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Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might shi

Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might shift in a way that's difficult to imagine from the midst of the rat race.

pmoriarty 7y ago
I've grown a lot more skeptical of what Gates has been doing with his foundation after investigative journalists started reporting on it.
- mffnbs 7y ago
  What reports are you referring to?
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Here’s one: https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/unholy-alliance/olob-bmgf-factsheet.pdf https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...
    - mffnbs 7y ago
      This publication seems to be relying on the reader to have a preconceived negative bias on GMOs in order to establish some of their arguments. I understand why a casual reader who's been led to believe that GMOs are malicious or toxic would find this disturbing, but knowing that GMOs are basically how we are able to consume most if not all modern food safely, it's immediately sensationalist to me. I don't know about the other two topics they address, but I kind of question the motive altogether.
      - erikpukinskis 7y ago
        Nothing wrong with choosing GMO seeds. Definitely something wrong with trying to force farmers to use them.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Yes, Gates has done many good things, but the foundation makes a lot of calls, many of them bad. I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not. He’s older and kinder than he was before, but he still has many of the imperialist values that let him turn Microsoft into an empire.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    Can you provide some more information instead of just muddying the waters? What are these "lot of bad calls". What are you referring to exactly? >I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not. Its not good just because its philanthropic, its good because they are investing money fighting diseases that nobody is interested in curing because there is no money in it (because the victims are from poor countries). A prime example is tuberculosis.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      Trying to get small African farmers to grow monocrops with seeds from giant Ag companies and making it harder for them to do ecologically sensitive farming.
      - la_barba 7y ago
        Okay, you got me. Farming and agriculture is not my wheelhouse, so I can't really discuss it with a high level of confidence or familiarity. But AFAIK the gates foundation doesn't make anyone buy anything, they issue grants. They have identified the root cause of yields in agriculture is the soil/seeds. Maybe the problem can be solved without pest/soil resistant GM seeds, but the fact remains that the food supply situation is getting worse on that continent. I'm sure there are other aspects to it like distribution/infrastructure/government investment/etc. Also to your specific point - according to their own website https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755 https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755 "AGRA has never taken a monocropping approach to agricultural development. We have invested millions of dollars in breeding minor crops grown by smallholder farmers in order to help them maintain diversity even as agricultural systems intensify." I'm not going to blindly believe them, I'll give them a chance to make their case...
- la_barba 7y ago
  The foundation issues grants, and all of this is public information. Can you point to which grants you have a problem with and why? https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/grants-database https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/gran... Some of my friends working in the drug discovery domain are on that list and so I know for a fact that the money, or atleast some of it, is going towards a noble cause.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might shift in a way that's difficult to imagine from the midst of the rat race. Indeed. If I was independently wealthy and only had 1 million extra, I can immediately think of a ton of stuff I'd start doing with it that would not directly benefit me. If I had tens of billions that I did not need to survive I would absolutely do something like develop my own rocket. I wouldn't stop there either. Mars 2020 has a 2.5 billion dollar price tag, if I had Bezos-money I would absolutely try and send a lander/rover pair to both Mars and the Moon except I wouldn't have a bunch of science equipment on it, I'd purely be going to record the best VIDEO and photos that I could on both purely to get people interested. Even if I couldn't get a government to let me do a lander, simply sending orbiters that could capture 1080p video of the approach and several times around Mars and the Moon, and then taking days, weeks, months to transmit it all back, just throwing that up on YouTube would be worth the spend to me just to see it, and the amount of people that would likely inspire to be interested in things bigger than just them, bigger than politics of this or that country, bigger than Earth could be truly profound. I'd open source the designs of the equipment too and creative commons the video for general use and allow entities to obtain commercial use on a sliding scale depending on their intended use. If a student wants it for something, give me 10$ and a producer credit, if some big studio wants it, still be very fair but obviously charge more.
