Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sebguer | Hacker News Reader

Where does the 600 million dollar superyacht fit into this all?

Pleasure. I feel sorry about Bill and Melinda because the expectations of them are super high as you just proved yourself. Instead of laying on the beach of a private island they travel around the world meeting people having what-not ilnesses. For any sane person this must be a taxing experience. They need to wind down from time to time. I would have taken a gap year a decade ago. What they do is admirable. And if he wants to buy a billion $ coffee mug he should - it's well earned after all.

What expectations?

They need a super polluting yacht to wind down?

It’s boggling to me that you’d imply that in order to “wind down” Gates needs to spend $650 million dollars. He is a human being and there is no evidence to suggest people worth 100,000 a middle class westerner needs to spend multiple order of magnitude more money to treat stress.

This is making me wish for more Jack Dorsey’s who spend mere thousands on meditation retreats.

Your coffee mug example makes your reflexive defence of billionaire excess even more obvious. I’m with Peter Singer and the Effective Altruists, we absolutely should criticize the rich for buying Rolex when Timex will do, and the savings can be used to buy medicine for sick children. The yacht is like 50,000 Rolex watches.

Climate science research.

'The investment underlines Gates’s long-standing interest in alternative fuels, and his enthusiasm for new technology that could tackle emissions from industry and transport that together make up 75% of the world’s carbon footprint.'

It's an 'investment'.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/09/bill-gate...

Well, as ridiculous as it sounds, this is bound to trigger some R&D for hydrogen powered ships. And from what I know, maritime transport is in dire need of clean tech, since it's actually a huge pollutant.

Plus, there's many bad things to say about Bill Gates, but he's been the world's richest man for 20+ years. I find it a bit ludicrous that only now we'd be making fun of him for buying a superyacht when he could afford and could have bought one back in 1985 :-)))

Allow me to pick a nit. You're argument still stands but he hasn't been consistently at number 1. He has been surpassed by Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim and now Jeff Bezos. What he has done is manage to stay at top three, and always recover the top position after a fall - that is, until Bezos came along.

There are two well proven ways to get founding for research projects:

1) make it part of a sport (see Formula 1)

2) convince rich people this is a cool thing to have

It's the same kind of "climate change research" as if I burned a bunch of tires in my backyard. The energy required to manufacture and operate that yacht far exceeds any imaginable reasonable threshold for anyone who truly cares about the environment. And that's something _he doesn't even need_. Same with his 30000sqft house. It's pure hypocrisy.

Yes, it's hard to take on board his pleas to reduce carbon emissions when he does the exact opposite.

Looks like the story is fake news though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com