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Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013

thegatesnotes.com

369 pointsohjeez167 comments

As people in Tech industry we should be very proud of Bill Gates and what he has done with Microsoft and his charity work.

A lot of people totally miss the point when they say "hey anybody could do all that if they have enough money". That is simply not true. Charity is not just about throwing money at poor, it is a far more difficult job than say building a company. Working for profit is simpler where clear regulations, contracts are in place and a government which has an interest in making businesses work.

Charity is a different ball game, I remember I was in Pune-India when Bill Gates quietly flew there in his private jet sneaked into local red light area to meet the health workers and monitor the progress. No one knew about his visit, when media reached there his private security somehow managed to make him disappear. He had a review meeting with health workers and key government people, and then simply flew out. He does this in all the countries where no sane minded Billionaire would set a foot.

Throwing money and feeling good is simple. Achieving results is very difficult. Pune's red light area has benefited immensely by his efforts. There are at least 3 NGOs who have successfully managed to reduce AIDs and help the children of prostitutes rehabilitate in better professions. Over last 10 years, the sex workers in this area have reduced.

Bill Gates is actually very stingy when it comes to money. You cant simply setup a NGO in red light area and get funding from him. The whole process by which he chooses whom to help is the real USP of his work. That is something takes a lifetime to build and he has done it well.

USP = Unique Selling Proposition, for those who also didn't know.

I would be a lot prouder of Bill if he hadn't made his money by breaking the law.

That is simply not true. Charity is not just about throwing money at poor

This is an important and underappreciated point. Ken Stern makes it in his book With Charity For All, which I wrote more about here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/06/02/with-charity-for-all-ken-... . In essence, we spend a lot of money on various charitable efforts without knowing what those efforts are really doing.

Foreign aid is probably the most interesting part. Since 1945, I've seen estimates that say the U.S. and Western Europe have donated in the neighborhood of $1 – $2 trillion (with a "t") dollars to various developing countries. It hasn't done much. Why not?

That's a question that a host of books have attempted to answer (I recommend Dead Aid, The Bottom Billion, and Why Nations Fail to the curious). I don't think we'll ever get a complete answer but we should at least be asking the right questions.

(Relevant observation: I'm a grant writing consultant for nonprofit and public agencies. I see a lot of stuff that makes me. . . very skeptical, let's say. . . of many aid efforts.)

Per person per year it doesn't seem like that works out to all that large a number.

Q: why would you assume its <>evenly<> distributed? might be the problem right there...

>Since 1945, I've seen estimates that say the U.S. and Western Europe have donated in the neighborhood of $1 – $2 trillion (with a "t") dollars to various developing countries. It hasn't done much. Why not?

Because these money are not about helping those countries grow. It's about keeping them down, financing local lackeys, directing their progress in ways that benefit those giving the money, pushing political and cultural agendas, etc.

Sometimes, when those dollars are earmarked for specific equipment or food purchases, donations are about clandestinely subsidizing industry or agriculture back home. In the case of food aid, this is especially pernicious, because these foreign food purchases flood local markets and undermine local food production, often making the food-availability situation worst post-donation.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion?

This is about one Foundation and how it was used as vehicle by CIA to launder money into other countries as "Aid to Developing nations", and achieve its political ends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation#Relationship_wi...

The CIA had been laundering its funds for dozens of organizations and events, and the foundation served as one of its main fronts.

If you look around you will find a lot of such covert channels.

>If you look around you will find a lot of such covert channels.

And if you look around you'll find far, far more examples of honest foundations, filled with honest people, doing honest work. What's your point?

That billions of dollars and foreign aid programs are not decided and funneled through and to honest people.

We're not talking about some small time charity here.

Yes, I read history. And am from a country that has seen actual, hard, 20th century history in the making -- instead of watching it from a far in the History channel.

>>It hasn't done much. Why not?

May be because most of that money is spent on 'management expenses'.

Over the last 15 years large public-private partnerships (PPPs) many very similar to what before that was called "Quango" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango ) were created often with near zero real-world accountability (i.e. on paper those might have accountability rules but they are not enforceable or controllable).

The "Global Fund" mentioned in the article (98%+ financed by tax payers in the largest industrialized nations) is one of those vehicles - it has financed (some of the worst and most corrupt) governments in developing countries for more than 10 years.

Besides that, the "Global Fund" is certainly one of the biggest marketing shows on this planet. It calls itself a "financing instrument", what it actually does is receiving $3-4B p.a. tax payers monies, and disbursing those (after a 10%+ "cut" for running a "secretariat" in Geneva full with people getting paid $300K+) to entities in developing countries that are de-facto controlled by the local governments (please note that the "Global Fund" does not select which "programs" & countries are financed - this is done by an external "expert panel"). It has done that over almost a decade with nearly zero oversight on what and where the monies were spent, an almost complete lack of functioning management systems or any accountability (at one point in time a few years ago existing internal controlling & risk management system were "switched off" when they showed too many problems and any institutional oversight was kept at bay by not funding the function or keeping the posts vacant for very long periods or even firing the incumbent(s) - as the BBC showed this month - when those actually do their jobs).

The "Global Fund's" biggest claim "saving lives" doesn't stand minimal scrutiny. In short, it's like the HMCR (the UK's IRS) would claim that it saves millions of lives every year because hospitals / the NHS are financed with taxes. Another visualisation of this claim would be - if you give $10 to the Red Cross you have saved millions of lives (the "Global Fund" does not report "results" it shows "results" of programs contributed to - the official new speak is "influenced by" - often these "results" are non-measurable / non-impact and have been double / triple / quadruple counted in the past). It does all that at 8-10 times the "cost" of comparable organisations (yes other government funded financing organisations exist), i.e. disbursing $1M through the "Global Fund" costs 700%-1000% more than doing that in other ways. This does not count in the "slack" lost until the monies reach the implementing agencies / NGOs that do the actual work (medical aid, training people, creating & running health infrastructures, reducing poverty, saving lives). Another way of looking at this: Funds provided to the "Global Fund" are actually diverted away from the implementing agencies / entities (a lot could be said about this as well - only so much - even UN agencies like government agencies have to comply with at least basic accountability rules).

Anybody looking beyond the shiny surface gets threatened, press and oversight muffled, staff trying to do their job fired and their lives destroyed. Those looking "the other way" often for up to 10 times the salaries they would "normally earn" got promoted for years and received glorious "performance reviews". When the whole "show" became too smelly a few years ago, more than 1/3 of the staff were removed with scapegoating a few (while some of the biggest "culprits" were already before that moved to senior posts in other organisations), those "part of the system" leaving with golden handshakes and millions in pensions and quickly found/finding themselves on new posts again.

Like with similar "constructs" anyone looking deeper into this is hitting an invisible wall of silence.

And since a few years it is officially possible to count military aid into the development aid statistics.

With the "Global Fund" it would already help if people like Bill Gates would ask the right questions or sometimes any questions at all.

>It hasn't done much. Why not?

I suppose you have to define "hasn't done much."

Perhaps your expectations are too high. Do you think $2 trillion dollars is enough to permanently pull the global population out of poverty?

I was awe-struck when he introduced himself as, "co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" rather than the chairman of Microsoft on his Reddit AMA (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...). I think it really is his life's primary focus right now.

> Over last 10 years, the sex workers in this area have reduced.

Hardly anyone wants to ask if that is an overall benefit to society?

The sex ratio for India is 108 men per 100 women [1]. For those under 15, the ratio is 113:100, so the problem is set to get much worse in the near future.

If India (pop. 1.2 billion) were to have maximal monogamous relationships and no sex workers, you'd have 577 million happy couples, and 46 million men left over who have no chance of any sexual intimacy.

