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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

That's a strange reaction. Hasn't the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation been one of the most successful philanthropic organizations of all time? I thought they've saved millions of lives fighting malaria alone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

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Also, Polio was near extinction before Gates jumped in and collected the ovations for finishing job.

http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourworl...

That's great what they've done, but saying they've eradicated polio is brutal exaggeration.

The table I posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551250 contradicts them "jumping in". Other major donors have continued to make large contributions to polio intervention over the period where the Gates foundation has made their contributions, the period on your graph where it is nearly gone.

There is literally nothing on that article about how many lives their initiative saved. Just standard corporate propaganda about how much they spent on this and that.

If I've spent 80 millions on Vaccines does that mean that I've saved hundreds of lives? No.

I don't want to be a truther here, nor I'll paste links that would confirm partial statement wrapped inside my question, but it would be great if one could be open to critically observe actions of our beloved philanthropists, there is complete universe beyond local news feeds.

> There is literally nothing on that article about how many lives their initiative saved.

Well it's impossible to know exactly, but with statistics we can estimate that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has saved millions of lives. 7 million is the current estimate for just the vaccination program:

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/infographic-...

I think your opinion is probably interesting and potentially valid, but your tone in the original comment is limiting your ability to communicate effectively.

Less sarcasm would serve you well.

sarcasm is better part of life, it's not limiting it's enriching :) I fail to understand why people hate it?

It's the sarcasm tied to apparent lack of desire to discover or communicate actual information.

There are entire organizations devoted to assessing the effectiveness of various kinds of charity and measuring how many lives they save (e.g. http://www.givewell.org/ and https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/), and their reports can be found within 20 seconds of googling, less time than it took for you to type your based-on-no-actual-information sarcastic judgement.

Sarcasm plus knowledge would be fine.

Sarcasm has its places. Hacker News discussion threads are not so much among them.

So it's not so much that people here hate sarcasm as that they value the differences between Hacker News and other places on the internet where people type text in boxes.

After a while, overtly sarcastic tone gets a bit boring when you get to read it every day in the every corner of internet over any possible issue.

And in my experience, it's rarely very effective in changing people's opinions, if they are not tending to agree with you already in the first place.

Okay people, you win. I wasn't trying to change opinions, I just kept my own. I'm still new here so let's consider this an experiment in public discourse.

Peace ;)

Because it's juvenile and lazy.

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