3 ms·
Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as la
by sanoli 11y ago
Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.
- hkmurakami 11y agoAbsolutely. But imo most of us (including myself) find it difficult to spend a token amount of our earning or net worth for a public good.
- gohrt 11y agoIt wasn't a public good, it was a Microsoft marketing campaign to push people onto the Silverlight platform. MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.
- adventured 11y agoIt was a public good and it required silverlight. Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.
- jkaunisv1 11y agoReally? I thought giving to charity was a fairly common and widespread practice around the world. If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation! And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.
- noonespecial 11y agoThe opposite, I think. People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake). The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks. I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.
- edanm 11y ago"People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake)." Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.
- sdoering 11y agoWell isn`t this some sort of selection bias going on here? To draw your conclusion, I would think you are talking about the louder, more visible types of billionaires. Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.
- edanm 11y agoThat's a good point. And yet, I'd still like to see some kind of reason to think that that's how the other billionaires behave.
- tempestn 11y agoI don't necessarily agree with you, but I don't feel like this comment is unproductive or otherwise violates HN rules. The downvotes seem unwarranted.