10 ms·

An interview with Bill Gates

160 points by rshlo 13y ago

batgaijin 13y ago
Why, so they can't create companies to support their countr's GDP to become independent of your pity aid? What a monopolistic cunt. Make microsoft quit taxing android phones for a windows license before you act like you have a high ground beyond your 22 hidden patents. What a rich shitmark.
- Alterlife 13y ago
  You don't have to agree with everything that a person says or does in order to acknowledge a simple truth. If Gates said the sky is blue, would you (as you have done) call him a 'cunt' for saying so? Clean water, healthy food, tenable living environment... All these things obviously matter more than internet connectivity. I don't know how anyone could argue otherwise. If you can get yourself vaccinated against a disease, that's one less thing that can go wrong. You have to be healthy to do things.
  - batgaijin 13y ago
    The country these people are living in should have hospitals. They should be able to affordably produce antibiotics, malaria nets and everything else. Antibiotics and most other medical products are unnecesarilly burdened by patents and become prohibitevely expensive unless some rich patron grants them something they could buy at a much cheaper price. Patents can be a tax on those who are unlucky. I think certain things deserve patents. But the company he represents taxes any linux device as a microsoft device. I agree people should be healthy. But you know what? Maybe they should be able to make their own fucking choices in their own fucking hospital on their own fucking dime. He is a cunt for being afraid of competition and supporting autonomy. That is a sign of the weak and those who are unable to deal with truly dynamic problems that come from actual competition. In all honesty I understand his position. But for him to vocalize it as though he doesn't see the poor billions as potential competitors? Too fucking bad. He can have his own beliefs but fuck spreading a narrative.
    - batgaijin 13y ago
      I take back most of my shit. I guess that's what happens when you are a neckbeard that can't even code.
- stinos 13y ago
  Serisously, this is about malaria, internet, a better life for people and you start nagging about ms-vs-google-vs-linux etc?
  - batgaijin 13y ago
    The country could potentially have their own corporations that produce a tax basis for hospitals. Those hospitals could have a much lower cost of setup. You want me to pretend that his short time frame narrative matters? I'd be happy to die today I knew it was part of a meaningful step for others to get beyond the limits they were born into. Sadly socialist demagoguery tend to be run by worse fucks.
mortdeus 13y ago
He kinda has a point.
- mortdeus 13y ago
  Though it is worth pointing out that worldwide internet coverage would provide a great resource for those living without suitable education and work opportunities. One of the hardest parts in eliminating poverty from the poorest nations on earth stems from the lack of economic infrastructure in those countries. We can keep giving them rice and supplies but until they have work opportunities that provide a way to purchase their own life essential resources; the fundamental issue causing the poverty in the first place will remain unsolved. Internet is a good step towards providing that infrastructure.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Protip: There's an edit link, and you're allowed to use it.
    - kamakazizuru 13y ago
      super protip - theres a Karma level after which you are allowed edits.
Tarang 13y ago
Guys don't go so hard on him. This is a passionate person about getting rid of this disease. I've had malaria 7 or so times. The problem is when you don't get access to medication which is the problem. If you don't it can kill you very slowly. Malaria is caused by this organism transmitted by mosquitoes. If you get rid of it, mosquitoes still live, but malaria can disappear. Also its not zero sum. Dedicating resources to getting rid of malaria isn't going to stop people getting access to the internet. The problem lies more with the cost and quality of the internet. Most people in Africa have access to the internet via some form of wireless means (mostly 3G/Edge). The problem is this is very costly. All the solutions that keep coming forth are just variations of wireless (Loon for example). People to have the phones, its not rare to see people go hungry to save up to by phones. It gets access to a lot of people but then you have issues like latency, connection dropping, susceptibility to bad weather & bad signal. People love the internet but hate the cost. Android is partly solving it, but infrastructure is the other hard problem. Everyone would love to hate him but I find it very hard to do that. His actions are clearly louder than his words (even when out of context).
- mtgx 13y ago
  So why does he have to trash everyone else's priorities then? What if I worked on making a fusion reactor technology that could give "free energy to everyone". Would I get to shit on Bill Gate's "anti-malaria" campaign, too, because I'd think my priority is more "important"? Phone and Internet communications are very important to people. Much more important than it might seem at first glance. I come from a relatively poor country where people would spend "whole salaries" to buy a smartphone. Clearly people themselves have different priorities, and it's not just about the corporation's or government's priorities. So I guess my point is, I'm sure Bill Gates could go about funding his anti-malaria campaign without trashing other priorities. If he wants to attack other people's priorities, how about attacking something like oil subsidies, that take important amounts of money from the tax payers, and give it to very profitable companies. That money could be used for fighting malaria instead - if you will. But again, not for Bill Gates to decide.
  - Tarang 13y ago
selectnull 13y ago
I generally like what Bill Gates is doing and think there should be more people like him in the world. But this statement is really below him; it has kind of 'me hates google' behind it and is wrong. He should know better than that.
- jsmeaton 13y ago
  Did you read the entire article? The link headline is link-bait. He was asked a leading question and answered it. Gates didn't go out of his way to make the statement.
  - selectnull 13y ago
    You are right, I didn't read it. Mea culpa. I've read it now and I have mixed feelings still. This is what I would like to hear from Mr Gates: "Guys, I'm taking what I believe is the most important thing in the world and that's curing those damned diseases. And I think that once we have cured all the people, they would need better education and internet is so far the best we have (though it could still be improved). So you Zuck and Larry and others work on that and we will all make the world a better place." If he explicitly said something along those lines, my admiration for Mr Gates would skyrocket thru the roof. If he still thinks the internet is a joke (because only priority number 1 is important, right?) than I still stand by my original statement that he should know better.
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
the QALYs generated by enabling tech are harder to quantify because they are several steps removed from the aid. Example: the CDC has projected that greater access to the internet could save millions of lives by providing quicker info about breakouts of infectious diseases and coordinating responses.
jbrooksuk 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that life > internet access.
- bolder88 13y ago
  It's not that simple though. There's quite a few people who are not at risk of ever getting malaria, but who don't have any decent internet access. So for them, curing malaria will make 0 difference to their life. Also, since when has Microsoft or Bill Gates ever been sold on the idea of the internet as a good thing?
  - tunesmith 13y ago