EDIT: Condoms, contraception, and safe sex are obviously good things. My comment is whether eliminating sex work should be the goal. If that's the goal, then please answer the following question: Should men who don't have or can't find a normal relationship be forever denied occasional intimacy?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

We aren't talking about independent escorts here. Here's the link for one infamous redlight area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonagachi

>5.17% of the 13,000 prostitutes in Sonagachi are estimated to be HIV positive

>According to some sources, prostitutes from Sonagachi who test HIV positive are not told about the results, and live with the disease without knowing about it "because the DMSC is worried that HIV positive women will be ostracized."[5] Some prostitutes in Sonagachi have stated that "the clients, at least three quarters of them" refuse to use condoms and "if we force them to use the condom, they will just go next door. There are so many women working here, and in the end, everyone is prepared to work without protection for fear of losing trade.”[5]

Weaning them off prostitution is a net positive.

That's a rather controversial comment you're making here.

I'd rather see a man deprived of sexual intimacy than a woman constrained to prostitution for lack of better opportunity.

The first fate seems largely less cruel than the latter.

> That's a rather controversial comment you're making here.

Yes, indeed it is. My comment is so politically incorrect that I dare not make it in real life. Yet I suspect that plenty of people (though probably not the majority) would agree, but can't speak out about it.

The question is what proportion of sex workers truly, voluntarily, entered that profession (i.e. had viable access to alternatives, and chose not to pursue it).

It's a lot less then 100%.

Is there a profession where answer is 100%?

There aren't that many professions where we ask you to trade an intimate act involving your own body.

Maybe the military, but you know, conscription is also kind of a big deal for that reason.

Any professional sport also comes to mind. Especially full contacts. But there the risk reward ratio seems to be greater.

"politically incorrect" is one way to describe your apparent belief that men are owed sex slaves, yes.

That's not controversial.

At least to me as an India, that's what is happening here all over the place.

There is one more theory going around. Soon same gender marriages among men are going to be common here.

Here is another theory argued by some sociologists, which is even worse: Lack of women is a volatile situation and ripe for crime, war and violence.

Both China and India have large gender imbalances -- and with a border conflict... :-(

"May you live in an interesting time" was a Chinese curse, I think?

There are already many villages in northern India where there are gangs of unmarried men simply sitting there without marriage. Most are uneducated, and have no skills to secure any employment.

Gender related crimes against women already very common in India. I believe they will intensify in the future.

Either way with <850F:1000M gender ratio, for India's population scale there will states full of unmarried men. I believe though crime will be a common place, it won't be possible for all men to indulge in crimes(Which will be a civil war situation at the scale we are talking about).

Either way a lot of men will have to marry men.

You say "have to marry men" like it's a choice to be attracted to the same sex.

IMO it will result in a lot of angry and depressed single men who resent society. If you put someone into a corner without many options they can become desperate and violent. This imbalance in India and China will become very dangerous in the coming years

> You say "have to marry men" like it's a choice to be attracted to the same sex.

Attraction is generally not a choice (there's probably some things you can do deliberately over time to shift it a little bit, but...). Marriage, OTOH, is a choice, and its a choice that historically is motivated by many things, with attraction quite often not being a main factor.

The real problem with "have to marry men" isn't that attraction isn't a choice (as marriage and attraction are not the same thing) but that marriage is not mandatory.

So, not having prostitution, will create opportunity?

The ratio is actually far worse! A lot of 'adjustments' go on during census times. The net ratio is close to (<850 women) per (1000 men). You are right in pointing out that its going to get a way more worse very soon.

The main reason for that is dowry and extremely bad treatment meted to women in India. Most people prefer to not have girls at all given these scenarios. Imagine having to spend money on your daughters education, tending to physical safety and then only to find the boy's family asking for big money gifts during marriage. And not just that, in most common cases the demand for gifts just keep coming infinitely even after marriage. The demands are insane of course- Asking for large quantities of gold, real estate, or just plain hard cash, cars combined with a demand for lavishly marriage party are a common place here in India.

Some people have absolutely no shame and sense of self esteem and resolve themselves to this kind of begging to get money. This includes people from all over India, regardless of caste, religion, color, regional, linguistic belongings.

This whole thing promotes a culture for a madness to have male children.

I am assuming marriage among people of same gender especially men is going to be a common place in India only a couple of decades from now.

>> Should men who don't have or can't find a normal relationship

Such men should actively work towards a society that doesn't kill girls before birth and after wards. If they can't may be they should suffer and live in the society they built.

> The net ratio is close to (<850 women) per (1000 men)...Most people prefer to not have girls at all given these scenarios. Imagine having to spend money on your daughters education, tending to physical safety and then only to find the boy's family asking for big money gifts during marriage.

With a shortage of women, shouldn't the groom's parents be paying instead?

Having the ability to kill somebody before they were born is a recent medical advancement. Before that you had to simply accept what ever was born to you.

Dowry system has been going on India since ancient times. The system works like this. By and large Indian society still works in a system where your parents choose your spouse. So when a boy is of marriageable age, their parents go a matchmaker- and put forward their clauses. There are some typical things they look in a girl, The girl must be fair, beautiful, not taller than the boy, shy, and obedient. She must not be too intelligent, or bold or sometimes not working or well educated.

Apart from these behavior and cosmetic demands. They also put down financial clauses- Generally the demand is in gold, or real estate. Or a car, Or just hard cash. The demands for gifts never really ceases. Women are harassed, many women set themselves on fire unable to bear the torture and harassment. Dowry deaths are common and you will often hear of them in the news papers. In many cases women commit suicide, or worse there are cases where the mother in law burns the girl alive. As much as shocking to you all this may seem, it happens all the time here.

This has been happening since a long time. There are trends of these demands. If the boy is a doctor/Civil Servant the money demanded is highest, engineers/rich business men come next and so on... And this is so common, if you have to marry off your daughter you have to often pay up!

So you need to undo that much of cultural thing. I don't think it will go away anytime soon.

I guess the laws of supply and demand do not apply when ancient traditions are involved.

They do apply, just because there's fewer women than men doesn't mean they're on the supply side.

In traditional Indian culture daughters are seen as a deprecating asset that their parents want to get rid of.

Presumably the bribes dished out to get rid of them are less than their upkeep would cost if they weren't married off, with some added cost to account for the social stigma of having an unmarried single daughter.

Logically you would think this may help women but .. Let me explain. I come from a part of India which supposedly experienced bad sex ratio in 1920s-40s. I learnt from my parents and Grand Parents that the greedy parents of Women were 'selling' their daughters for higher money to older widowers. Also women were bought from other states. These were captured well in Telugu Drama 'KanyaSulkam' as an effort to get rid of evil. Apparently changes in sex-ratios don't result in correction of power balance.

> Imagine having to spend money on your daughters education, tending to physical safety and then only to find the boy's family asking for big money gifts during marriage. And not just that, in most common cases the demand for gifts just keep coming infinitely even after marriage.

Why? Why would the bride's family give these gifts? What basis is there for these demands?

Tradition and culture perhaps, but if the situation is so screwed up, then maybe it's time to abandon or fix those traditions. Spend money on education and teach her independence, and if she wants to marry out of love, she can do so without any dowry.

Its largely cultural, and unfortunately I can never give you a complete context behind these issues. Being a parent of a girl child is difficult in India. Right from birth you will face constant discrimination, every single part of the society will make all attempts to keep your child the weaker gender.

These days its still a lot better. A few decades back, the society would have big problems with as simple a thing like teaching a girl how to read/write. Then came the society's opposition towards women working. That's how backward these people are.

