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Well, Gates is a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world's leading expert on everything. He has no tra

Well, Gates is a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world's leading expert on everything. He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization, yet he seems to actually believe he's a Great Scientist Using Evidence-Based Approaches to Save the World. He lives in a $200 million house yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous. I laugh at Elon Musk when he thinks getting fired from Paypal means he knows how to run a car company. I also laugh at Bill Gates when he thinks stealing the worst desktop operating system makes him a doctor. We can't overthrow our masters. At least let us make fun of them.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous And let's not forget the scummy secondary benefit of Gates donating tons of money into soneth education. It undoubtedly is going to have some influence on what computers they use and teach, further entrenching Microsoft as place.
MauranKilom 6y ago
> He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization I'm confused by this statement. It only counts as training if you did it around age 20? Or what makes you think that someone who is spending this much time, effort and money on a given topic would not arrange for appropriate (or rather, excellent) training on it? Or is this something you conclude by starting from the assertion that Bill Gates must be a bad guy?
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  If you were to choose someone to lead one of the world's largest charities, would you choose to hire some random guy and train him from scratch or would you choose an expert in public health? If you were to take some random bozo off the street and put them in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they would learn a lot about medicine and sanitation and education and so forth. It would also be obviously stupid. Yet that's pretty much the way the current system. Our society hands control over massive amounts of resources to rich people because they made money doing entirely unrelated things. It's even worse here. William Henry Gates III is rich because of his malicious and illegal actions as the head of Microsoft. He is worse than a random bozo; he's been selected to be powerful because of his bad behavior. Maybe you think Gates's tenure at Microsoft wasn't completely destructive. I disagree, but whatever. Substitute in your favorite brain-dead celebrity or "job creator". The problem is the same: we hand over control of our institutions to morons because they have money.
Bedon292 6y ago
You can certainly make the argument that he was a bad guy, but I don't know if I can continue to draw that conclusion. He built that house over 30 years ago for $60M. While that is certainly excessive, its not like he just bought a $200M house while trying to be philanthropist. At least $45B in charitable contributions, so the house is worth 0.4% of that. Is the house really relevant? Isn't it possible he has changed since then? What you call a "billion-dollar propaganda campaign" I call billions of dollars worth of charitable contributions. He may not have formal training any any of those things, but he can pay people with the training to advise him and make the decisions. Do you think he is just making all of them in a vacuum? Money can buy you a lot of experts to consult. What would you prefer him to do with the money, if not attempt to do some good with it?
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >What would you prefer him to do with the money, if not attempt to do some good with it? Pay his employees more, charge less, and pay more in tax. Basically not have $60 billion dollars.
saagarjha 6y ago
Clearly he's not out there doing the surgeries himself; he hires people to do that.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

>yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous And let's not forget the scummy secondary benefit of Gates donating tons of money into soneth education. It undoubtedly is going to have some influence on what computers they use and teach, further entrenching Microsoft as place.

MauranKilom 6y ago

> He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization I'm confused by this statement. It only counts as training if you did it around age 20? Or what makes you think that someone who is spending this much time, effort and money on a given topic would not arrange for appropriate (or rather, excellent) training on it? Or is this something you conclude by starting from the assertion that Bill Gates must be a bad guy?

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
If you were to choose someone to lead one of the world's largest charities, would you choose to hire some random guy and train him from scratch or would you choose an expert in public health? If you were to take some random bozo off the street and put them in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they would learn a lot about medicine and sanitation and education and so forth. It would also be obviously stupid. Yet that's pretty much the way the current system. Our society hands control over massive amounts of resources to rich people because they made money doing entirely unrelated things. It's even worse here. William Henry Gates III is rich because of his malicious and illegal actions as the head of Microsoft. He is worse than a random bozo; he's been selected to be powerful because of his bad behavior. Maybe you think Gates's tenure at Microsoft wasn't completely destructive. I disagree, but whatever. Substitute in your favorite brain-dead celebrity or "job creator". The problem is the same: we hand over control of our institutions to morons because they have money.

Bedon292 6y ago

You can certainly make the argument that he was a bad guy, but I don't know if I can continue to draw that conclusion. He built that house over 30 years ago for $60M. While that is certainly excessive, its not like he just bought a $200M house while trying to be philanthropist. At least $45B in charitable contributions, so the house is worth 0.4% of that. Is the house really relevant? Isn't it possible he has changed since then? What you call a "billion-dollar propaganda campaign" I call billions of dollars worth of charitable contributions. He may not have formal training any any of those things, but he can pay people with the training to advise him and make the decisions. Do you think he is just making all of them in a vacuum? Money can buy you a lot of experts to consult. What would you prefer him to do with the money, if not attempt to do some good with it?

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>What would you prefer him to do with the money, if not attempt to do some good with it? Pay his employees more, charge less, and pay more in tax. Basically not have $60 billion dollars.

saagarjha 6y ago

Clearly he's not out there doing the surgeries himself; he hires people to do that.