    Not sure what your point here is, but it kind of reads as if you're saying that the life of someone on the verge of internet access is more valuable that that of someone on the verge of fatal malaria.
    - bolder88 13y ago
      Point is they're two separate groups of people. From the majority of people from 1st world countries, it is more valuable. I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria, or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria. It's a non issue. But I'll certainly experience and interact with a larger internet population.
      - Volpe 13y ago
        wow. So because you'll never see it, it isn't a problem. You getting cheap/free internet is more important than millions of people dying [1]... [1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/ http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/
        vidarh 13y ago
        He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives. We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty much demonstrate that most of us are.
zaptheimpaler 13y ago
He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. But mainly, the title is provocative and misleading. The article clearly states, he was asked a leading question "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria", and he answered. The title makes it seem like he went out of his way to make the comparison and put himself on a pedestal, but thats not what happened.
- bolder88 13y ago
  Those things are also about increasing our problems down the line IMHO The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else? Sure, you could save a few million poorly educated people from dying. Then what? They're all going to need food, energy, education, housing, etc etc. Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
  - quink 13y ago
    > The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else? Not that greatly. Birth rates in near enough every country are dropping after having peaked. 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, 9 billion in 2043, 10 billion in 2083 is what UNFPA predicts. As education improves and the relative value of each life, and as people live longer on average, the Malthusian catastrophe is one I would think we will avoid. In fact it is this stabilisation of the population that worries me because without any immediate pressure from something else, with no race, no competition and no Sturm and no Drang in progress, will we be destined to find the answer to the Fermi Paradox through our own fate? Look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Population_of_Japan_since_1872.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Populatio... and then consider that while the case of Japan seems about to be a portent for other countries. Doesn't this scare you even more - the thought of the human race ending with a whimper? Or will each of us be, by our current standards, a god among machines living a life a hundred times more valuable than those of their ancestors in their grasp over the earth. If anything these kinds of questions should probably keep you more awake than the thought of a Malthusian catastrophe at this point.
nodata 13y ago
False dichotomy. You can do both at the same time.
- yen223 13y ago
  He's not saying you can't do both, he's saying that we need to get our priorities straight. Which is true.
quink 13y ago
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html > Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. ---- Also, remittances have been increasing and these help the situation in poorer countries enormously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance and I'm pretty sure that the Internet is not entirely fault free in causing this increase. And then there's this too: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mobile-phone-access-reaches-three-quarters-planets-population http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mo... Giving people access to some form of communications, even if it is just SMS surely can't hurt and must be bound to be an investment that can pay back itself, Malaria or no Malaria. Bill Gates should be congratulated and commended for his work every day. But to read out of that that the two have no relation with each other is a bit short-sighted.
Gonzih 13y ago
Another misleading title on HN.
spiritplumber 13y ago
Bill Gates (or realistically someone in his organization) should answer my emails. I'm going to deliver him a way to curb malaria spreading at cost, and nobody over there has gotten a hold of me yet. I'm severely tempted to just drive to his house and drop the prototype off....
- deletes 13y ago
  Show us your solution.
  - spiritplumber 13y ago
    I'm not sure how, that's the thing. Do I do a video time lapse? It's a bit boring to watch someone NOT being bitten by mosquitos.
    - ehsanu1 13y ago
      Post an explanation + clear diagrams of how it works somewhere, and your process for making the prototype with pictures of it. And details about the cost/parts etc. Then drum up some interest. Get some blogs to write about it, then hopefully bigger media. Works better if you can point out something unusual - eg if you were 15 years old, that would work really well for you here, or if you can put a concrete estimate to the cost/benefit - "Save 100 Lives For $100 With This Anti-Mosquito Shield". Find their angle for them, and you have a better chance. Someone will get a hold of you then. The time-lapse with proof that it works would probably help a lot if you could as well, but details are even better for the skeptics among us.
      - spiritplumber 13y ago
        Thanks, I will try to do that. The only unusual thing about me is that I scooped Google once, and they acted weird about it. I'm twice that age though :) Right now I am trying to figure out how to get a proper medical study done that this stuff doesn't affect people.
    - 13y ago
rightnow 13y ago
Is this news?! I thought it was common sense! Im really surprised about all the headlines. There are people all around the world that live happy lives without the internet. But there are no people that are happy they are dying in malaria.
pcvarmint 13y ago
Bill should support Bradley's Kina Tonic, right at home in Seattle, and then move on to supporting internet access: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161679272/bradleys-kina-tonic-making-the-best-tonic-in-the-w http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161679272/bradleys-kina-...
- pcvarmint 13y ago
  Wow, downvoted for suggesting that Gates support a kickstarter project that will, if it's successful, become one of the best tonics in the world (I've tasted it). Quinine is the best natural cure for malaria. This project is succeeding with very little kickstarter funding. I was not attacking Gates -- simply suggesting that a tiny dose of funding for this Seattle tonic startup could help a lot for malaria, and then the much more expensive internet infrastructure problems could be addressed.
  - quasque 13y ago
    Quinine is not the best antimalarial drug out there nowadays, and is certainly not a good choice if you have lots of money to invest in malaria treatment in impoverished regions of the world. Investing in this tonic water startup for that purpose would be pointless and counter-productive. Also it's rather inappropriate to be shilling it in a serious discussion about responsible philanthropy.
tomelders 13y ago
The answer to every single problem in the world is education. The internet is education... and cats.
algorias 13y ago
Getting rid of Malaria is obviously a higher priority than internet access from the perspective of any one person living in the third world today. I have much respect for Bill Gates for the work he's doing in that area. However, there is a kind of shortsightedness in his attitude: The thing is, societies evolve because of technology and opportunities. So while it is preferable for each individual to have no internet and no malaria, society as a whole might progress more by taking care of the fundamental causes of poverty (lack of education and opportunity, government corruption, etc) rather than fighting the symptoms. Even if it turns out that Gates is right and I'm wrong, dismissing the relevance of the internet as flippantly as he has done is intellectually dishonest to a certain extent.