If only there were meat market options...

If there were, the suppliers might realize the coming supply shortage and "ramp up production".

I don't have facts and figures in front of me right now, but it is thought that the majority of sex workers in poor areas are either forced or coerced into it, up to and including human trafficking, and they start young, perhaps preteens, we aren't talking about high priced call girls here.

India needs to enforce the laws against selective abortion.

Your numbers ignore homosexuality, but I don't know if that'd make any difference.

Having a well regulated but legal sex industry can be beneficial to society but in absence of such laws most women in this industry are forced into it. Most of the girls there are sold to pimps by their own close relatives. The Pimps then treat them as good as slaves.

The highest amount of recruitment comes from the children of these sex workers. NGOs in these areas mostly focus on health and well being of these children. Thus giving them far better options than working as sex workers.

I talked with several NGO people working in this area and they were clear "we are no here to persuade these woman to take another profession."

> As people in Tech industry we should be very proud of Bill Gates and what he has done with Microsoft and his charity work.

Yes, but they won't be because a bunch of neckbeards are still bitter about OS/2 and Netscape dying or Apple being reduced to desktop irrelevance, or what have you, to have anything like a reasonable perspective on these things, which is a shame.

We don't need your sexism and racism.

I don't really get the canonisation.

I'm very happy the the Gates' foundation is doing good work. You'd be a fool to say that it wasn't. However, I don't believe that the tech industry should be proud as a result, nor do I think that there is a particular difference between the foundation and some other charities, nor do I understand the obvious astroturfing.

I especially don't think that the act of charity somehow excuses the dodgy business practices or Microsoft or the long-term damage done to the tech industry.

So we should be grateful that the Gates' money is being used to positive ends. But that certainly doesn't make Bill a saint, and I suspect that this hyperbole and short-term memory-ism can fuel the backlash.

The Gates Foundation is unlike any other charity or foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

That's a link to the Wikipedia article about the foundation, which I'm pretty familiar with. You haven't really provided any evidence that the Foundation is significantly different. It's large, but in what manner is that qualitatively different and better?

Which is not entirely bad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

>I especially don't think that the act of charity somehow excuses the dodgy business practices or Microsoft or the long-term damage done to the tech industry.

How much damage do you think that is? You don't think all the lives saved have "made up" for that? You don't think the world is better off than it would otherwise be without Bill Gates?

No, because I don't think that positive or good acts can somehow "cancel out" (or as you say, "make up for") bad or negative ones. Karma is not a concrete concept, and the question "is the world better off" is objectively unanswerable.

Then your comment upthread is especially pointless, isn't it? Why am I meant to pay special attention to Bill Gates the man, rather than the 40 billion dollars that has been put to using entrepreneurial strategies to end global disease and poverty?

Yeah, fair. I should really have replied to one of the top-level commented describing Gates as a saint, or waxing lyrical about his greatness; my objection was not to the article itself, and that wasn't clear.

That was a way more reasonable response than the tone of my comment merited. Thanks! :)

Hate the man's business practices. Love the man for his philanthropical work. They don't need to cancel out, and you don't need to forgive one to appreciate the other.

Michael Vick was put in prison for dog fighting. I absolutely hate him for that. At the same time, I appreciate his talent on the field as a football player.

Orson Scott Card is a rampant homophobe. I absolutely hate him for that. Doesn't affect my opinion of his novels though, not in the least.

There's no logic in idolizing or demonizing anyone. Life's a lot better when you get out of casting a pall over everything a person does by some other things that they've done. People like making villains and heroes of people, whether or not they deserve it.

We see someone we don't like from afar, and it's easy to assume that they're bad at everything, that they're horrible people, that they're bad parents, that they're likely running around kicking puppies all day long. That's very rarely the truth.

With people we're nearer too, it's easier to accept that they have strengths and weaknesses, and I don't know why it's hard to imagine the same thing of famous people, but it is. There's very little to love about Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft. Similarly, there's very little to hate about Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Roll with it.

> Hate the man's business practices. Love the man for his philanthropical work

At the core of this is trust. Bill lost mine at Microsoft's helm - he has shown a borderline sociopath that will stop at nothing and will destroy anyone on his path.

To give this much credit to someone with such dark history is appallingly naive.

To give him trust might be naive, but giving him credit for the things he has done is just a recognition of fact.

He donated $28,000,000,000 to a philanthropic organization. Refusal to "give him credit" for that is just being petty. He did it.

Conversely, he engaged in anti-competitive behavior with Netscape, so he gets the credit for that too.

Loving him for the former is every bit as pragmatic as hating him for the latter, but neither act means that is who he is as a person. People are far too complex for that.

Everytime a big company implements a feature or rolls out something, they affect companies working in that area. You can find similar things about almost any company or person, but for some reason the bad things about Microsoft are always amplified.

For example, see how Google squashed Skyhook

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Aliyun and Acer prevented from launching a phone because of the secret rules of the "Open" Handset Alliance. http://www.zdnet.com/cn/report-google-stops-acer-from-launch...

Apple and the famed 30% cut of even sales from Apps, an example of how they used someone's OSS code in Safari and then banned them from the app store:

http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

My point is that someone fed a steady diet of bad stories about one company while barely being exposed to good stories ends up not liking them and everyone knows how many tech sites and journalists and news sites like Slashdot and HN's bias in story selection because of the vocal minority who sometimes appear to be on a crusade of ends justifying the means.

It seems you need a history lesson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...

I already knew about that, but not sure what you're implying here.

The link says this:

>in 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages, coming to about $5.50 per copy of MS-DOS 6.0 that had been sold. The jury also agreed with a Microsoft counterclaim that Stac had misappropriated the Microsoft trade secret of a pre-loading feature that was included in Stacker 3.1, and simultaneously awarded Microsoft $13.6 million on the counterclaim. [2]

Are you alleging that Microsoft bought the judge and/or jury off? Why would they award such a high amount then? They ruled that the infringement wasn't intentional, and certainly they had way more access to the facts and testimony of the case than you or me.

I have to ask, did you even read your own history lesson before teaching it to others?

Also, it's funny that no company can even sell the equivalent of DriveSpace these days for Chromebooks, iPads and iPhones. Android phones would probably need the user to get root and/or unlock the bootloader which is a nonstarter for already niche software. Would even be banned from the Mac App Store. Yet people buy them and cheer them on just because they're more anti-MS while pretending to be pro software freedom.

A couple of contemporary history lessons for you.

Google found guilty of infringing Lycos patents. http://www.fastcompany.com/1844439/meet-vringo-cto-ken-lang-...

So, you think Microsoft developed DoubleSpace by itself, without knowledge of Stac's technology? I'm not sure exactly how they got away with unwilling patent infringement after that. Maybe they formed a new team and never let them read Stac's patents, or something like that. Still, they got US%5.5 for every copy of DOS 6 sold, which is, IMHO, the judge saying that, while there is not enough evidence to rule the infringement was deliberate, Microsoft didn't play nice.

Then you throw a smokescreen by mentioning Apple and Google. We are not discussing Apple and Google, we are discussing Bill Gates and his past as a sub-criminal bully and how he is trying to erase that image by high-profile charity.

As for disk and file compression, you can't sell something like it for Windows Phones either. Or Windows - because NTFS already supports file compression. You can do it for Linux, on servers and desktops, but that's another question. I'm not sure if there is stable support for file compression on any current filesystem. Probably yes, but storage is cheap these days.

Also, i4i: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i

>In May 2007 Vulpe and i4i successfully sued Microsoft, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas

Isnt that considered evil around these parts?

