Probably less than 100 globally in a few countries. Bill Gates will get it.
Anyway, while it’s great, and we should be happy, 400,000 kids will die from malaria in Africa this year.
We could do more to save millions of lives over the next 10 years.
His foundation has spent $2.9 Billion so far on it.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/global-health/mal...
That or finding ways to sterilize all anopheles mosquitoes, or do other mosquitoes carry it also
You might as well say that a person is too phlegmatic and needs bleeding when they have gallstones.
The world moves, move with it
In a worst case nature comes up with a similar one by mutating something similar, but then it is still a new thing.
Polio is an Enterovirus[2]. There are many virus in that family, and most of them cause only a mild stomachache and fever. A week later you forget that you where ill. Moreover, in the 95% of the case the Polio virus only cause the same symptoms instead of the paralysis.
One of the other virus can evolve and start to cause an illness that is very similar to Polio and we can decide to call it Polio, or PolioII, or some acronym like SPGWSPLI or something like that[3].
Nobody is sure about the cause of Acute flaccid myelitis [4], but it is somewhat similar to Polio and it is probably caused by an Enterovirus too. If something like that cause a big outbreak, we will hopefully make a vaccine and eradicate it too.
[1] Where "difficult" means "almost impossible, but there is a chance".
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterovirus
[3] Old illness have cool names. I hope we can eradicate them all, but they have cool names like "Cholera". New illness get a bland acronym.
Malaria is different in that there was not the same level of eradication infrastructure to leverage and different because it touches on drinking water and food chains in the non-human environment. Malaria is not mostly a vaccine distribution problem.
It's the same reason that if Oprah took her billions to try and solve some global problem with her husband Stedman, many mentions of the work they were doing would not mention Stedman.
One is a famous individual who built up an obscene fortune, and the other person is married to them. And despite how involved their partner is deploying that wealth for the good of the world, people are just not going to mention the less famous one who didn't build up the fortune as often.
He did this (I assume) to imply the reason she was not mentioned was because she was a woman and not because of the large and obvious disparity in fame.
Bill Gates also regularly gives speeches. I checked and Melinda doesn’t have any on youtube since 2013.
So Bill is very much the public face of the foundation, even though Melinda is equally active and her name is in its name.
Not the only reason, but worth pointing out a prominent benign one.
For instance, a parallel example is how ycombinator is often mentioned as being founded by Paul Graham, and Jessica Livingstone is left out. Why? Partly sexism of course. But Paul also was the public face of YC with his essays.
And we have evidence it’s not just sexism, because YC had four founders
> by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Tappan Morris.
I think the second two are even less well known than Jessica Livingstone, and this correlates with how much public writing and speaking she’s done as the face of YC and about startups.
(There’s a whole other discussion to be had about whether women are chased out of the public sphere, but this comment is long enough)
What "ism" is the reason reason Warren Buffett is more famous than Charlie Munger?
> He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988,[3] considered the first computer worm on the Internet.[4]
Would appreciate if someone could enlighten me. Surely there must be a good reason.
Yeah, he was running a competitive business where he took advantage of his market position... just like any other business.
But oh, "I love my iPhone, and Steve Jobs is therefore my hero. So Apple is good because it loves it's customers".
Celebrating the beneficial outcomes of Bill Gates' charity without reflecting on why he's able to give away billions of dollars without breaking a sweat invites us to ignore the fact that the system that enriched Bill Gates doesn't actually encourage him to do any good (and actually involved him doing quite a lot of harm).
In others words, we're extraordinarily lucky that this particular ultra-wealthy person has decided to do good things with (some) of their money. But grounding moral and humanitarian progress on a steady stream of luck seems shortsighted.
It's most certainly not a fluke that the mega rich are solving problem governments can't or won't.
There is no "can't or won't" on a global scale: some countries have, others haven't as a function of their means. The fact that ultra wealthy individuals have better means than entire countries is an indictment of the state of affairs, not praise.
Edit: To elaborate on the above: eradicating polio isn't something that democratic, liberal countries are uniquely good at. Autocratic and despotic governments have also historically been good at it and have aggressively pursued it, because paralyzed citizens just aren't very useful. Countries that don't pursue eradication are historically ones that just lack the means (whether that's money, or infrastructure, or whatever), not ones with specific political structures.
That is exactly "can't or won't". The USA or China certainly "can" fix these issues in Africa if they want to but they "won't". But the African countries themselves obviously don't have this capability thus they "can't" fix it.
> The fact that ultra wealthy individuals have better means than entire countries is an indictment of the state of affairs, not praise.