- DanBC 13y ago
  You can't educate school children if the teachers are dying of malaria, or the people who feed he teachers or the children are dying of HIV/AIDs. You're right, it's a complex bundle of interacting problems and there's plenty of space for them all to be tackled at the same time. Knowing that Gates is pouring cash and expertise into malaria is re-assuring enough that it gives other people the opportunity to do other stuff.
  - Shish2k 13y ago
    > it's a complex bundle of interacting problems and there's plenty of space for them all to be tackled at the same time This is probably the most realistic and sensible response that I've ever seen in any priority opinion flamewar
- epo 13y ago
  He's not dismissing it. He is saying we have got our priorities wrong. You are being intellectually dishonest by adopting an artificially contrarian position and trying to pretend he was saying we had to choose one or the other just, it seems, for the sake of having a contrarian position. You are wrong, but despite having an idiotic opinion you're not an idiot, tempting as it is to think that. You are just someone who thinks that just because they can form a banal opinion that means the opinion has any worth. It doesn't.
laichzeit0 13y ago
So there's a philosophically sound argument that eradicating malaria comes before worldwide Internet access. Or does it just rely on majority consensus that the one should come before the other? I mean if you keep asking "Why?" like a 5 year old, eventually you hit what underlies the reasoning: some basic assumptions that each person holds and that the rest of the argument is built on. E.g. Kant's categorical imperative. The problem is not everyone might agree with your most fundamental assumptions, and when you arrive at questions like "Internet or malaria eradication first?" people will disagree. Unless you lay those assumptions bare, it's unnecessary argumentation. E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.." Well I might just not hold that that truth is self-evident, and disagree with you on any argument you build on that assumption.
transfire 13y ago
What is so frustrating is that the malaria problem has all but been solved. I have read on multiple occasions about our ability to breed genetically modified misquotes that can be used to decimate mosquito populations on the one hand and on the other create malaria immune mosquitoes that stop the transmission of the disease. So why hasn't it been done? Short answer: bullshit "unknowns" about long-term ecological effects. Well try explaining that to the 12 children who just died from malaria while I wrote this comment.
- algorias 13y ago
  You can't pivot your way out of ecological catastrophes, you know... There are many instances of "innocent" actions of mankind that ravaged huge areas of the world very rapidly (the beaver plague in south america, just off the top of my head). Ecosystems often find themselves in very delicate states of equilibrium, an equilibrium that can be irreversably broken with the slightest missstep. There are very good reasons to be extremely conservative in this area.
  - s_baby 13y ago
    Considering more than half of all humans ever have died from Malaria it's a reasonable risk to take.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Source? I find that very hard to believe. For starters, not nearly all humans do or have lived in places where malaria is particularly widespread. Secondly, while deaths from malaria are high in developing countries, according to WHO it still "only" accounted for 4.4% of deaths in low income countries in 2002. While the percentage of Malaria deaths has undoubtably dropped substantially as the fight against Malaria has intensified, the drop in recent decades do not seem to justify that the worldwide deaths causes by Malaria has at any point been so far above 50% to compensate for lower rates later and for the parts of the world where Malaria either is not endemic or not widespread enough to cause significant deaths.
MaysonL 13y ago
It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other. Quite the reverse, actually. Doing either would facilitate doing the other.
- claudius 13y ago
  > It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other. Available resources in general, and in particular those available to specific individuals/foundations, are limited, hence it is not possible to pursue both worldwide internet access and malaria eradication with the same strength as you can pursue either of them. Of course, there may well be factors where by doing A, you also achieve parts of B, but given that the timeframe before ‘world-wide internet access’ helps ‘researching a malaria vaccine’ is at least ten-or-so years (the absolute minimum time it takes someone with no education to get anywhere where they can actively develop vaccines), I doubt that this is feasible.
tosic 13y ago
While this is obviously a good statement, it is besides the point. There's no reason you can't work on both and since he is caring about malaria, others can work on internet access. The question to ask would be, if working on both slows progress in either and what the "sweet spot" is for balancing funds and efforts to achieve the best overall progress.
nirnira 13y ago
Nice to see that even with a few dozen billion under his belt he still's the same guy: unable to help himself from mocking ideas he thinks suck! Who cares if you agree with him, his honesty and passion are amazing.
- Qom 13y ago
  You've got it the wrong way: with his billions and fame, he is more likely to be honest and to mock others. People will listen to him and respect no matter what he says.
StefanPatelski 13y ago
Give a man a vaccine, and he lives for a day. Give a man the opportunity to educate himself, and he will be able to find vaccines to last a lifetime.
- yen223 13y ago
  *Give a man the opportunity to educate himself, and he might die from malaria.
  - StefanPatelski 13y ago
    You are right, but I hope you do understand my point. This is about short term vs. long term. Bill Gates could have made the choice to not found Microsoft, and instead give the seed money to a charity that solves a disease. But then he wouldn't have been able to spend billions on malaria research. Both the short term and the long term are important. So it is strange to make the comparison. Both these investments can co-exist.
DanBC 13y ago
An excellent example of why HN doesn't allow submitters to fuck around with the article title. rshlo has editorialized this title, and thus some comments here are pointless knee-jerk reactions to a bad title, rather than a reaction to what's actually in the article.
- sanoli 13y ago
  I'm with you. I also hate when submitters mess around with titles, since the journalist has already (a lot of the time) messed around and hand picked a quote or chose a sensationalist header. Then comes the HN submitter and double-fucks around.
nnq 13y ago
