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If only every billionaire had a "tax shelter" that saved millions of lives. http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-is-bill-gates-better-than-batman-2012-1

by whack 10y ago

If only every billionaire had a "tax shelter" that saved millions of lives. http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-is-bill-gates-better-than-batman-2012-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-is-bill-gates-bet...

tanderson92 10y ago
thaumasiotes' point is not that Bill Gates is not a philanthropic individual, it is that most estimates of wealth are not accounting correctly for the total amount of wealth he has accumulated. He is simply using his wealth for more moral actions.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  I'm not even talking about "the total amount of wealth he has accumulated". If he went spectacularly broke, that wouldn't take away from his lifetime earnings, but it would take away from his current wealth. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is under his direct control and the money goes where he thinks it should go. It's fundamentally identical to a personal entertainment fund. There is no reason to leave it out of estimates of his current worth.
paganel 10y ago
We will never know the true opportunity costs of Windows being a closed-platform throughout the '90s and early 2000s, when they also actively tried to kill one of the only open alternatives. This is especially true in this day and age when automation is about to kill a lot of jobs, and the people affected by this might have had a better chance at switching careers had they not seen computers mostly as black boxes when they were younger.
- Scea91 10y ago
  Or possibly they wouldn't have seen computers at all, because they would have been too complicated for them.
  - paganel 10y ago
    Microsoft making computers not complicated (which is debatable) and them trying to kill off Linux in the aforementioned period are 2 different things, not sure when we stopped looking at how most of Gates' wealth was built. Yeah, good for him that he's saving children in Africa with a part of his huge wealth, but as recently as 2015 he was still actively investing his money in fossil fuels and was spreading FUD about solar energy (old habits die hard, I guess). Here's one of the related articles: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/bill-gates-calls-fossil-fuel-divestment-a-false-solution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/bill-gat... .

by whack 10y ago

tanderson92 10y ago

thaumasiotes' point is not that Bill Gates is not a philanthropic individual, it is that most estimates of wealth are not accounting correctly for the total amount of wealth he has accumulated. He is simply using his wealth for more moral actions.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
I'm not even talking about "the total amount of wealth he has accumulated". If he went spectacularly broke, that wouldn't take away from his lifetime earnings, but it would take away from his current wealth. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is under his direct control and the money goes where he thinks it should go. It's fundamentally identical to a personal entertainment fund. There is no reason to leave it out of estimates of his current worth.

paganel 10y ago

We will never know the true opportunity costs of Windows being a closed-platform throughout the '90s and early 2000s, when they also actively tried to kill one of the only open alternatives. This is especially true in this day and age when automation is about to kill a lot of jobs, and the people affected by this might have had a better chance at switching careers had they not seen computers mostly as black boxes when they were younger.

Scea91 10y ago
Or possibly they wouldn't have seen computers at all, because they would have been too complicated for them.
- paganel 10y ago
  Microsoft making computers not complicated (which is debatable) and them trying to kill off Linux in the aforementioned period are 2 different things, not sure when we stopped looking at how most of Gates' wealth was built. Yeah, good for him that he's saving children in Africa with a part of his huge wealth, but as recently as 2015 he was still actively investing his money in fossil fuels and was spreading FUD about solar energy (old habits die hard, I guess). Here's one of the related articles: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/bill-gates-calls-fossil-fuel-divestment-a-false-solution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/bill-gat... .