That is the majority opinion around here, yes, but I contend that that opinion is flawed, precisely because of cases like i4i. It is a textbook case of a big guy ripping off a small guy, and patents being the only thing that helped the small guy.

The Wikipedia entry has surprisingly little backstory, so it turned out to be a poor choice on my part. But the gist is that like the Stac case, Microsoft was in active discussions to license or buy i4i's Office plugin before they turned around and, without warning, built it themselves into the next release of Word. Unlike the Stac, and indeed most, patent lawsuits, Microsoft was found guilty of willfull infringement.

I'm mostly a fan of Microsoft, and I don't really believe all the hate it gets is justified, but this is one case where it was really a bad actor.

So what? If he is a sociopath, so what? Are you trying to insinuate he has dark ulterior motives for his charity efforts?

If not, why is his personality worth a damn to the discussion?

> Are you trying to insinuate he has dark ulterior motives for his charity efforts?

Dark ulterior motives? No. Being remembered as a philanthropist rather than a robber-baron is quite enough. Hs is doing good, but he is not doing good for the good of others.

Why the f%ck do you care if he is doing it to be remembered? Since when was the value of charitable works derived from the motive?

As usual, Linus shoots straight.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21887/Linus_Microsoft_Hatred_is_...

The discussion started by matthewmacleod is about the moral character of Bill Gates, not the value of his charitable works. For most people, intentions are important when discussing the former.

Calling him a sociopath is absurd. A sociopath wouldn't care about charity in the slightest. If you think he was doing it for publicity purposes, he wouldn't be putting so much effort into it or avoiding the media at times like was mentioned in the article. You don't have to agree with what he did, but he has certainly shown he is not a bad person and has good intentions.

'Dark history'? Aggressive business practices for sure, but it's not like he was dumping toxic chemicals in the water supply or something. How many people were killed as a result of Gates 'sociopathy'? I'm afraid that slowing the popularity of Linux and the open web doesn't strike me as particularly impressive in the Evil Genius stakes.

Jimmy Saville, well-known British celebrity with lots of charity work for kids, now known to be a sick child abuser.

Lance Armstrong, well-known cyclist with lots of charity work fighting cancer, now known to be a drug cheat.

Can Bill Gates wash away his sins? Has he really turned over a new leaf?

"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's investments in Monsanto and Cargill have come under heavy criticism. Is it time for the foundation to come clean on its visions for agriculture in developing countries?"

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matter...

/facepalm at how many logical fallacies you have squeezed into one short comment.

>Lance Armstrong, well-known cyclist with lots of charity work fighting cancer, now known to be a drug cheat.

Are you really equating Lance Armstrong with a guy who likely sexually abused hundreds of children? That's idiotic.

You realize that what Armstrong did wasn't a crime, right? Just against some arbitrary rules of some form of sports entertainment (a bicycle race!)? And that the treatments he undertook are perfectly legal in the real world? And that they may have even helped his recovery from cancer, in one way or another?

You hate charity. We get it. But I'll take the work of Bill Gates and Lance Armstrong over whatever it is the armchair pundits around the internet are doing, all day.

It's still a bit like taking with one hand and giving with the other, if you know what I mean? Where the money comes from does matter. So it's not quite as disconnected as the examples you cited, IHMO. Kinda like drug barons who help kids and poor people in their communities; sure it's great for those they help, but it doesn't make you forget the dead bodies they are also responsible for. Not just the companies ripped to pieces, consider all the FUD about open source - haven't heard that stuff in a while, huh? But imagine if that would actually have taken root; and it wasn't for lack of trying, that's for sure. Did Microsoft cost the world more than it gives back? How would the world look if what they wanted, they would have gotten? Hard to tell.

I do think Gates is aging well, and getting cooler as he does; but it would help if he at least could say "in hindsight, some Microsoft tactics and claims were kinda low, oh well", instead of going on about how everything is so wonderful and smart and clean, and the past full of hard work and friendly ribbing and nothing else. But to be fair, that seems to be the norm of the industry, and he seems to be less full of it than most. So yeah, good for him, but still let's not confuse him with people who spend all their life doing good, or saints. If I give someone 5$, my generosity is not measured by how poor that person is, but by how much 5$ are for me. That sometimes gets forgotten in all the money porn.

I don't necessarily disagree. The broader point that I was trying to make was that idols shouldn't be idolized, nor should demons be demonized. People may or may not be the sum of their actions, but even if you just mugged somebody an hour ago, you giving that $5 to a poor person is still an act of good. Not quite as benevolent, but still, preferable to having spent that $5 on crack cocaine.

Robin Hood he isn't (though I'd argue that people's view of Robin Hood is also very skewed -- he did not steal from the rich and give to the poor, as the nutshell synopsis goes), but nor is he Satan. In real life, we're very few of us saints. In regards to 'credit', it's worth noting (forgive me if you already knew this) that I just learned not too long ago that Mother Teresa, often pedestooled as the archetype of things saintly, was not only not very Saintly, but depending on how you read it, quite the horrid cunt, whose good deeds were mostly a marketing ploy that she used to amass wealth.

All totaled though, yes, it'd be fantastic if Bill Gates came out and decried the actions of his 'former self'. But that doesn't mean that his current contributions don't massively benefit society.

I agree with all of that, though maybe he actually is a bit of a Robin Hood, considering Microsoft "plundered" mostly the first world? It may not have been his initial intention to give it away, but you're right, it's still a good act to do it. For kids it's more important to not die of a disease than to use Linux, that stuff can come later, and if I told a mother who is happy about her kid being alive that "yeah fine, but Linux is better, and Microsoft ads are dishonest, so how ethical is this?!", she'd slap me, rightfully so.

> In regards to 'credit', it's worth noting (forgive me if you already knew this) that I just learned not too long ago that Mother Teresa, often pedestooled as the archetype of things saintly, was not only not very Saintly, but depending on how you read it, quite the horrid cunt, whose good deeds were mostly a marketing ploy that she used to amass wealth.

Yes, I remember reading an article about that in like 1998, and being kinda shocked. Something about basements full of donations that went unused or to missionary work because she thought the poor were ordained to be poor by God or something, or purified by being poor, something like that.

But considering this, I wouldn't call her a horrid cunt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Spiritual_life It's not like she was freely enjoying her life as superstar, it rather seems to me she was a simple woman who genuinely believed in the value of faith even when she herself didn't have it, which seems kinda tough. That doesn't make some of her actions less misguided, but because I like crude analogies so much: if you're in the bathtub, and a kid wants to bring you some super fresh toast, so it just throws the toaster in the bathtub... that's a bad outcome, but born from good intentions. Similarly, if from her perspective all that matters for the ultimate outcome for a person is faith, and if poor people have a better chance to get to heaven, it kinda makes sense. Which is utterly off-topic but hey :)

Perhaps I've absorbed the bias from whichever exposé I read on the matter, but (paraphrased), she ran medical centers more like "places for poor people to go and die", and ran them zero painkillers, inadequate, unhygienic conditions that were understaffed, all so that she wouldn't 'interfere' with their suffering, which she felt likened them to Christ. As I stated, it's very likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I certainly don't have any knowledge that would consider me insightful on the matter.

< Orson Scott Card is a rampant homophobe. I absolutely hate him for that. Doesn't affect my opinion of his novels though, not in the least.

I respect you for that. In addition, I don't personally blame him for his views, but strongly disagree with them. But my love of his books doesn't interfere with my disagreement with his sexual identity views. I feel that if in the '90s the prevailing wasn't the same, that OSC, wouldn't voice the same opinions so cavalierly.

