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Comment by helloworld | Hacker News Reader

In a first-world, disposable income scheme of things, I guess $60 a month isn't bad. Your cellphone bill is probably higher.

But what Bill Gates said last year in a Reddit AMA resonates with me: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer."[1]

I'm reminded of an inscription that appears on English gravestones going back to at least the 1500s:

  If life were a thing that money could buy,
  The rich they would live and the poor they would die;
  But God in His goodness hath ordered it so
  That the rich and the poor they together must go.

Maybe not for much longer.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-ti...

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About this quote by Bill Gates, whom I admire greatly:

"It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer."

Bullshit. It sounds great, but what's it's really saying is that Bill Gates is a better judge of what should be done with Leonard Guarente's time than Leonard Guarente. That kind of talk is insidious. First of all--what are we going to do, all submit to Bill Gate's idea of what we should do? If not Bill, then, who will decide?

It ignores the fact that the research of people like Guarente could end up right in Bill's wheelhouse. Many great scientific discoveries were accidents.

It also completely ignores the fact the Bill himself became a great force for good not by doing what some factotum told him what to do, but by doing something that everyone told him not to do. Who knows, maybe Guarente will make a trillion dollars on his research (which I have absolutely no interest in). If Bill had done what his parents wanted him to do he probably would have been a white-shoe lawyer in Seattle or CEO of Planned Parenthood.

I think Bill is a severely underrated CEO and probably a well-intentioned human being, but Bill has no fucking business telling the rest of us what to do with our time.

It's called an opinion, and yes, even billionaires-turned-philanthrophists are entitled to them. :)

Don't worry, though - it'll be at least another 10 years or so until Gates starts sending his cronies out at night to black-bag folks into compulsory humanitarian aid work.

I was under the impression that they had already started doing that ;)

...what are we going to do, all submit to Bill Gate's idea of what we should do?

I thought this was the point of the "Halloween Memos"?

I agree with Gates's sentiment, but if you consider the state of specialization, some people are going to be skilled in combating diseases and others are going to be skilled in designing new longevity paradigms. Just because Mr. Robot is an amazing TV show doesn't mean all TV shows should be dramatized representations of hacker culture, for example.

You should donate malaria nets to help reduce the 440,000 deaths, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. It's quite cheap.

https://www.againstmalaria.com

I've donated in the past. Then people with more ability can work on the harder problems.

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