Gates is right, but the reasoning is a bit more complicated: Starting with "connectivity" is basically "putting the cart in front of the ox". There's this utopical view that once you give them internet access smart African children will start freelancing and provide for their families, but it doesn't work this way: once you give him internet access, the African child with an IQ of top 0.001% will just learn there are better places in the world to be and live and he will find a way to leave his country and pursue a better life for himself, leaving his family and all the other around him behind in the same state of poverty. By putting connectivity first you'll basically end up building a better brain-drain, which might be exactly what some of the new generation billionaires want, but this is not socially responsive philanthropy! Smart people are empowered by connectivity, indeed, but they don't use this empowerment to pull the others around them up, not at the risk of pulling themselves down in the process. You need a social and economical infrastructure, with the basic healthcare and poverty problems solved, so the smart people empowered by connectivity can "pull up" the rest of the society without the risk of pulling themselves back down into misery! I agree that "connectivity is a social good in itself", but I think that you don't need to do anything in particular to get people "connected". Once you solve the basic health and poverty problems of a community, they will get themselves connected in no time, without any direct outside effort - lots of small local companies will spring to provide cheap services and the big companies are already building cheaper and wider infrastructure as we speak.
- vidarh 13y ago
  The smartest kids already knows that there are better places. Most kids knows that. Yet there's still lots of kids that do get the opportunity to go somewhee else, that still goes back to make things better.
- icebraining 13y ago
  he will find a way to leave his country and pursue a better life for himself, leaving his family and all the other around him behind in the same state of poverty. The World Bank estimates that migrants transfer around $500 billion per year back to their home countries; that's around 4x times the global amount of foreign aid. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/Migrants-from-developing-countries-to-send-home-414-billion-in-earnings-in-2013 http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/Migrants...
stesch 13y ago
Knowledge isn't important? There are more problems than just malaria.
Qom 13y ago
Disclaimer: I am not a STEM guy so don't go calling me an elitist. This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry. What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs. Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.
- Volpe 13y ago
  There is more than enough money and resources to go around. It isn't a supply problem. We have heaps of everything. So being able to synthesise it wouldn't change that fact. The problem is we suck at distributing it. We have a system that allows the super rich (and thus super poor) to exist. If we could magically create any object we like, the rich/powerful would make sure they had a monopoly on that technology so they could maintain their richness/power. There is a great talk given by G.A Cohen against capitalism that illustrates this point wonderfully[1] [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c [Video] EDIT: Sorry just saw your strange reference to Newton as well. You are saying technological advancement is more important than people, and we should prioritise advancement over people... why? Why should we advance technology for technologies sake?
  - Qom 13y ago
    >Sorry just saw your strange reference to Newton as well. >You are saying technological advancement is more important >than people, and we should prioritise advancement over people... >why? Why should we advance technology for technologies sake? That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that if you want to help people technological progress will be vastly more efficient than anything else, and particularly aid programs. I don't care about progress for its own sake, nobody does. I'm saying that some people are objectively more valuable than others in the long term and that we should help them instead of helping huge numbers of less productive people. A single great invention could save all those people better than any amount of aid money.
alan_cx 13y ago
While I find it kind of obscene that ISPs (and many many other businesses) make lots of cash in Africa (third world in general) rolling out connectivity, while seemingly giving little back, which of course could help with malaria (and many other issues), I do wonder if it will blow back on the west in the form of the mass of Africans suddenly knowing how the other half live as it were. As a result, demanding more of what the west have, knowing how the west profits while they suffer. Im sure they do know to an extent, but this might prove it, or make it fantastically clear. Heh, kinda like their Snowden. They suspected, but access to real data will prove it. Another barely considered idea that has just floated in to my head is the idea that some how, say via UN treaty, rich countries and or corporations should be prevented from profiting in third world countries while certain defined baselines of quality of life are below a certain standard. So, for example, you cant profit from internet connectivity until health and education standards are at a certain defined level. Or, perhaps if companies do, then a percentage of their profit must be spent in that country addressing the various issues. OK, I have zero idea how you define that in to law or treaty, especially with out some gits working out how to circumvent it, but as an ideal to work to?
kayoone 13y ago
Making the world a better place isnt limited to one thing at a time. So everyone can work on issues that are most important to him and thats great!
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Title should be changed. The actual title is: "An exclusive interview with Bill Gates". The submitter has editorialised it ("Bill Gates says putting worldwide Internet access before malaria is 'a joke'"). The small part of the interview the current title is referring to is this: "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s second-richest man does not hide his irritation: “As a priority? It’s a joke.”" He doesn't say connectivity isn't important. He just thinks that is isn't as important as finding a cure for malaria.
acd 13y ago
We could use the moon as an Internet Relay, so you bounce lasers off the moon latency will be around 1.2 seconds. IRC :) http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/nasa-internet-laser/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/nasa-internet-lase... Solar planes and low orbit satellites could also be used as bounce points from earth uplinks. http://www.o3bnetworks.com/o3b-advantage/service-coverage http://www.o3bnetworks.com/o3b-advantage/service-coverage http://titanaerospace.com/platforms/solara-50/ http://titanaerospace.com/platforms/solara-50/
pearjuice 13y ago
Vaccinations bring up a very controversial debate. The counter argument to vaccinations is that they increase the rate of autism dramatically because they contain a preservative of mercury. Research has shown that in 1992 when they increased the amount of vaccines given to children the rate of autism sky rocketed. Coincidence? Some say that it's a direct link, others oppose of that conclusion. The debate rages on.
- schuke 13y ago
  This has been busted for ages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about_autism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about_...
  - pearjuice 13y ago
    My issue is that I struggle to trust the pharmaceutical industry as all corporations when reaching a certain size turn corrupt. When corporations are in the business of health shady their concern is about making money rather than human health. It's like trusting oil companies to help humanity when everyone well knows they lobby the government to get their way to access more oil in foreign lands, even if it means to engage in warfare. My issue with putting trust behind the studies saying vaccinations are perfectly fine is that corporations once again are known to fund mislead research to protect their interests. Forgive me to use cannabis as an example, but it's broad enough to show how much effort they put into making false claims that it's extremely unhealthy to both physical and mental health. Today the research has done a 180 because the government is slowly but surely easing up on the research which was once heavily restricted.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      No your problem is you believe your completely unsupported opinion is more valuable then the breadth and depth of scientific literature on the subject, and to that end have elected to do no in-depth reading on the matter. It is an attitude that can only come from someone who's been vaccinated and lives in a country where such programs have practically eradicated common fatal diseases, and will be completely unaffected by whether or not they're dangerously wrong.