I can disagree with someone's politics without disagreeing with their literary ideas, and I don't have any qualms about that. OSC is a fantastic author, with terrible personal opinions and I accept that unconditionally.

I am a consequentialist and do believe that "bad acts" are acceptable if there is a net benefit. Comiting a crime should be ok if it saves people's lives. The question is not unanswerable, it's entirely possible to measure or at least estimate how much good a charity has done, or how much harm a business has done.

Which is better, a billion dollars in the hands of one person or one dollar each in the hands of a billion people? Gates has done large, prominent good works, while the microsoft business practices and their effect on the overall tech industry have made hundreds of millions of people's lives slightly worse in small, almost unnoticeable ways. Yes, I do believe the world is worse off on the whole.

(Which is not to say that the foundation isn't a great thing, or that he hasn't done better things with his ill-gotten gains than the overwhelming majority of rich people)

>... the long-term damage done to the tech industry.

I know everyone takes this for granted, but there is no empirical evidence Microsoft harmed the tech industry in the years leading up to the antitrust suit:

"Did Microsoft Deter Software Innovation?", Josh Lerner, May 2001

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498

Fairly easy read, laying out the data, methodologies and controls used, as well as limitations and potential flaws thereof. It uses metrics like VC financing, employment growth, patenting, etc. as proxies to measure innovation, and finds absolutely no evidence that Microsoft harmed the tech sectors it was alleged to in the antitrust suit.

Of course, this was before Microsoft let IE languish at v6 for the next 5 years :-)

In slightly related news,nobody is talking about the UN Millenium Goals [1][2]anymore, which are due next year. And it doesn't need a prophet to predict that we will miss most, if not even all eight, of them[0].

[0]http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/2013_progr... [1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals

I am proud that the technology industry, of which I am a part, has created Bill Gates, a living saint.

Mmmh, I'm trying really hard not to be contrarian for the sake of it but "a living saint" seems a little too strong an expression.

I mean, of course what he does is awesome and I'll probably never be in a position to do anything remotely that significant in my life but I feel it's easier to do that kind of stuff when you're that insanely rich.

That being said he could probably as easily not do it, so props to him for that. He seems like a good man, saint or not. Humans are rarely all black or all white, that's what makes us interesting.

But, there are many wealthy people who do not give their time and money over to philanthropy.

Conversely, there are many who are not wealthy who also do lots of charity work (could be something as small as volunteering in a soup kitchen on Christmas or Thanksgiving, helping out at the local hospital, spending time at a nursing or retirement home, etc.). I know many people who fall into this category.

So many saints are considered as much for far less than he's helping accomplish.

I don't think he's a saint. I think a lot of people on HN, given the same resources Gates has, would do substantially similar things with their lives. It seems like incredibly rewarding and important work.

I'm just really glad he chose to do it.

And what is the role of his wife and her schooling from nuns?

I don't know, but modern Catholic nuns are kind of bad-ass. For instance, the Ursulines who taught Melinda Gates recently gave a middle finger to the Catholic hierarchy and vocally defended Gates' work despite its support for contraception.

Wherever you look for close-minded reactionary people stuck in the 1950s chastising members of their own church for unapproved good works, chances are you'll see nuns on the other side of the argument.

I don't doubt that there are a whole lot of bad nuns out there (though just typing those words seems kind of silly to me), but in the modern organized faith they seem like one of the bright spots.

Do also note that the top of that hierarchy, the current Pope, is dragging the ethical values of the Catholic Church forward through the centuries, despite significant baggage he can't be expected to just discard (though he should if he could)

The Jesuits are another bright spot in the Catholic church. I had four years of Jesuit high school, and everything people like us seem to like about Pope Frank plays right to the Jesuit type.

I have been guessing that the nuns that taught Melinda got her highly devoted to 'charity' in some general sense and that she and Bill had a 'deal': After he worked his tail off at Microsoft to make a lot of money and, thus, necessarily spent a lot of time at the office instead of at home with her and the kids, he was to back off from an active role at Microsoft, e.g., be just COB, and, then, join with her in using much of the money for charity. So, in this way Melinda would get to pursue the goals and values of charity she got from her nuns. Just a guess.

I could make this guess because my wife, her sisters, and their mother were all highly devoted to a life of charity via 'volunteer' work, and much of the origin of their interests in charity was from Christian religion, although in their case Methodist instead of Roman Catholic.

But, 'deal' with Bill or not, the record seems to be that Melinda is one heck of a 'super fundraiser': She also got Buffett to hand over much or nearly all of his fortune. Then she publicized the value that any really wealthy person should leave 50% or so to charity.

So, I'm guessing that the nuns got Melinda to get Bill and others to cough up $100 billion and counting.

And what is Melinda's 'sales pitch?" My guess is just total sincerity with nothing for herself, no money, of course not, but neither fame, status, prestige, etc. It seems to me that in charity Melinda is fairly closely following the values of the nuns.

And she did one more: As we know, just having the money and giving it away does not necessarily do much to 'alleviate human suffering' or 'improve the world' as the nuns might want. Instead, giving the money away in effective ways is hard work. So, Melinda got Bill dedicated to the work, and Bill is a bright guy who knows the heck how to get things done.

I'm suspecting that heavily Melinda, and before her her nuns, are the real driving force behind all of this. Instead, Bill might be driving/racing Porsche cars!

Finally, we have to suspect that 'hard hearted', no nonsense, bottom line oriented, take no prisoners Bill is totally taken with, in awe of, head over heels in love with, and has awesome respect for Melinda. But then some such fits: Supposedly Bill's mother was a big influence on Bill, and a boy with a good mother tends to look for a wife much like his mother.

It's nice that tough guy Bill is now harnessed as a very bright and capable horse pulling the wagon of Melinda and her nuns!

One could hope so.. but given the number of millionaires (I mean tens and hundreds if not thousands of millions) all over the world not doing this makes me thing it would be like that (of course HN isn't representative of the world, but still).

(I interpreted your "a lot" as most, given the small number of people here)

There are a load of 'millionaires' that are still busy keeping their company going/growing, which is where their money comes from. The people like Bill Gate - the billionaires many times over - they have the luxury of time to decide what to do, and the money to make it happen. No doubt there are many millionaires with the luxury of free time, but probably not as many as you think. Meaning, if they stopped doing what they're doing, the money would mostly go away pretty quickly.

Yeah right. Most of the people on HN will never quit the game, and will keep trying to make more money until they have one foot in the grave. (And no, I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with this.)

Gates got to a point where he knew his time as a competitive capitalist was over, and that his time as a generous philanthropist had begun. This isn't about net worth, this is about making that choice at a point where you still are physically, mentally, and financially able to have an impact.

Anyone who has a good exit has sufficient resources to no longer work and could make a similar choice, even if they won't have the same net impact as Gates. But most of them don't. Most of the people at Gates' level don't either. It's commendable.

>Most of the people on HN will never quit the game, and will keep trying to make more money until they have one foot in the grave.

That's because, as was already stated, most of them won't have billions of dollars. If they did, they would probably at some point start thinking about something besides personal wealth.

>Anyone who has a good exit has sufficient resources to no longer work and could make a similar choice, even if they won't have the same net impact as Gates.

Getting a good exit is only slightly more likely than winning the lottery. You make it sound like most of us here at HN will be millionaires. That's just ridiculous.

Well, I think Sainthood is given to those people who work out of their religious beliefs and are busy glorifying poverty and suffering (Example: Mother Teresa). Gates is a not a saint he is just a philanthropists and a good one at that.

If Mother Teresa is the one modern venerated person you've heard of, I guess that would be a reasonable summary of the meaning of Catholic sainthood. I agree though with the underlying point, which is that "sainthood" is a political concept that isn't relevant to the work being done by the Gates Foundation.

