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"Billy" has donated over $50 billion (that's with a "b") dollars to charity, a good chunk of that to health care both at home and abroad. If that isn't putting

"Billy" has donated over $50 billion (that's with a "b") dollars to charity, a good chunk of that to health care both at home and abroad. If that isn't putting your money where your mouth is, I don't know what is. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-bill-gates-has-given-over-50-billion-charitable-causes/3169864001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fac...

unnouinceput 6y ago
"donated" to his Melinda and gates foundation to get out of paying taxes and buy influence all over the world. He does it every single year, he simply and legally can claim zero profit by doing so. He's continuing to screw US citizens by not paying taxes at all and buys influence using the profits. He simply got smarter than the shenanigans he did in 90's when almost got buried. Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core.
- josephg 6y ago
  > Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core. Its not that simple. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does amazing, mostly unsexy charity work the world over. Governmental aid organizations rarely want to fund boring infrastructure work like building roads in poor countries, or (before the pandemic) overfunding the world's vaccine manufacturing capability. Nobody wants to fund things like that because it doesn't sound sexy to voters or at charity fundraising events. The B&M Gates foundation does this stuff - and they have for years. Through their principled giving they've improved the lives of millions of people. And selfishly, there would be fewer doses of covid vaccines today without them. Did they make that money through shady business practices at Microsoft? Yes. Are they using the charity to get out of paying US taxes? Yes. Is the money doing good in the world? Also yes. The world today would look different without Bill Gates. Microsoft strangled tech innovation for decades, but their charity work has had a massively positive impact on people's lives. Bill Gates also deserves credit for that.
  - croes 6y ago
    But they convinced Oxford it would be better to sell their vaccine to AstraZeneca instead of donating it to the world for free. BG is a techno capitalist. He thinks technology and capitalism are the solutions to everything.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    They also use their money to shout down competing approaches to problem solving. They were a big force in "high stakes testing" and "pay teachers who have higher performing students" backed by shoddy statistical analysis.
    - josephg 6y ago
      The B&M Gates foundation has given 23261 grants[1]. Of course some of those projects turned out in retrospect to be regrettable. Thats way too many projects to get a 100% rate when vetting. Or to put it the other way, if you had to be 100% sure when giving money that it would work out well, there would be a lot of great causes you wouldn't be able to contribute to because of outcome risk. But even if the high stakes testing problem was entirely forseeable, thats my point! Its not simple. Bill Gates isn't Simple. He's not a comic book villain - Nobody is outside maybe mass murderers. Comic book heroes and villains don't exist in the real world. (And increasingly they don't exist in comic books either.) If you want to know what he's like, watch some interviews with the man. Gates is obviously trying to make the world a better place. And he's going to continue to do that imperfectly, because he's made out of meat like the rest of us. And yes, I'm also angry about standardized testing, and the historical stain microsoft has left on computing from the 90s. Angry and grateful, all at once. [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants
wpietri 6y ago
Call me crazy, but donating some portion of his illegal gains is not super impressive to me.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
If a man steals a pizza from his neighbor, and then gives 3/4 of it as a tax-deductible "gift" to his favorite causes, shall we call him a hero?
- josephg 6y ago
  The problem with that metaphor is it implies 100% of microsoft's profits only exist because of theft. Their software added legitimate value to people's lives. It still does - Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do. DirectX pushed the stagnant OpenGL to innovate. Visual studio is fantastic (miles better than current XCode). C# is a worthy successor to Java. VS Code is excellent too. And so is the XBox. And I'm glad windows exists as a counterpoint to the hardware lock-in in the macos ecosystem, and to keep Apple honest. Microsoft's customers weren't all robbed of their money. And on the other side, Bill Gates has committed to giving away all his money before he dies. Its like, a man steals one pizza from his neighbor and makes 10 more. He eats one then he gives the rest to the homeless. Should we call him a hero? No - that theft wasn't ok! Is he a villain? No - he made pizzas and gave them away. Villains don't do that. What is he? He's a man. He exists somewhere in the ethically murky middle. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes through every human heart." History will remember him for a lot of things - some good, some bad. Saint and sinner both. Like the rest of us.
  - ConceptJunkie 6y ago
    > Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do OK, now I know you're kidding.
    - josephg 6y ago
      My next door neighbour is a lawyer. I asked about her workflow when visiting during the lockdown. There's about 40 lawyers in her office, and they have a lot of ongoing cases between all their clients. She spends some of her time each week "filing". For her this means sifting through the firehose of emails and documents that their office receives and assigning every one to the correct case, marking if it needs attention (and from whom), tagging the types of documents, etc etc. She does all this from home through a custom workflow built on top of Outlook. I'm sure its not pretty in the backend, but can you name a system that would let her do her job more effectively? MacOS Mail? Gmail? Hah! No. Outlook is the tool they use; and it looks like it works well - even working from home. I don't use anything in the office suite myself, but for my neighbour's office I don't think there's a better choice. Hate on outlook if you want, it solves problems for real users.

