Bill Gates will never be the same

Epstein associates recruited underage girls outside of high schools. These girls ended up in parties where men like Bill Gates were being flown into on private jets (dubbed "Lolita Express"), according to reports surfacing now. This should say a lot about Gates judgment, morals, motivations and the scale and frequency of his mistakes, which are NOT like the rest of us.

are you also defending Epstein? would have been easy for him to donate $1B to some charity (maybe he even did) and you could argue he helped more people than he hurt.

Hmm. Not so sure. In terms of the operating systems there were better alternatives on the table, yet IBM has chosen Bill Gates company that did not even have operating system - luckily for Microsoft, they managed to license CP/M clone called 86-DOS created by Tim Paterson and sell it to IBM (as if IBM could not do this by itself or take CP/M or some Unix variant).

Bill's mom was higher-up in IBM and she managed to convince management to buy from Bill and if it were not for Paterson, Bill would not have anything to sell, as timeline was really slim.

For all the years of MS-DOS existence it was way better to install DR DOS, as it was more stable than Microsoft thingy.

Then we get "marvels" like Windows 98 and infamous Windows ME (Millennium Edition).

The first usable version of windowed operation system from Microsoft was Windows NT. New Technology meant more or less "hire David Cutler and his 30 people from Digital, so they can rewrite VMS system so Microsoft can sell it".

We are yet to see first innovative product from Microsoft, so far they were catching up with the rest, sometimes trying to use shady techniques to gain advantage (like effectively killing very good Borland C++, but some tricks with API changes, so BCC code was not working correctly, so they could force people to use MS products).

At the end, let's not forget about Internet Explorer, the product that was a true cancer of the WWW, horrible crap, pushed only to kill Netscape. Hard to estimate how many hours people spent on fixing web pages to make them work on IE.

When it comes to charity work by Bill, I don't know how all of this worked, what was its true value, but anytime I hear in the same sentence "charity", "foundation", "very rich person" my brain starts screaming one thing: tax avoidance.

It wasn't about an affair, or at least, not _just_ about an affair.

The suggestion is that the incentive was to launder the reality of his life, which appears to be rather worse than you claim.

He - they - could have done plenty if not all of this work without the cult of personality at the centre of it; given their money quietly and without fanfare.

Even if you do good for self-glorification and to remind everyone how awesome you are, reality still gets to bat last and puncture your conceit.

the news are just reporting. you're free to make up your own mind. but think about it. why would my organization trust this man with money for projects if his own wife doesn't trust him. business deals are all about trust; any sign of danger means no deal. so it is very news worthy.

also, even if he cured malaria I wouldn't want to work with him or praise him (assuming allegations are true). imagine you had a brilliant work colleague but at the same he was a big jerk or worse, a sexual harasser.

I do not regard his philanthrocapitalism as even as good as straight taxation would have been. His net financial worth is $140B+. Tax $139B of that and he's still a billionaire.

His philanthropy echoes that of Carnegie and others - get rich through any means possible, then use that wealth to whitewash your history via private giving.

His "fixing education" hasn't fixed education. His projects are failures, and leave others in the lurch. His billions in funding give undue weight to his amateur, outsider viewpoints over those with domain expertise and experience.

For examples, "RAND was selected at the outset of the initiative by the Gates Foundation to evaluate whether the project improved outcomes for students. ... The Gates Foundation sank over $US200 million into the initiative since 2009, with local tax dollars and the federal government adding to the pot. RAND estimates the initiative cost around $US1 billion in total over the seven school years, ... “Our analyses of student test results and graduation rates showed no evidence of widespread positive impact on student outcomes six years after the IP initiative was first funded in 2009-2010,” the RAND study said."

Jay Greene, a professor of education at the University of Arkansas [comments] ... the Gates Foundation initiative “appears to have generally done more harm than good.” “It cost a fortune,” Greene writes. “It produced significant political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising efforts.” - https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-melinda-gates-founda...

Or as from https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/05/08/why-bill... :

> The Gates Foundation has undertaken several projects in education. They have not gone well, and while Gates has always had the ability to walk away from these projects unscathed, not everyone has been so lucky.

> At the beginning of the new millennium, Gates decided that perhaps breaking large schools into smaller schools might yield some improvements. Gates spent billions of dollars piloting programs, creating thousands of small schools across the country and ultimately walking away from the project when he decided that it wasn’t producing results. What’s important to note that not only did Gates decide what kinds of structural changes he was paying for, and not only did he leave many districts to figure out what to do next with the half-finished experiment that was their community school system, but Gates also set the terms for what a successful school would look like. You might be able to think of many benefits to having your child in a smaller school, but Gates only looked at three—attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test.

> These are factors that can be reduced to data, and data has been a singular focus of Gatesian reform. If data is the new oil, then public schools are the new Texas. The Foundation put at least $100 million into inBloom, a massive project intended to mine data from students and staff at schools. Somehow, backers failed to anticipate that there would be considerable resistance to the idea, and inBloom ended as a massive failure.

> The next Gates project was an attempt to improve the teaching profession through training, hiring and evaluation. Again, a mountain of money was spent, and again, the project was ultimately judged a failure—in part, because it did not raise student scores on standardized reading and math scores. And again, the Gates Foundation walked away from the program; Hillsborough School District in Florida was one system left holding a multi-million dollar bag.

> Of course, the most infamous Gates education project was the Common Core State Standards. Gates did not invent the Core, but as detailed by Lyndsey Layton in 2014, he provided financial backing, organization, and sheer clout to swiftly push them into every state in the nation. The amount of money that Gates spent to support the Core is hard to know exactly—the sheer number of groups and size of the checks written is staggering. But Gates spending on US education involves billions of dollars and has directly influenced how trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. And while some still argue that the Core was a success, it would be hard to find any broad-based agreement.

Perhaps what's broken in education is that people with money and political power think they know how to educate better than educators do, and have more control over education policy?

Or, switching to health, and quoting from https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi... :

> Throughout the last two decades, Gates has repeatedly advocated for public health policies that bolster companies’ ability to exclude others from producing lifesaving drugs, including allowing the Gates Foundation itself to acquire substantial intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic. On top of steering the global health community towards Covax rather than patent-free technology sharing, last year Gates bragged about convincing Oxford University not to open-license its vaccine.

SJ?