I feel exaclty the opposite, of both the technology industry, and Bill gates.

It's really easy to be charitable when you can't even count the money you have. In addition to that, it's also easy to invest your time in charity when you left a company you worked for, with exceptional intensity, for a life, and suddenly you have nothing to do anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Bill Gates is "evil". I'm saying that there is very little to admire in such behavior. Most of the people, with unlimited money and time, and having exhausted their stack of accomplishments, would do the same.

Secondly, the root of the main problems around the world is not technological, but social in nature.

And again, don't get me wrong, it's good to cure people, invent cleaning bacteria, cleaner energy etc.etc. If you don't work out the social root, it's going to be a whack-a-mole game.

The Gates Foundation is different than other charities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...

"It's really easy to be charitable when you can't even count the money you have. In addition to that, it's also easy to invest your time in charity when you left a company you worked for, with exceptional intensity, for a life, and suddenly you have nothing to do anymore... Most of the people, with unlimited money and time, and having exhausted their stack of accomplishments, would do the same."

Whether or not it is easy, not only don't most billionaires invest anywhere near as much money or time as Gates into charity, almost none of them do. Check out the Forbes list of 20 billionaires if you don't believe me [1]. A typical example: "At a then estimated $16.3 billion net worth, she contributed a total of $3.5 million cumulatively between 2002 and 2006." [2]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ [2] http://www.facesofphilanthropy.com/christy-walton/

BillG is one of the very few people about whom I have completely changed my opinion.

Post his Microsoft days, he is the highest profile "rich tech person" who has promoted so many projects and efforts to help the poor. While Microsoft was famous for “embrace, extend—and extinguish” where it crushed any product that felt like a threat (saw this first hand with Netscape).

Now BillG is using his enormous wealth in the best possible way! Kudos and Thanks

I have different view on that.

The charity Bill Gates is doing now is good, but what Bill Gates did as Microsoft founder was much better and way more important.

Lots of people are still using Microsoft products.

>>Lots of people are still using Microsoft products [which are really good/important].

And lots of people are using Kalashnikovs e.g. the LRA, so they must be good?

Please don't just write simple opinions like that on HN.

Let me take a simple counter example:

Microsoft had(/have?) a monopolist strategy. This meant they needed to have software/api/data formats hard to clone and be compatible with. this means they had to be over complex and varied in incompatible ways over time (then replaced regularly with new over complex implementations).

That results in lower life quality for me and everyone else that had to use their stuff.

The lack of better implementations, because of the monopoly, was a waste of money, blood pressure and time for at least tens of millions of people.

I do agree about the charity, as a philantropist Gates has a serious attitude with setting goals and trying to reach them. Afaik, that made an incredible difference compared to e.g. the foreign aid of my country Sweden, set at 1% of GNP.

>Lots of people are still using Microsoft products.

Huuuuuh? What? What does that have to do with ANYTHING?

Lots of people still use Bayer aspirin but that doesn't make their actions during WWII ok. They used slave labor and manufactured gas used in Nazi gas chambers and their executive Fritz ter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison for his actions.

They also invented heroin as a "non-addictive morphine substitute."

It's a little unfortunate that rather than discussing the contents of the piece we are focusing on the individual

But I would like to comment on the substance because that is the link that was shared; and avoid all the on and on conflicts about the author of the piece.

I hate to be that guy, but while I appreciate the optimistic note (no pun intended), I think we really should introspect on how 2013 was actually a year of setbacks in fight against poverty and other related social problems including the ones listed by BillG, which I want to point out. I am writing on the basis of my knowledge (which I can assure you is credible) and will append references later.

1.Polio: While there are some obvious achievements, the question of Pakistan is one country that has taken long backward steps since being close to eradicating it just before 9/11, and most of that has to do with geopolitical reasons. Post 9/11 the insurgent groups started targeting polio workers and banning immunization programs alleging that they were American spies. Because none of these were allegations were substantiated, the village elders fought against their voices, and the immunization program continued with the insurgents not being able to do much. However that changed with the Laden killing which in a way vindicated the insurgents as the chief informant was a doctor affiliated with the polio program. Since then the elders lost their ability to object, and the insurgents gained their authority which has resulted in completely dismantling of the polio program with periodic killings of polio workers, the last one less than a week back.

The number of polio cases in Pakistan has grown about 40-50% since then. And one would argue there's a lot that the west can do to regain confidence for the local workers without jeopardizing the so-called continuing war on terror. This is a contentious issue, but ones that needs to be highlighted and not as simple as the Pak PM giving assurance to Gates.

2. Child mortality: Sure child mortality has gone down but it is far from the target set in the Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs). More importantly its not just the poorer countries that are doing badly. Amongst the worst performing countries has been India which goes on to my next point that economic growth or the rate of poverty going down means nothing more than in numbers to the state of social welfare. The overall child mortality has gone down because of two separate factors: 1. Countries in latin america and south east Asia have improved drastically through better "socialistic" maternal and child welfare programs while the rest amongst the poorer countries languish. 2. The civil wars that plagued sub saharan countries before the 2000s have gone down both in their occurrences and their casualties, of which women and children formed a huge number. Sure you hear about the current violence in the likes of South Sudan, Mali, Syria and CAR but these are nothing compared to the violence of the past and the civilian casualties are much lower in number.

3. Poverty rate: From the point above while in absolute terms poverty has gone down, social inequality has grow. More importantly the measure of poverty line is highly debated as growth in income in low and middle income counties has also seen concurrent high real inflation on the ground which is highly under measured.

4. Rich counties re-committed to saving lives: This is actually perhaps the most concerning. Just read this piece by Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's most well known development economist who was is a key advocate of the Global Fund that Gates mentions that http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/world-to-poor-dr...

Sorry if this sounds like a long rant. But I really strongly believe that we need to be realistic of what has been achieved. I appreciate what Gates is trying to do, but we need to introspect on how little we are doing to address these grave issues. And discussing the man and not the article itself is one of those key symptoms of our indifference and lethargy.

Points 2 and 3 both sound like steps forward to me.

Also:

> middle income counties has also seen concurrent high real inflation on the ground which is highly under measured.

What does that actually mean? "Real" is an economic term that doesn't make sense in that context. And if inflation's not being measured properly, how do you know in which direction it's off? Or more generally - you seem to think inflation is higher than is being reported; why do you think that?

When people say that inflation is not being properly measured, what they're likely referring to is the fact that some policy makers use the CPI Less Food and Energy which means that some of the biggest expenses for the majority of people, food and energy, are sometimes ignored when discussing the effects inflation.

That's not a measurement problem, though; that's a what-should-our-policy-response-be problem. Food and energy prices are actually easier to measure and compare year-over-year. There are good arguments for (and some against) excluding them from your monetary policy targets, but I've never heard of anyone doing it when discussing human wellbeing. But either way, it's still being measured.

The World Bank has inflation for middle income countries as 4.1% [1]. If you download their data sheet, you'll see that number is a GDP deflator, so no food/energy exclusion. That's not an ideal number, but it's not high either, and it's much lower than most previous years. They also have a CPI number, which is actually higher: 4.6%, but again not terrible. So my question still stands: does the GP think that number is wrong, and if so, why?

[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/mic

>the fact that some policy makers use the CPI Less Food and Energy which means that some of the biggest expenses for the majority of people, food and energy, are sometimes ignored when discussing the effects inflation.

That's hardly a "fact". It's nonsense that circulates around the internet. Look at the CPI reports yourself.

Both figures are reported and public information, core and headline CPI, with the latter including the volatile food and fuel prices. In fact, you can look at the data and see precisely how much housing and fuel prices have risen or fallen, month to month.

