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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.

He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.

The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.

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>The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.

Yeah everyone forgets, he killed Hitler. That was a huge win for Germany. But no one ever gives him the credit.

You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?

They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy..

I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company.

I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.

His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.

I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.

Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.

And how many people would have been saved if he didn't forcibly extracted that money from society to begin with?

Because it's almost impossible to not help someone if he just throw wads of money at random. What important is how many people weren't saved because he decided to be a middle man in all of it?

Way, way fewer. Any billionaire you've heard of is almost certainly a net creator of a huge amount of value, by successfully leading a company in a capitalist system that made enough money selling products or services to make its shareholders worth billions of dollars. This isn't forcibly extracting money from society, this is exactly what net-value-creation looks like in the world.

He uses philanthropy to force his ideology on everyone and his ideology doesn't work. His philanthropy makes things worse not better.

At some point it stops being a philanthropy when it makes lives of people he tries to "help" worse. Like his actions have a ulterior motives...

Interesting. Honestly I don't know as much about his philanthropy, which ideology does he push? How did it make lives worse?

Common Core for one.

This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.

A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.

The way they teach math is stupid

Math education has always been a failure, or a "crisis." The number of people who come out of school with any functional math ability has been fairly constant over the decades, and depends a lot on family background and economic class. I'm not even sure that differences across countries are all that significant when people reach adulthood.

Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.

I like the common core math curriculum. I think it makes a lot of sense. I prefer it to how I was taught.

I have a kid in school and a math degree so I have some knowledge of this.

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