malthaus 13y ago
It's not a joke, it's applied economics. Better welfare in developing countries means better ways to cope with / eradicate diseases.
jokoon 13y ago
politics are not as easy as technologies
motherfucker2 13y ago
The funniest thing about this is that he got confused between Peter Singer, the ethicist, and Paul Singer, a venture capitalist and philanthropist. It gets even funnier when you find out that Paul Singer's philanthropic activity is mostly lobbying at similar activities which the argument he's quoted as making would dismiss.
asadlionpk 13y ago
I think both internet(read education) and child health are important for any part of the world. You can't always be fixing their health problems rather than giving them a means of learning how to fix their problems themselves. You need to do both at the same time. "give a man a fish..."
Swannie 13y ago
It is a joke. Worldwide internet access is available today, for a high price, via satellite. Worldwide disease control is an incredibly hard problem. Just think that only 20 years ago the internet was not generally used to conduct business. Sure academia, and some international businesses had embraced it, but it was in its infancy. People distributed information via many other means - means which are cheaper than the internet to this day. Everyone saying that the internet or telecoms enables faster and easier transfer of that information is correct - but it's not the only method, and it's certainly not the most efficient way to educate people.
tete 13y ago
Oh no, so my power point presentation on the cloud won't save the world? What a cruel realization for someone like me, living in the startup world, constantly getting told how great everything I do is. What comes next? The realization that electronics, like the iPhone end up as waste, destroying the environment and its acid causes cancer to children instead of bringing them rainbows and unicorns? It sounds just as bad as the realization that Facebook and other, invade privacy and are used for bullying leading to depressions and suicide. (Sorry for that sarcasm) About technology and evolution of society... Did you know that the neolithic revolution actually caused diseases, famines and made humans more aggressive, less social, less intelligent and lowered the life expectancy so much that it only recovered in the last centuries. Considering technology to solve all the really big problems is naive in a world, where most new technologies come with new diseases physical (posture, various forms of cancers by new materials, radiation, ..) and mental (addictions, depressions, reduction of memory retention). No, I don't want to go and live like the apes. I enjoy the comforts, but given all this it's just self-deception to think that computers with internet would solve more problems to people suffering from illnesses than any other tool, a vaccine or even a change in world politics. Folks, I am a technology and information enthusiast, but please lets keep our help cool and not get emotional over the realization that people may actually need something else and that technologies have dark sides and that there may be many cases where the pros outweigh the cons, but it's not a general rule and shouldn't be the religious dogma of a technocracy.
- icebraining 13y ago
  This is not a technology vs something else. Vaccines are technology too. This is a discussion on a specific technology vs another.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I don't disagree with Gates. In fact, I find it very difficult to comment on his moral position at all, and that's what makes this such a fascinating discussion. If you had a billion dollars, what would you do to make people's lives better? For most of us, this is like talking about what to do if you won the lottery: the stuff of daydreams, not reality. But if you really sit down and think about this problem, it's not an easy one to get a grasp on. You could do immediate things, like feed them, vaccinate them, or teach them English. These are things where you pay ten bucks, you get ten meals. Easy to measure. You could do systemic things, where you create a system that's then supposed to do things. Build a school, create a farm, build an irrigation system. You could invest in systems, choosing winners over losers. Finance that business, support that government program. There are other options, and it'd probably be interesting to go through them all one day. But at the end of it, you're left with the uncomfortable fact that thousands of other entities have invested trillions of dollars in making people's lives better and have very little to show for it. Entities much smarter than you, operating on a much greater scale than you can. Even if you're Bill Gates. I'm not ready to give up and say the problem is intractable, but it makes me angry that so many snake oil peddlers, many of whom are politicians, sell the idea that these are solved problems; we just need the money. They are not. So I wish Gates the best of luck. I'd probably bet on connectivity ahead of saving lives, because I think long-term it's more important for humanity to solve its own problems than to keep individuals alive, but heck if I'm happy with that opinion. And if I were Gates, I might just take us to task for that, as he's doing. Good for him.
sebastianconcpt 13y ago
The internet is what helps the guy that cares to help those suffering but without expensive vertical and salvationist interventions. Help people help themselves instead of making more dependant. The "more basic stuff" is guaranteed to improve when their own cultural awareness arises way beyond malaria. Internet accelerates that process. Vaccines don't. PD: also, is not about one or the other, it's about attacking the problem in both flanks
jroseattle 13y ago
I find it's important to have perspective of Gates vs the sili-valley-elites in this debate of who will save the world. It reminds me of this Dilbert comic strip from years ago: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-12-23/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-12-23/ The implication: Dilbert => Gates Zuck/Page => Wally The real issue isn't quite this simple, but only in the context of how valuable internet access is in the context of an individual in a disenfranchised part of the third world. I'm with Gates. And Dilbert, for that matter.
kapad 13y ago
Google has let me down, but I remember an article I read a few years ago in the Indian edition of the TIME magazine. It spoke of how millions of dollars spent on medicines for malaria between the late 90s and early 2000s had done nothing in terms of numbers for the malaria problem. The problem had just gotten worse. The antibiotics required to cure a person kept getting stronger and more expensive, since the malarial parasite was becoming immune to common antibiotics. The article then did a case study of on single NGO that did not distribute medicines, but rather distributed mosquitoe nets. There was a sharp decline in the numbers for people affected with malaria in the region in which this particular NGO was operating. Some times connectivity, access to communication and information is much better then spending millions and billions of dollars on medicines, medical staff and medical research (on stronger anti-biotics. Throw all the money you want at vaccine discovery and it is not wasted.) when a much cheaper and easier alternative would have gotten better results. If lack of information and communication was a cause of the bad approach being used, then the internet definitely will help in such situations.