An increase in inequality isn't a first principle. I'll take a increased inequality that comes with an increase in absolute wealth over no change 10 out of 10 times. Quite frankly inequality isn't something I find particularly meaningful. Don't covet thy neighbor.

So basically you're saying that things have improved but that we're not there yet, and that we haven't achieved the ambitious goals set out a decade ago. Still sounds great to me. It took Europe centuries to get from where most developing countries were at two decades ago to where we are now. Said developing countries are doing it at a 10x rate. Your characterization of 2013 being a year of setbacks doesn't follow from the points you raise to substantiate that claim.

Things you might have missed in 2013:

The Gates Foundation's Hypocritical Investments

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/gates-foundat...

Seems like the Gates Foundation is mostly a front for a profit-seeking venture.

Yeah, Bill Gates has sure pulled the wool over all our eyes on this one.

Please explain what sense it would make for a gargantuan liquid fund not to try to invest profitably?

If you read the tax return, you'll see that your statement is literally not true.

It is the other way around. If you are doing effective altruism, you want to make sure you have money coming in that you can be altruistic with.

The bit about Walmart was especially badly done. If the author of this article thinks Walmart employees are poor on the same scale as the poor that the foundation targets, he really has no clue about world poverty. If the minimum standard of living throughout the world were equal to that of a typical Walmart employee, the world would be tremendously better off.

So, your argument is that it's right to make Walmart employees poor in order to maximize profits because they are not nearly as poor as the poorest people in the world?

If there is something poor here, it's the excuse.

How does buying a lot of Walmart shares make Walmart employees poor? I am frankly baffled here. Walmart buyers should probably get more blame here.

Have you ever spared a thought about who made the electronics you own and under what conditions?

When you buy shares you send the signal the company is doing the right thing. It says you support the company and its business practices and, ultimately, enables the company to continue them. If everybody refuses to buy their shares, their stock will plummet and prompt changes.

As for my electronics (and consumables), yes, I try to avoid manufacturers and brands that are associated with poor working practices. Nice try attacking me to try to disprove my argument against the Gates foundation.

Oh for fuck's sake. How do you think a double-digit-billion endowment gets managed? By Bill Gates sitting around with a copy of the Wall Street Journal and a cup of coffee, picking stocks?

No. The money manager roles for the Gates Foundation are extremely serious, and extremely high-status. The guy who runs money management for the Gates Foundation was the former CFO of Merck. Presumably, managing the endowment for an organization with goals like "eradicate polio from the face of the earth in the name of Bill and Melinda Gates" is a job done with at least as much deadly seriousness as your average pension fund or university endowment, both of which are organizations that handle their money the same way.

"Hypocritical investments in Wal Mart". Sheesh.

Universities can (and sometimes do) take a more ethical aim than some other funds. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Africa...

The article we're talking about does not accuse the Gates Foundation of investing in apartheid South Africa.

Yes, it just says he invests in oil companies in Africa and child detention centers. I'm sorry you just are familiar with the mcdonalds logo and nothing else.

Getting angry at me isn't going to make your argument any more valid.

OT: People have made arguments that Harvard is virtually a hedge fund

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100291522

http://theamericanscene.com/2008/05/12/is-harvard-just-a-tax...

Dude, wtf. How about a private juvenile detention centers ran by a company with a history of child abuse in those prisons? At least more due diligence?

Circulate a petition to end the private prison industry? I will sign it. Come up with a credible plan to fix that public policy problem? I'll donate.

Meanwhile: if you're going to manage a forty billion dollar endowment to maximize its impact on global poverty and disease, you're going to be working with large-scale corporate debt and equity. It would be very difficult to maintain diversified exposure to those markets without investing in something that would piss someone off.

That's great propaganda. What are a couple juveniles being abused compared to curing polio?

Yes, yes, I understand. I've been here as long as you have and I know where you're coming from. You do. not. like. Microsoft.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=rbanffy+m...

But you're getting yourself into trouble in this argument, because Bill Gates self-evidently hasn't abused any juveniles, but actually is working to cure polio.

I love the way you start your argument with an ad hominem. It's delightful how consistently you mention my public position in an attempt to discredit me.

So, tell me the difference in his money going to companies that abuse juveniles for profit and his money going to companies that try to eradicate polio. He is not eradicating polio himself either - he pays people to do so.

For one thing, Richard Henriques doesn't actually invest in "companies that abuse juveniles for profit", but the foundation actually does deliberately work to end polio.

That seems like a pretty relevant distinction to me, but, hey, if we weren't arguing over private prisons, you'd be telling me how evil Coca Cola (another foundation investment) is instead, because the real point here is spelled out in your HN profile.

The Microsoft you dislike still exists, and, worse, has communicated itself spiritually to other tech giants. It is downright weird that you'd focus your attention instead on something that really is exclusively an effort to work on global poverty and disease.

McDonalds and Coca-Cola could be perfectly explained by your comment.

But surely a for-profit juvenile detention center is a bit of a stretch? And the other private prison the Foundation invested in listed "reductions in crime rates" as one of the risks to its bottom line. Surely common sense (or better-than-common in the case of Gates) would lead you to not invest in a company that literally grows with the crime rate... I find it hard to believe that it was so hard to find viable investments that they had stoop to investing in private prisons.

The Gates Foundation is awesome, but that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes. And hopefully they might consider being slightly stricter in deciding which investments they are morally opposed to if they are currently investing in private prisons.

I am morally opposed to private prisons and have a very low opinion of juvenile justice in general, but unlike say marriage equality, where I assume most reasonable people are bound to share my beliefs, I do not assume that everyone believes private prisons are evil.

Consider that juvenile abuse is endemic in the entire juvenile justice system, and that (a) a reasonable person might believe that private prison systems are actually more accountable for abuse, since the market can respond to their mismanagement (and because it is far easier to sue a private enterprise than a government agency), and (b) the statistics could conceivably bear this out. I don't know. My problem with private prisons has to do with incentive alignment. But maybe Richard Henriques disagrees with me?

Remember: the Gates Foundation endowment is basically a large private hedge fund that happens to have a charity as its beneficiary rather than a bunch of rich old dudes. The expectation that it be managed differently than any other fund clearly exists, but I'm not sure why that explanation would be valid. There are probably a bunch of universities that hold that private prison stock too.

But here's where we get back to how silly the article is, especially here on this thread: that private prison company is a tiny fraction of the endowment's equity portfolio. It isn't even listed above the fold in the article! The article concerns itself with the suggestion that any support of western consumerist capitalism is hypocrisy on the part of the Gates Foundation. What makes me think that? Because the first page of the article concerns itself with the Foundation's investment in Coke, McD's, BK, Taco Bell, and Pepsi. The article has an unmistakeable and ridiculous thesis.

Yup, agreed about the consumer type companies. As I was reading the article I was thinking the same thing. I was just a little surprised and disappointed when I got to the prisons. I actually think lobbying and long-term contracts remove the theoretical benefits of privatizing prisons, to the extent that reasonable people would probably agree at levels close to those for marriage equality--but that's for another thread.

Not a carefully-written article. When you buy stock in a public company, that company is not getting your money -- the seller of the stock is! So if you buy a Pepsi stock or a Shell stock, you are investing in that stock, but not investing in the company in a traditional sense (in which they get money from you and expect to pay out more money later, with the surplus coming from their activities).

[There is the small factor that the company usually owns some of the stock and demand for the stock usually pushes the price up slightly, the company's stock assets do benefit slightly in a case like this, but this doesn't matter unless they sell, which is a rare activity compared to general volume of investment.]

