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Bill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth

Bill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.'

thesagan 9y ago
Charities that may not have been as necessary under a less concentrated wealth scenario. And he still gets to call the shots with a charity.
- jandrese 9y ago
  For what it is worth, Bill spends a lot in the third world, where a more equitable US would have minimal impact on the standard of living.
  - clubmg 9y ago
    Meanwhile America looks more and more like a third world country thanks to the billionairs like Besoz and Gates that hog much of the wealth and resources of our country. By hey Amazon Prime and Microsoft 10 are worth it right?
    - comboy 9y ago
      It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos. I'm really surprised by all the hate in this thread towards wealthy individuals who worked hard to attain it. Especially in this environment, where people try to figure out ways to be one of them. It's HN FFs. Also, maybe UBI just seems reasonable to Jeff, like it does to many people. He really doesn't need it for anything which he couldn't have many other simpler ways.
      - joering2 9y ago
        > It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos. Not it wouldn't. Operating a Windows OS and being able to buy stuff online with one click does not magically make your country a first-world country. Just like country that runs on Linux and operate offline with brick&mortal stores is not automatically a third world nation.
    - joering2 9y ago
      America (North/USA) IS a third world country; it just happened to be very rich third world country; although most of that wealth is borrowed from future (assumptions of earnings aka robbing our children).
barrkel 9y ago
Charity is problematic too, though. It's subject to the whims of the wealthy, and worse it's damaging to the dignity of recipients - it denies them agency in their own well-being. I say this having been the beneficiary of charity myself: needing to be grateful to someone else is a kind of psychological servitude. We'd be better off with an economic system that values agency and lives worth living a little more than efficiency and profit, that ends up bio-hacking people to buy more food and mind-hacking people to control their attention. I don't know how to help make that happen, but I'm pretty sure basic income isn't the right answer either.
- Pyxl101 9y ago
  The charities that Gates tends to invest in don't just distribute goods to needy people. His charities try to tackle core societal problems like fighting malaria in Africa: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Malaria https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal... https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Discovery-and-Translational-Sciences https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Dis... > Working closely with other global programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Discovery & Translational Sciences program aims to create and improve preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for infectious diseases as well as other conditions that affect mothers, infants, and children. We do this by identifying and filling gaps in scientific knowledge, creating or implementing new technology platforms that can accelerate research in support of our goals, and investing in potentially transformative ideas. > All of our investments advance the goal of creating solutions that can be deployed, accepted, and sustained in the developing world. To speed the translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming late-stage clinical trials. There's nothing about fighting malaria that denies people agency in their well-being as far as I'm concerned.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    The problems are not just agency, but also whimsy. Charity is basically a combination of guilt assuaging, ego food and social proofing. I think we'd be better off with democratically controlled funding, or economically allocated funding, from a self-sufficient demos, for things like the battle against malaria. Charities like Gates's typically turn into long-lived foundations which acquire politics and agency of their own, not entirely benign. They need to be connected to their benefactors by some structure of control, like democracy or economics. A big pile of cash and investments isn't that; it's independence from control. Yes, democracy also has problems, it would be great to figure out something better. But democracy is still better than oligopoly, even if they're benign today.

thesagan 9y ago

Charities that may not have been as necessary under a less concentrated wealth scenario. And he still gets to call the shots with a charity.

jandrese 9y ago
For what it is worth, Bill spends a lot in the third world, where a more equitable US would have minimal impact on the standard of living.
- clubmg 9y ago
  Meanwhile America looks more and more like a third world country thanks to the billionairs like Besoz and Gates that hog much of the wealth and resources of our country. By hey Amazon Prime and Microsoft 10 are worth it right?
  - comboy 9y ago
    It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos. I'm really surprised by all the hate in this thread towards wealthy individuals who worked hard to attain it. Especially in this environment, where people try to figure out ways to be one of them. It's HN FFs. Also, maybe UBI just seems reasonable to Jeff, like it does to many people. He really doesn't need it for anything which he couldn't have many other simpler ways.
    - joering2 9y ago
      > It would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos. Not it wouldn't. Operating a Windows OS and being able to buy stuff online with one click does not magically make your country a first-world country. Just like country that runs on Linux and operate offline with brick&mortal stores is not automatically a third world nation.
  - joering2 9y ago
    America (North/USA) IS a third world country; it just happened to be very rich third world country; although most of that wealth is borrowed from future (assumptions of earnings aka robbing our children).

barrkel 9y ago

Charity is problematic too, though. It's subject to the whims of the wealthy, and worse it's damaging to the dignity of recipients - it denies them agency in their own well-being. I say this having been the beneficiary of charity myself: needing to be grateful to someone else is a kind of psychological servitude. We'd be better off with an economic system that values agency and lives worth living a little more than efficiency and profit, that ends up bio-hacking people to buy more food and mind-hacking people to control their attention. I don't know how to help make that happen, but I'm pretty sure basic income isn't the right answer either.

Pyxl101 9y ago
The charities that Gates tends to invest in don't just distribute goods to needy people. His charities try to tackle core societal problems like fighting malaria in Africa: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Malaria https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal... https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Discovery-and-Translational-Sciences https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Dis... > Working closely with other global programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Discovery & Translational Sciences program aims to create and improve preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for infectious diseases as well as other conditions that affect mothers, infants, and children. We do this by identifying and filling gaps in scientific knowledge, creating or implementing new technology platforms that can accelerate research in support of our goals, and investing in potentially transformative ideas. > All of our investments advance the goal of creating solutions that can be deployed, accepted, and sustained in the developing world. To speed the translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming late-stage clinical trials. There's nothing about fighting malaria that denies people agency in their well-being as far as I'm concerned.
- barrkel 9y ago
  The problems are not just agency, but also whimsy. Charity is basically a combination of guilt assuaging, ego food and social proofing. I think we'd be better off with democratically controlled funding, or economically allocated funding, from a self-sufficient demos, for things like the battle against malaria. Charities like Gates's typically turn into long-lived foundations which acquire politics and agency of their own, not entirely benign. They need to be connected to their benefactors by some structure of control, like democracy or economics. A big pile of cash and investments isn't that; it's independence from control. Yes, democracy also has problems, it would be great to figure out something better. But democracy is still better than oligopoly, even if they're benign today.