160 points by rshlo 13y ago

Why, so they can't create companies to support their countr's GDP to become independent of your pity aid? What a monopolistic cunt. Make microsoft quit taxing android phones for a windows license before you act like you have a high ground beyond your 22 hidden patents. What a rich shitmark.

Alterlife 13y ago
You don't have to agree with everything that a person says or does in order to acknowledge a simple truth. If Gates said the sky is blue, would you (as you have done) call him a 'cunt' for saying so? Clean water, healthy food, tenable living environment... All these things obviously matter more than internet connectivity. I don't know how anyone could argue otherwise. If you can get yourself vaccinated against a disease, that's one less thing that can go wrong. You have to be healthy to do things.
- batgaijin 13y ago
  The country these people are living in should have hospitals. They should be able to affordably produce antibiotics, malaria nets and everything else. Antibiotics and most other medical products are unnecesarilly burdened by patents and become prohibitevely expensive unless some rich patron grants them something they could buy at a much cheaper price. Patents can be a tax on those who are unlucky. I think certain things deserve patents. But the company he represents taxes any linux device as a microsoft device. I agree people should be healthy. But you know what? Maybe they should be able to make their own fucking choices in their own fucking hospital on their own fucking dime. He is a cunt for being afraid of competition and supporting autonomy. That is a sign of the weak and those who are unable to deal with truly dynamic problems that come from actual competition. In all honesty I understand his position. But for him to vocalize it as though he doesn't see the poor billions as potential competitors? Too fucking bad. He can have his own beliefs but fuck spreading a narrative.
  - batgaijin 13y ago
    I take back most of my shit. I guess that's what happens when you are a neckbeard that can't even code.
stinos 13y ago
Serisously, this is about malaria, internet, a better life for people and you start nagging about ms-vs-google-vs-linux etc?
- batgaijin 13y ago
  The country could potentially have their own corporations that produce a tax basis for hospitals. Those hospitals could have a much lower cost of setup. You want me to pretend that his short time frame narrative matters? I'd be happy to die today I knew it was part of a meaningful step for others to get beyond the limits they were born into. Sadly socialist demagoguery tend to be run by worse fucks.

mortdeus 13y ago

He kinda has a point.

mortdeus 13y ago
Though it is worth pointing out that worldwide internet coverage would provide a great resource for those living without suitable education and work opportunities. One of the hardest parts in eliminating poverty from the poorest nations on earth stems from the lack of economic infrastructure in those countries. We can keep giving them rice and supplies but until they have work opportunities that provide a way to purchase their own life essential resources; the fundamental issue causing the poverty in the first place will remain unsolved. Internet is a good step towards providing that infrastructure.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Protip: There's an edit link, and you're allowed to use it.
  - kamakazizuru 13y ago
    super protip - theres a Karma level after which you are allowed edits.

Tarang 13y ago

Guys don't go so hard on him. This is a passionate person about getting rid of this disease. I've had malaria 7 or so times. The problem is when you don't get access to medication which is the problem. If you don't it can kill you very slowly. Malaria is caused by this organism transmitted by mosquitoes. If you get rid of it, mosquitoes still live, but malaria can disappear. Also its not zero sum. Dedicating resources to getting rid of malaria isn't going to stop people getting access to the internet. The problem lies more with the cost and quality of the internet. Most people in Africa have access to the internet via some form of wireless means (mostly 3G/Edge). The problem is this is very costly. All the solutions that keep coming forth are just variations of wireless (Loon for example). People to have the phones, its not rare to see people go hungry to save up to by phones. It gets access to a lot of people but then you have issues like latency, connection dropping, susceptibility to bad weather & bad signal. People love the internet but hate the cost. Android is partly solving it, but infrastructure is the other hard problem. Everyone would love to hate him but I find it very hard to do that. His actions are clearly louder than his words (even when out of context).

mtgx 13y ago
So why does he have to trash everyone else's priorities then? What if I worked on making a fusion reactor technology that could give "free energy to everyone". Would I get to shit on Bill Gate's "anti-malaria" campaign, too, because I'd think my priority is more "important"? Phone and Internet communications are very important to people. Much more important than it might seem at first glance. I come from a relatively poor country where people would spend "whole salaries" to buy a smartphone. Clearly people themselves have different priorities, and it's not just about the corporation's or government's priorities. So I guess my point is, I'm sure Bill Gates could go about funding his anti-malaria campaign without trashing other priorities. If he wants to attack other people's priorities, how about attacking something like oil subsidies, that take important amounts of money from the tax payers, and give it to very profitable companies. That money could be used for fighting malaria instead - if you will. But again, not for Bill Gates to decide.
- Tarang 13y ago

selectnull 13y ago

I generally like what Bill Gates is doing and think there should be more people like him in the world. But this statement is really below him; it has kind of 'me hates google' behind it and is wrong. He should know better than that.