Since the article does not differentiate between stocks, bonds, and loans, it is essentially useless. I guess they didn't care enough to differentiate, and just wanted to say bad stuff about the foundation; or, maybe they just don't understand finance much at all, and didn't think about it.

Come now.

If unethical corporations faced divestiture, amoral investors would expect less profits, which would drive down prices all the way to the IPO/VC buyin and the RSU packages for management.

You can't seriously believe that the stock market exists while disbelieving that buy-side demand is a fundamental component of launching and running business.

Of course not, but look: you manage the investment arm of a charity fund and your job is to provide more income for that fund in the future.

If you put money into stocks, and get a return on that, that return means very concrete things: more people who get polio vaccines, more people who get dewormed, etc, etc. Very concrete results.

If you don't put money into stocks, because they are unethical ... well, how exactly? As we have mentioned the stock has already been sold. So, you don't do it because by doing so you are helping support a market system that may provide a setting for future unethical corporations to arise in and go public? (Along with many ethical corporations?) Or because by providing demand for the stock now, you retrocausally made it possible for that company to have IPO'd years or decades ago?

These are very abstract and weird concerns when your job is very directly to help people.

You say "if unethical corporations faced divestiture", but even a large fund like this one has no say in that. If they don't invest in McDonald's or Walmart or whatever, it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

So seriously, if you were running the fund, what would you do? For real. If you make less money, actual human beings die who would not have died, in volume.

(All of this said, I would feel pretty dirty about buying the stock of a prison company, anyway. But railing on them for stuff like McDonald's and Walmart just ... doesn't make sense.)

It's hard to invest in poverty or only in businesses with very high moral standards. I think none of the listed companies is particularly evil and they just happen to give the best return.

Discarding what Gates does just because he still thinks and invests like a businessman is a little unfair. There are plenty of charities that fail to deliver just because they are too concerned with being perfect in every little step they take. It's not like you can take all the money donated, go to Africa and "help". You need to invest, do marketing, rent offices and so on. The better it is executed, the more impact per $ donated you get.

That article is so cringe-worthy. As if investing in McDonald's is in some way against the goals of the organization. The organization's goal isn't to reduce McDonald's stock price by a few points, or help people who can afford McDonald's eat more healthy. It is to combat, if not cure, Malaria, HIV, Polio, Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, various intestinal problems (millions die a year from diarrhea) and hundreds of other horrific maiming illnesses that ravage many places. It is to invest in technologies for vaccines, energy, clean water and attempt to end malnutrition (read: starvation).

Even today, 21 children die of preventable causes... per minute. The Gates foundation is attacking all the more prevalent causes (70%+). It is rare to see an article miss the point so astoundingly hard, while managing to be completely without empathy AND clueless. Just utterly detached from reality.

Have you read about all the oil and coal companies that the Foundation invested in? Or the private prisons and military contractors? I mean, maybe they aren't a part of Bill's current pet project, but climate change and human rights are both very important issues, as important as diseases.

I'm shocked that the response seems to be "Where's the problem in investing in companies that make the world a worse place if he uses that money for other good purposes?". The good you can make doesn't magically erase the bad you made.

To be fair though, investing in Coca Cola or McDonald's is like taking money from fat rich people and then distributing it to poor thin people. I see no hypocrisy, just stupid rich people accidentally helping to feed poor thin people, with the foundation taking the arbitrage.

Not sure I'd call the McDonald's clienteler rich. But richer than average Africans.

What would you prefer to see, $xx billion burnt in a hurry in 10 years and then run out of money, or have a foundation that keeps on working for upliftment of the most vulnerable human beings decades or centuries using money from its past investments after Bill and Melinda run out of time in this world?

Also, lets say the foundation did not invest in Walmart shares. How much evilness of Walmart would've been reduced?

Over 200 million people get malaria each year, and approximately 1 million die. [1]

If the Gates Foundation money managers think holding Coca-Cola stock will help fund their fight against the disease, that seems like an extremely easy call.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22305225

Everyone's focused on the problem of whether the foundation should be focused on societally responsible investment, but without noticing the problem with the article's analysis: to get a handle on whether they're investing in that fashion you need to measure the market cap of those decidedly irresponsible companies against those same companies representation in the overall market.

My reaction looking at that list was "wow, he managed to invest less than a billion in oil companies." They do make up a fair chunk of the market, after all.

A lot of people here hate on BG for his past and at the same time idolize Steve Jobs. If you would just have swapped MS and Apple in terms of market growth i am not so sure if Jobs wouldn't have made as many questionable decisions as Gates. Apple of today is making lives harder for a lot of companies, arguably more than MS of today. Also MS seems to share a lot more (Open Source, Public research) while Apple seems to be 100% self-centered. That of course makes sense for any competitive company, just saying that when one reaches the top, they always look kind of evil while the underdogs seem more sympathetic.

Health activists in India, observers the states push for pentavalent vaccines with suspicion. They are more expensive and does not really provide the cost-to-benefit.Also, experts are divided on the fact that there are 18 deaths reported on which state has confirmed 3 being caused by the vaccine.

EDIT: Context - gates pushes pentavalent vaccine being the exciting thing for next year. [1] http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/centre-confirms-three-... [2] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/penta... [3] http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/policy-draft-backs-new...

Ugh, it's seriously hard to read those articles. The writing is just off enough a bit to make it super jarring to read.

In summary: 2 million doses delivered, 3 doses per child, 18 reported deaths (of which two apparently were in child who didn't take the vaccine at all). Depending on the sources, the actual number of deaths caused by the vaccine is 3 or up to 16. This is ontop of a base infant mortality rate of 12 deaths per 1000 infants per year. Also controversy over the actual need to vaccine Hep B and Hib (the two additional vaccines added to the original 3-combo vaccine), over spending their resources on other vaccines.

I would be more interested in they can work for self sufficiency. They seem to be more interested in bringing big business to every corner of the world then making corners of the world self sufficient. Instead they want to push GMOs along with the purchase of those seeds.

He links to a pretty decent site too -- 'oooh shiny visualizations' http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd/visualizations...

If others in the tech industry are keen to contribute to having as big an impact on the world as Bill has, I encourage you to check out the Effective Altruism movement in your area. Effective Altruism overlaps with lean approaches and evidence based action, and many of the proponents are big names in the Valley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

I wish he were to post something similar regarding climate change and energy developments.

Yep. That was a pretty conspicuous omission from his list.

That and coordinated approaches to significant problems, whether at the national or international level. I'm seeing less rather than more success at both scopes.

I wish someone was working as hard on climate change as Gates is on preventable disease in the developing works. But I do not wish that Gates worked any less diligently on the problems he's chosen. Global poverty and disease in the developing world are, particularly in the way they stifle the potential of a huge fraction of the world's people, root causes of most of our other big problems.

"Global poverty and disease in the developing world are, particularly in the way they stifle the potential of a huge fraction of the world's people, root causes of most of our other big problems."

No, they're definitely not the root causes. There's plenty of interest from the richer countries to keep poor countries in such condition, that is the root cause.

Waiting for the drone strikes to take out Bill Gates then.

If you're interested mainly in at-a-glance summaries, this might fit:

http://www.ipcc.ch/

Why it must be him? Why not me? Why not YOU?

Because Gates is an exceptionally well-informed man on the subject matter, and I'm very interested in what one of the wealthiest persons in the world has to say about action to prevent the world's biggest ills.

I love you, Bill. I will do everything in my ability to get all help to your foundation, financially or otherwise. Thanks for your enormous contribution to the world. Here's hoping you get a Nobel peace prize.

Saint William of Redmond?

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