter through cows' bodies. Cows produce waste, that waste is used to replenish the land with minerals needed for grain growth.
Now, wouldn't the same thing be possible without filtering that waste through animals, keeping the waste in high amounts, suitable for the grain agriculture?
Of course, there's absolutely nothing magical in cow's butt that produces the necessary fertilizer. You can fertilize land with vegetable waste, producing less pollution and less non-recyclable waste, needing less energy.
The animal component is completely unecessary.
If you're trying to find rationality of these industries look at this narrative.
People hunted animals, they survived because of animals, but why did they do it, instead of just picking berries, raising food?
It was a time-saving heuristic. The animals were free, the animals were collecting nutrients, packing them into their bodies, and all that time was saved for the human. Humans just "collected" the neatly packed nutrients and had concrete savings.
Today, we bring the food to animals, we center everything around their food filtering, from an energetic, sustainable, environmental perspective it isn't equivalent, it's not even close. It is irrational. This irrationality is closely linked with our desire of excessive luxury.
From all the given evidence, dropping this would save us billions if not trillions in environmental cleanups, health-care bills etc.
Currently, there's nothing magical in animals that necessitates our use of them. The magic has disappeared when we snatched the planet.
The way forward on that issue is to develop synthetic meat products that can out-compete animal meat on economical/ethical/environmental dimensions.
This is exactly what Bill Gates seems to want to do.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Should-We-Eat-Meat
The arguments for why he wants to do it are in the article to one of the repliers to my OP.
> ?—one solution would be to ask the biggest carnivores (Americans and others) to cut back, by as much as half. -- Bill Gates, the pink glasses guy
Other solutions are miracle agricultural and technological breakthroughs. He's ignoring scientific facts when it comes to energy conversion from sun to plants, the long time of investment return of \w+ponics technologies and transition costs. The largest energy and efficiency gains can be made by improving logistics, everything else is set in stone by the laws of physics.
Yeah, I'll praise the synthetic meat, but really, 2048 - year of massive oceanic ecosystem collapse, due to pollution and the number of species going extinct directly because of the animal agribusiness is heavily increasing. Not to mention Amazon rainforest and similar issues. The damage is already done, there's no turning back. What Bill Gates is doing is just more damage and accelerating the process. This problem cannot be solved in 20 years time, it might be the case that it should have been solved by now to avoid the catastrophic side-effects.
> asceticism never works as public policy.
Yeah, me the first-world ascetic not eating meat. This statement makes no sense. Asceticism can in no way be compared to removing products from animal sources.
Let's ignore the first world, let's concentrate on the developing India+Africa.
India would have a food crisis if 40% of its population weren't vegetarians.
Why not encourage plant-based diets instead of pushing, through his Foundation the meat, dairy and eggs?
The guy is irrational. There's nothing more about it.
Tax-payers are currently paying for people to get cardiovascular diseases.
Do we have mass shortages at the moment? As opposed to some people being hungry because they are out of cash.
Someone who was gifted $1 million on the day he was born preaching about poverty is like someone who has never written a line of code running an I.T. department.