jsmeaton 13y ago
Did you read the entire article? The link headline is link-bait. He was asked a leading question and answered it. Gates didn't go out of his way to make the statement.
- selectnull 13y ago
  You are right, I didn't read it. Mea culpa. I've read it now and I have mixed feelings still. This is what I would like to hear from Mr Gates: "Guys, I'm taking what I believe is the most important thing in the world and that's curing those damned diseases. And I think that once we have cured all the people, they would need better education and internet is so far the best we have (though it could still be improved). So you Zuck and Larry and others work on that and we will all make the world a better place." If he explicitly said something along those lines, my admiration for Mr Gates would skyrocket thru the roof. If he still thinks the internet is a joke (because only priority number 1 is important, right?) than I still stand by my original statement that he should know better.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

the QALYs generated by enabling tech are harder to quantify because they are several steps removed from the aid. Example: the CDC has projected that greater access to the internet could save millions of lives by providing quicker info about breakouts of infectious diseases and coordinating responses.

jbrooksuk 13y ago

I'm pretty sure that life > internet access.

bolder88 13y ago
It's not that simple though. There's quite a few people who are not at risk of ever getting malaria, but who don't have any decent internet access. So for them, curing malaria will make 0 difference to their life. Also, since when has Microsoft or Bill Gates ever been sold on the idea of the internet as a good thing?
- tunesmith 13y ago
  Not sure what your point here is, but it kind of reads as if you're saying that the life of someone on the verge of internet access is more valuable that that of someone on the verge of fatal malaria.
  - bolder88 13y ago
    Point is they're two separate groups of people. From the majority of people from 1st world countries, it is more valuable. I'm never going to meet anyone who has had malaria, or even anyone who knows someone who has had maleria. It's a non issue. But I'll certainly experience and interact with a larger internet population.
    - Volpe 13y ago
      wow. So because you'll never see it, it isn't a problem. You getting cheap/free internet is more important than millions of people dying [1]... [1] http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/ http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/
      - vidarh 13y ago
        He's being realistic. How many of us are donating even percent of our income towards malaria eradication? Eradicating malaria has been possible for decades. It has not happened because people amongst others continues to prioritize luxuries over other peoples lives. We can pretend we're not amongst "those people", but the fact we're spending time on HN debating this matter instead of doing something about it pretty much demonstrate that most of us are.

zaptheimpaler 13y ago

He's right. Poverty, disease and basic things like that are things about _survival_, the internet is not. But mainly, the title is provocative and misleading. The article clearly states, he was asked a leading question "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria", and he answered. The title makes it seem like he went out of his way to make the comparison and put himself on a pedestal, but thats not what happened.

bolder88 13y ago
Those things are also about increasing our problems down the line IMHO The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else? Sure, you could save a few million poorly educated people from dying. Then what? They're all going to need food, energy, education, housing, etc etc. Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
- quink 13y ago
  > The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else? Not that greatly. Birth rates in near enough every country are dropping after having peaked. 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, 9 billion in 2043, 10 billion in 2083 is what UNFPA predicts. As education improves and the relative value of each life, and as people live longer on average, the Malthusian catastrophe is one I would think we will avoid. In fact it is this stabilisation of the population that worries me because without any immediate pressure from something else, with no race, no competition and no Sturm and no Drang in progress, will we be destined to find the answer to the Fermi Paradox through our own fate? Look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Population_of_Japan_since_1872.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Populatio... and then consider that while the case of Japan seems about to be a portent for other countries. Doesn't this scare you even more - the thought of the human race ending with a whimper? Or will each of us be, by our current standards, a god among machines living a life a hundred times more valuable than those of their ancestors in their grasp over the earth. If anything these kinds of questions should probably keep you more awake than the thought of a Malthusian catastrophe at this point.

nodata 13y ago

False dichotomy. You can do both at the same time.

yen223 13y ago
He's not saying you can't do both, he's saying that we need to get our priorities straight. Which is true.

quink 13y ago

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html > Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. ---- Also, remittances have been increasing and these help the situation in poorer countries enormously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance and I'm pretty sure that the Internet is not entirely fault free in causing this increase. And then there's this too: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mobile-phone-access-reaches-three-quarters-planets-population http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/07/17/mo... Giving people access to some form of communications, even if it is just SMS surely can't hurt and must be bound to be an investment that can pay back itself, Malaria or no Malaria. Bill Gates should be congratulated and commended for his work every day. But to read out of that that the two have no relation with each other is a bit short-sighted.