- goseeastarwar 7y ago
  What kinda stuff would you do with an extra million?
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    If I didn't have to spend it immediately, I'd use the 3% SWR rate on it and spend 30k a year until I died or it ran out. In this case I would probably support a lot of indie art/film projects on crowdfunding, I'd scan new projects daily for something that catches my eye and set a calendar reminder to check them out halfway through their campaign and if they weren't close at that point I'd contribute what I felt was a good amount if I thought they might reach funding. I'd also keep an eye out for people in my social circles that might be down on their luck for whatever reason and see how I might assist them without directly handing them money (fix their car, good clothes for interviews, etc). --- If I had to spend 1 million at once... I'd probably fund a pilot of an idea I have for an alternative way of applying philanthropy while simultaneously helping individuals not only get good CV experience but also cover part of their educational experiences, I'd rather not say more than that because I'm actively trying to find someone to back the pilot. There's 1 trillion pledged through the Giving Pledge and if even 1 billion of that was used this way, we could create more than 200 million hours of service and help 50k people pay for most of a 4-year degree while providing good CV experience and directly helping in potentially thousands of communities. --- If I had to spend it all at once, on multiple projects... - I would find 20 students to give 5k each towards tuition - I would set aside 500k to attempt to create manufacturing trade training, to some degree, digitally on a monthly subscription model (something cheap, 10-20$ a month) and build community tools on this platform. People could learn a lot of the basics and theory and then try and find people in need of apprentices. Hobbyists could also use it to improve their knowledge base. Eventually I'd try to leverage this to partner with one or more major manufacturers to create virtual versions of their machines so people could practice on a perfect simulation of real equipment in a virtual environment (either VR or just on a monitor) not unlike flight simulators so they can develop good habbits without damaging expensive tool heads or ruining materials learning. Also building in some sort of gamification could help encourage people to learn these skills and would hopefully create a good base of new people to apprentice with real equipment for these trades. - The remainder, I'm not sure. Some would probably go to some of my favorite YT creators like LGR, Gaming Historian, Townsends, etc. I really... dislike... that a lot of philanthropic people take their money and throw it at hiring academics to sit around and think about problems - or worse - fund charities they control and then pay those people to largely evaluate other philanthropic endeavors to then hand grants off to. I have a GED, non-profits and NGOs won't touch me with a ten foot pole becuase I don't have at least a Masters and a bevy of accolades. If I had a good idea or project they also wouldn't fund me because, on paper I've not made some great accomplishment(s) and don't have a string of letters after my name and social swagger and as a white male I don't even fit the mission of some philanthropic persons because I'm not a woman or I'm not a person of color or I'm not fro an economically depressed area. I'm not saying it's wrong to champion those types of people and attempt to help them I'm just saying... I don't like it. If I was independently wealthy (I need a million or less, sadly I'll work til the day I die though based on my current net worth after 16 years of full time employment) I would spend my free time not chasing more wealth, I'd spend it doing stuff to better an individual, better my community and/or better the species. Instead, I worry about if I'm going to be able to pay my bills most months and spending 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there looking at what the wealthiest people of the world are doing and more oft than not just shaking my head. Bezos, I like Bezos, he's got a vision and he's chasing it with large cash infusions from his own pockets. Sam Altman, much lower net worth but same thing... he seeded Y Combinator Research out of his own money and now he's throwing himself full time at Open AI, Sam believes in that and can put his sole focus on it while not needing to worry about income or a future career path. Some of these people though, they have tens of millions of dollars (or tens of billions of dollars) and they still run companies, still heavily invest via VC funds/firms, still have this podcast and sit on these 3 boards and own these 12 companies all trying to make more more more money, and then are like "yeah, yeah I'll write a letter pledging I'll eventually give up half of my money". Feh! Do something!!!!
wslh 7y ago
That's true. Almost all world population has a lifelong relationship with labor that frame their entire life. Once you don't need to work the life framework changes completely.
dandandaml 7y ago
I'm relatively skeptical about Bill Gates' philanthropic motivations -- his strategy seems to be to grow consumer bases which improve the bottom line of his company; in a world with ever decreasing resources, more people isn't the solution.