unnouinceput 6y ago

"donated" to his Melinda and gates foundation to get out of paying taxes and buy influence all over the world. He does it every single year, he simply and legally can claim zero profit by doing so. He's continuing to screw US citizens by not paying taxes at all and buys influence using the profits. He simply got smarter than the shenanigans he did in 90's when almost got buried. Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core.

josephg 6y ago
> Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core. Its not that simple. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does amazing, mostly unsexy charity work the world over. Governmental aid organizations rarely want to fund boring infrastructure work like building roads in poor countries, or (before the pandemic) overfunding the world's vaccine manufacturing capability. Nobody wants to fund things like that because it doesn't sound sexy to voters or at charity fundraising events. The B&M Gates foundation does this stuff - and they have for years. Through their principled giving they've improved the lives of millions of people. And selfishly, there would be fewer doses of covid vaccines today without them. Did they make that money through shady business practices at Microsoft? Yes. Are they using the charity to get out of paying US taxes? Yes. Is the money doing good in the world? Also yes. The world today would look different without Bill Gates. Microsoft strangled tech innovation for decades, but their charity work has had a massively positive impact on people's lives. Bill Gates also deserves credit for that.
- croes 6y ago
  But they convinced Oxford it would be better to sell their vaccine to AstraZeneca instead of donating it to the world for free. BG is a techno capitalist. He thinks technology and capitalism are the solutions to everything.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  They also use their money to shout down competing approaches to problem solving. They were a big force in "high stakes testing" and "pay teachers who have higher performing students" backed by shoddy statistical analysis.
  - josephg 6y ago
    The B&M Gates foundation has given 23261 grants[1]. Of course some of those projects turned out in retrospect to be regrettable. Thats way too many projects to get a 100% rate when vetting. Or to put it the other way, if you had to be 100% sure when giving money that it would work out well, there would be a lot of great causes you wouldn't be able to contribute to because of outcome risk. But even if the high stakes testing problem was entirely forseeable, thats my point! Its not simple. Bill Gates isn't Simple. He's not a comic book villain - Nobody is outside maybe mass murderers. Comic book heroes and villains don't exist in the real world. (And increasingly they don't exist in comic books either.) If you want to know what he's like, watch some interviews with the man. Gates is obviously trying to make the world a better place. And he's going to continue to do that imperfectly, because he's made out of meat like the rest of us. And yes, I'm also angry about standardized testing, and the historical stain microsoft has left on computing from the 90s. Angry and grateful, all at once. [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants

wpietri 6y ago

Call me crazy, but donating some portion of his illegal gains is not super impressive to me.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

If a man steals a pizza from his neighbor, and then gives 3/4 of it as a tax-deductible "gift" to his favorite causes, shall we call him a hero?

josephg 6y ago
The problem with that metaphor is it implies 100% of microsoft's profits only exist because of theft. Their software added legitimate value to people's lives. It still does - Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do. DirectX pushed the stagnant OpenGL to innovate. Visual studio is fantastic (miles better than current XCode). C# is a worthy successor to Java. VS Code is excellent too. And so is the XBox. And I'm glad windows exists as a counterpoint to the hardware lock-in in the macos ecosystem, and to keep Apple honest. Microsoft's customers weren't all robbed of their money. And on the other side, Bill Gates has committed to giving away all his money before he dies. Its like, a man steals one pizza from his neighbor and makes 10 more. He eats one then he gives the rest to the homeless. Should we call him a hero? No - that theft wasn't ok! Is he a villain? No - he made pizzas and gave them away. Villains don't do that. What is he? He's a man. He exists somewhere in the ethically murky middle. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes through every human heart." History will remember him for a lot of things - some good, some bad. Saint and sinner both. Like the rest of us.
- ConceptJunkie 6y ago
  > Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do OK, now I know you're kidding.
  - josephg 6y ago
    My next door neighbour is a lawyer. I asked about her workflow when visiting during the lockdown. There's about 40 lawyers in her office, and they have a lot of ongoing cases between all their clients. She spends some of her time each week "filing". For her this means sifting through the firehose of emails and documents that their office receives and assigning every one to the correct case, marking if it needs attention (and from whom), tagging the types of documents, etc etc. She does all this from home through a custom workflow built on top of Outlook. I'm sure its not pretty in the backend, but can you name a system that would let her do her job more effectively? MacOS Mail? Gmail? Hah! No. Outlook is the tool they use; and it looks like it works well - even working from home. I don't use anything in the office suite myself, but for my neighbour's office I don't think there's a better choice. Hate on outlook if you want, it solves problems for real users.