Why is this an indictment. This is not self evident at all to me. The opposite is true from my perspective. This story and initiatives like the giving pledge very clearly show me that that the mega rich are doing things no country is doing. And thus these problem would remain unsolved if they would not be here.
But the problem is that we are those rich people. We as tech people have suffered under the microsoft monopoly. Heck, we still suffer, from the horrors of windows 10, to browser incompatibilities, etc.
So we hate Microsoft. So it's hard to love Bill.
So what if he did "terrible" stuff 25+ years ago? I am sure no-one in this thread would give 90%+ of their personal wealth to humanitarian work such as these. People just like to complain.
Not true, for what some people want is power and they continuously dish out money to get it.
It's often used as a vector to create a lot of the world's problems. I'm pretty happy to see it used the other way. A win is a win.
But that harm was done to competitors, on the business field. The people who became collateral damage could always go and get jobs at some other company. The companies suffered and sometimes died but such is the way of capitalism.
If the upside was that his money gets redistributed to the genuinely poor and needy, who don't have any opportunity to earn for themselves in some cushy IT job, then I'm personally OK with it.
(I forget the specifics, but a piece of ancient code we wrote included a dummy assignment to a variable called BILLGATESBOLLOCKS, to get around some MS devilment).
Citation required.
However, The Gates Foundation tends to fund programs in developing countries where those countries's governments are not capable of funding it themselves.
While I can understand and in some sense agree that it's unfortunate our current best solution to tackling some of these problems is for someone with a lot of resources and no bureaucratic entanglements to focus on solving the problem once and for all. I can also recognize that few governments are capable of solving it regardless of political philosophy.
I'm more than happy to celebrate a solution that works today over a hypothetical solution that hasn't been successfully deployed yet. Maybe I'm too pragmatic.
The UN? They (to me / personal viewpoint / citation needed) don't seem to have any power, influence, means or goodwill to handle a problem like this. I mean they have never been as silent as they are now, while China and the US have literal concentration camps, Russia is assassinating political opponents and is encroaching on other countries - directly (Ukraine) or indirectly (influencing governments, heavily influencing destabilizing decisions like Trump's election or Brexit), the US is in a civil war and on a crash course towards a fascist dictatorship, currently working towards a sham election, actively undermining postal services so mail voting will not work so that Trump can go "Well shit is fucked, I'll just stay on a bit longer to fix this for you" and declare national martial law so that the army can beat down whoever objects.
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good.
A tangentially related matter I see cited more often than not in these circles, are about an uptick in vaccine-caused paralysis occurring in India, causing the foundation to be kicked out.
The argument being that an uptick in “non-polio acute flaccid paralysis” (NPAFP) was recorded in areas where the oral vaccine was distributed, and this subsequently got the foundation “kicked out of India” (quoted because, as source below states, this is false) [0]
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundat...
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
Gates has done some shady things in his day, but I can't fault him for that one. His fortune is a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, but being able to control and target his charity makes a hell of a lot of difference in the world. It's not like the federal government was going to cure polio in Africa, but for a few billion more dollars in tax revenue.
You could psychoanalyze this as acts of redemption, guilty conscience, seeking further world domination or whatnot, However it's undeniable he's helped many, many people and far, far,far more than his keyboard detractors ever would or could. And that's a very good thing IMHO.
Bill gates must really love swimming "uncle scrooge"-style in his billions. That's all he cares about. Everything he does must be to gain more billions, so he can swim in a bigger pool.
Bill was also super competitive, so let's focus on that and forget that he made his money providing value to users and businesses. It's better to act like he stole the money in an unfair way.
I personally feel very sad for a person that can't imagine that someone else could feel happy and satisfied by helping others, by having a huge impact on peoples lives in a positive way. I'm sure Bill and Melinda get more satisfaction of helping other people than looking at numbers on their bank account. But hey, that's not possible because he's rich, and therefore evil.
I'm not really big on the idea of 'redemption' - my actions today do not erase what I've done in the past. But he has lived a pretty decent life since then, and tried to do good things. So good on him.
Others hold grudges longer.
We also need to get rid of a vaccine-derived polio in Africa (and some places in Asia).
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/q-a-detail/what-is-v...
Summary: Whilst initial immunity is developing after vaccination, attenuated polio viruses can be excreted and cause a rare circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV) outbreak. 21 outbreaks have occurred in the last 20 years, with 760 cases, out of 3 billion vaccinated and 10 million polio cases averted. cVDPV is averted by getting as many people in the community vaccinated within a 12-month window as possible. It naturally stops being a risk as the vaccinated population approaches 100%.