pmoriarty 7y ago

I've grown a lot more skeptical of what Gates has been doing with his foundation after investigative journalists started reporting on it.

mffnbs 7y ago
What reports are you referring to?
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Here’s one: https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/unholy-alliance/olob-bmgf-factsheet.pdf https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...
  - mffnbs 7y ago
    This publication seems to be relying on the reader to have a preconceived negative bias on GMOs in order to establish some of their arguments. I understand why a casual reader who's been led to believe that GMOs are malicious or toxic would find this disturbing, but knowing that GMOs are basically how we are able to consume most if not all modern food safely, it's immediately sensationalist to me. I don't know about the other two topics they address, but I kind of question the motive altogether.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      Nothing wrong with choosing GMO seeds. Definitely something wrong with trying to force farmers to use them.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Yes, Gates has done many good things, but the foundation makes a lot of calls, many of them bad. I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not. He’s older and kinder than he was before, but he still has many of the imperialist values that let him turn Microsoft into an empire.
- la_barba 7y ago
  Can you provide some more information instead of just muddying the waters? What are these "lot of bad calls". What are you referring to exactly? >I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not. Its not good just because its philanthropic, its good because they are investing money fighting diseases that nobody is interested in curing because there is no money in it (because the victims are from poor countries). A prime example is tuberculosis.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Trying to get small African farmers to grow monocrops with seeds from giant Ag companies and making it harder for them to do ecologically sensitive farming.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      Okay, you got me. Farming and agriculture is not my wheelhouse, so I can't really discuss it with a high level of confidence or familiarity. But AFAIK the gates foundation doesn't make anyone buy anything, they issue grants. They have identified the root cause of yields in agriculture is the soil/seeds. Maybe the problem can be solved without pest/soil resistant GM seeds, but the fact remains that the food supply situation is getting worse on that continent. I'm sure there are other aspects to it like distribution/infrastructure/government investment/etc. Also to your specific point - according to their own website https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755 https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755 "AGRA has never taken a monocropping approach to agricultural development. We have invested millions of dollars in breeding minor crops grown by smallholder farmers in order to help them maintain diversity even as agricultural systems intensify." I'm not going to blindly believe them, I'll give them a chance to make their case...
la_barba 7y ago
The foundation issues grants, and all of this is public information. Can you point to which grants you have a problem with and why? https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/grants-database https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/gran... Some of my friends working in the drug discovery domain are on that list and so I know for a fact that the money, or atleast some of it, is going towards a noble cause.

ryanmercer 7y ago

>Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might shift in a way that's difficult to imagine from the midst of the rat race. Indeed. If I was independently wealthy and only had 1 million extra, I can immediately think of a ton of stuff I'd start doing with it that would not directly benefit me. If I had tens of billions that I did not need to survive I would absolutely do something like develop my own rocket. I wouldn't stop there either. Mars 2020 has a 2.5 billion dollar price tag, if I had Bezos-money I would absolutely try and send a lander/rover pair to both Mars and the Moon except I wouldn't have a bunch of science equipment on it, I'd purely be going to record the best VIDEO and photos that I could on both purely to get people interested. Even if I couldn't get a government to let me do a lander, simply sending orbiters that could capture 1080p video of the approach and several times around Mars and the Moon, and then taking days, weeks, months to transmit it all back, just throwing that up on YouTube would be worth the spend to me just to see it, and the amount of people that would likely inspire to be interested in things bigger than just them, bigger than politics of this or that country, bigger than Earth could be truly profound. I'd open source the designs of the equipment too and creative commons the video for general use and allow entities to obtain commercial use on a sliding scale depending on their intended use. If a student wants it for something, give me 10$ and a producer credit, if some big studio wants it, still be very fair but obviously charge more.

