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Comment by jarbus | Hacker News Reader

Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.

You don't have to love Gates or everything the foundation does to recognize that putting billions toward global health and poverty is way better than setting up a dynasty or letting it sit in investments

Foundation is a way to set a dynasty! Just look at all the robber baron foundations out there.

Some foundations have been used that way, no doubt. But I think there's a difference between setting up a tax shelter with vague goals and actively committing to spend down the entire endowment in a specific timeframe

True. Actively committing to spend down the entire endowment in a specific timeframe does not mean it is not used create a dynasty.

In the 50's the Congress in US was getting suspicious about those foundations already. There were a investigation for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...

> letting it sit in investments

Depends on investments. Arguably tech advances are more effective for alleviating hunger than direct food donations long term.

When though? When is it enough to be used for something good?

What companies would you invest in if you had a billion dollars and wanted to reduce global hunger?

Anything in energy production, manufacturing, or bioresearch. Probably add education in these areas as well.

I think the ideal is a mix: fund near-term needs like healthcare and food access and invest in the systems and tools that prevent future crises

> letting it sit in investments

I havent looked, and frankly can't be bothered [0], but I expect that even after giving away an unfathomable amount of money, the foundation and gates are probably richer (dollar net worth) than they have ever been.

It has been sat in investments, they have been giving it away, but they can't keep up with it.

[0] Turns out I could be - https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-ga...

Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them.

Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.

Among billionaires maybe he is on the good side. But in general?

Linus Torvalds did more for the world than Bill Gates, IMHO. And he didn't need to set up a system that first appropriates money in order to "be generous" later.

What diseases has Torvalds eradicated?

What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.

Polio type 2 and 3 were eradicated and overall we went from 400k cases of paralytic polio per year down to less than 1% of that.

You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag).

400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication."

Reduced the number of cases by 99%*

That's amazing and I am very happy I live in a world where someone helped that many people, regardless of who you compare their accomplishments to.

Attributing that whole reduction to Gates alone is a ridiculous thing to do. He didn't even fund most of the project and the only thing he really brings to the table is money. This has been a multinational effort with literally millions of people for 3 decades. Gates mostly wrested control from them in the last decade.

If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.

You're conflating cVDPV with WPV. Despite both having a "type 2", they are not the same virus.

Calling a few hundred reported cases a year globally "very, very common" is... a stretch. You have better odds of getting struck by lightning.

I am not conflating cVDPV with WPV. The parent comment claimed type 2 and type 3 polio were gone, which is not true. WPV 3 and WPV 2 are gone, but type 2 and type 3 polio are both still around. If you get polio today (unlikely but possible), there's a pretty good chance it's cVDPV 2.

So you you're saying you knew the two types of polio were eradicated but inexplicably assumed the parent comment must have meant the vaccine-derived poliovirus was eradicated. Or you think these are the same virus because you saw "type 2" in the names of both.

I don't think these are the same thing. But when someone says that polio type 2 has been eradicated, that means the entire family of WPV, cVDPV, and VAPP. Not just WPV.

For all intents and purposes, yes, cVDPV is the same thing as WPV. There have actually been instances where cVDPVs have evolved into things that look quite a bit like WPV. Declaring victory over "type 2/3" because WPV is gone is meaningless when lots of people still get cVDPV and have exactly the same symptoms.

SCO UNIX.

And/or when you die. We need more people trying to make the world better while they are here instead of treating the finish line like the, well, finish line.

I mean, the lifestyle of rich babies doesn't even require that much money. He can easily provide them the money to travel to a random city and buy a luxury condo and set up a food-truck business. A couple of million is enough to one day decide to pack it up and buy a farm.

Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands

An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments

In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors

The government spends about 10x the amount of money on foreign aid than the gates foundations entire budget ever year. Not to mention the hundreds billions spent on domestic aid every year. So your dream is already a reality.

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