goseeastarwar 7y ago
What kinda stuff would you do with an extra million?
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  If I didn't have to spend it immediately, I'd use the 3% SWR rate on it and spend 30k a year until I died or it ran out. In this case I would probably support a lot of indie art/film projects on crowdfunding, I'd scan new projects daily for something that catches my eye and set a calendar reminder to check them out halfway through their campaign and if they weren't close at that point I'd contribute what I felt was a good amount if I thought they might reach funding. I'd also keep an eye out for people in my social circles that might be down on their luck for whatever reason and see how I might assist them without directly handing them money (fix their car, good clothes for interviews, etc). --- If I had to spend 1 million at once... I'd probably fund a pilot of an idea I have for an alternative way of applying philanthropy while simultaneously helping individuals not only get good CV experience but also cover part of their educational experiences, I'd rather not say more than that because I'm actively trying to find someone to back the pilot. There's 1 trillion pledged through the Giving Pledge and if even 1 billion of that was used this way, we could create more than 200 million hours of service and help 50k people pay for most of a 4-year degree while providing good CV experience and directly helping in potentially thousands of communities. --- If I had to spend it all at once, on multiple projects... - I would find 20 students to give 5k each towards tuition - I would set aside 500k to attempt to create manufacturing trade training, to some degree, digitally on a monthly subscription model (something cheap, 10-20$ a month) and build community tools on this platform. People could learn a lot of the basics and theory and then try and find people in need of apprentices. Hobbyists could also use it to improve their knowledge base. Eventually I'd try to leverage this to partner with one or more major manufacturers to create virtual versions of their machines so people could practice on a perfect simulation of real equipment in a virtual environment (either VR or just on a monitor) not unlike flight simulators so they can develop good habbits without damaging expensive tool heads or ruining materials learning. Also building in some sort of gamification could help encourage people to learn these skills and would hopefully create a good base of new people to apprentice with real equipment for these trades. - The remainder, I'm not sure. Some would probably go to some of my favorite YT creators like LGR, Gaming Historian, Townsends, etc. I really... dislike... that a lot of philanthropic people take their money and throw it at hiring academics to sit around and think about problems - or worse - fund charities they control and then pay those people to largely evaluate other philanthropic endeavors to then hand grants off to. I have a GED, non-profits and NGOs won't touch me with a ten foot pole becuase I don't have at least a Masters and a bevy of accolades. If I had a good idea or project they also wouldn't fund me because, on paper I've not made some great accomplishment(s) and don't have a string of letters after my name and social swagger and as a white male I don't even fit the mission of some philanthropic persons because I'm not a woman or I'm not a person of color or I'm not fro an economically depressed area. I'm not saying it's wrong to champion those types of people and attempt to help them I'm just saying... I don't like it. If I was independently wealthy (I need a million or less, sadly I'll work til the day I die though based on my current net worth after 16 years of full time employment) I would spend my free time not chasing more wealth, I'd spend it doing stuff to better an individual, better my community and/or better the species. Instead, I worry about if I'm going to be able to pay my bills most months and spending 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there looking at what the wealthiest people of the world are doing and more oft than not just shaking my head. Bezos, I like Bezos, he's got a vision and he's chasing it with large cash infusions from his own pockets. Sam Altman, much lower net worth but same thing... he seeded Y Combinator Research out of his own money and now he's throwing himself full time at Open AI, Sam believes in that and can put his sole focus on it while not needing to worry about income or a future career path. Some of these people though, they have tens of millions of dollars (or tens of billions of dollars) and they still run companies, still heavily invest via VC funds/firms, still have this podcast and sit on these 3 boards and own these 12 companies all trying to make more more more money, and then are like "yeah, yeah I'll write a letter pledging I'll eventually give up half of my money". Feh! Do something!!!!

wslh 7y ago

That's true. Almost all world population has a lifelong relationship with labor that frame their entire life. Once you don't need to work the life framework changes completely.

dandandaml 7y ago

I'm relatively skeptical about Bill Gates' philanthropic motivations -- his strategy seems to be to grow consumer bases which improve the bottom line of his company; in a world with ever decreasing resources, more people isn't the solution.