Gonzih 13y ago

Another misleading title on HN.

spiritplumber 13y ago

Bill Gates (or realistically someone in his organization) should answer my emails. I'm going to deliver him a way to curb malaria spreading at cost, and nobody over there has gotten a hold of me yet. I'm severely tempted to just drive to his house and drop the prototype off....

deletes 13y ago
Show us your solution.
- spiritplumber 13y ago
  I'm not sure how, that's the thing. Do I do a video time lapse? It's a bit boring to watch someone NOT being bitten by mosquitos.
  - ehsanu1 13y ago
    Post an explanation + clear diagrams of how it works somewhere, and your process for making the prototype with pictures of it. And details about the cost/parts etc. Then drum up some interest. Get some blogs to write about it, then hopefully bigger media. Works better if you can point out something unusual - eg if you were 15 years old, that would work really well for you here, or if you can put a concrete estimate to the cost/benefit - "Save 100 Lives For $100 With This Anti-Mosquito Shield". Find their angle for them, and you have a better chance. Someone will get a hold of you then. The time-lapse with proof that it works would probably help a lot if you could as well, but details are even better for the skeptics among us.
    - spiritplumber 13y ago
      Thanks, I will try to do that. The only unusual thing about me is that I scooped Google once, and they acted weird about it. I'm twice that age though :) Right now I am trying to figure out how to get a proper medical study done that this stuff doesn't affect people.
  - 13y ago

rightnow 13y ago

Is this news?! I thought it was common sense! Im really surprised about all the headlines. There are people all around the world that live happy lives without the internet. But there are no people that are happy they are dying in malaria.

pcvarmint 13y ago

Bill should support Bradley's Kina Tonic, right at home in Seattle, and then move on to supporting internet access: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161679272/bradleys-kina-tonic-making-the-best-tonic-in-the-w http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/161679272/bradleys-kina-...

pcvarmint 13y ago
Wow, downvoted for suggesting that Gates support a kickstarter project that will, if it's successful, become one of the best tonics in the world (I've tasted it). Quinine is the best natural cure for malaria. This project is succeeding with very little kickstarter funding. I was not attacking Gates -- simply suggesting that a tiny dose of funding for this Seattle tonic startup could help a lot for malaria, and then the much more expensive internet infrastructure problems could be addressed.
- quasque 13y ago
  Quinine is not the best antimalarial drug out there nowadays, and is certainly not a good choice if you have lots of money to invest in malaria treatment in impoverished regions of the world. Investing in this tonic water startup for that purpose would be pointless and counter-productive. Also it's rather inappropriate to be shilling it in a serious discussion about responsible philanthropy.

tomelders 13y ago

The answer to every single problem in the world is education. The internet is education... and cats.

algorias 13y ago

Getting rid of Malaria is obviously a higher priority than internet access from the perspective of any one person living in the third world today. I have much respect for Bill Gates for the work he's doing in that area. However, there is a kind of shortsightedness in his attitude: The thing is, societies evolve because of technology and opportunities. So while it is preferable for each individual to have no internet and no malaria, society as a whole might progress more by taking care of the fundamental causes of poverty (lack of education and opportunity, government corruption, etc) rather than fighting the symptoms. Even if it turns out that Gates is right and I'm wrong, dismissing the relevance of the internet as flippantly as he has done is intellectually dishonest to a certain extent.

DanBC 13y ago
You can't educate school children if the teachers are dying of malaria, or the people who feed he teachers or the children are dying of HIV/AIDs. You're right, it's a complex bundle of interacting problems and there's plenty of space for them all to be tackled at the same time. Knowing that Gates is pouring cash and expertise into malaria is re-assuring enough that it gives other people the opportunity to do other stuff.
- Shish2k 13y ago
  > it's a complex bundle of interacting problems and there's plenty of space for them all to be tackled at the same time This is probably the most realistic and sensible response that I've ever seen in any priority opinion flamewar
epo 13y ago
He's not dismissing it. He is saying we have got our priorities wrong. You are being intellectually dishonest by adopting an artificially contrarian position and trying to pretend he was saying we had to choose one or the other just, it seems, for the sake of having a contrarian position. You are wrong, but despite having an idiotic opinion you're not an idiot, tempting as it is to think that. You are just someone who thinks that just because they can form a banal opinion that means the opinion has any worth. It doesn't.

laichzeit0 13y ago

So there's a philosophically sound argument that eradicating malaria comes before worldwide Internet access. Or does it just rely on majority consensus that the one should come before the other? I mean if you keep asking "Why?" like a 5 year old, eventually you hit what underlies the reasoning: some basic assumptions that each person holds and that the rest of the argument is built on. E.g. Kant's categorical imperative. The problem is not everyone might agree with your most fundamental assumptions, and when you arrive at questions like "Internet or malaria eradication first?" people will disagree. Unless you lay those assumptions bare, it's unnecessary argumentation. E.g. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.." Well I might just not hold that that truth is self-evident, and disagree with you on any argument you build on that assumption.

transfire 13y ago

What is so frustrating is that the malaria problem has all but been solved. I have read on multiple occasions about our ability to breed genetically modified misquotes that can be used to decimate mosquito populations on the one hand and on the other create malaria immune mosquitoes that stop the transmission of the disease. So why hasn't it been done? Short answer: bullshit "unknowns" about long-term ecological effects. Well try explaining that to the 12 children who just died from malaria while I wrote this comment.

algorias 13y ago
You can't pivot your way out of ecological catastrophes, you know... There are many instances of "innocent" actions of mankind that ravaged huge areas of the world very rapidly (the beaver plague in south america, just off the top of my head). Ecosystems often find themselves in very delicate states of equilibrium, an equilibrium that can be irreversably broken with the slightest missstep. There are very good reasons to be extremely conservative in this area.
- s_baby 13y ago
  Considering more than half of all humans ever have died from Malaria it's a reasonable risk to take.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Source? I find that very hard to believe. For starters, not nearly all humans do or have lived in places where malaria is particularly widespread. Secondly, while deaths from malaria are high in developing countries, according to WHO it still "only" accounted for 4.4% of deaths in low income countries in 2002. While the percentage of Malaria deaths has undoubtably dropped substantially as the fight against Malaria has intensified, the drop in recent decades do not seem to justify that the worldwide deaths causes by Malaria has at any point been so far above 50% to compensate for lower rates later and for the parts of the world where Malaria either is not endemic or not widespread enough to cause significant deaths.

MaysonL 13y ago

It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other. Quite the reverse, actually. Doing either would facilitate doing the other.

claudius 13y ago
> It's not like we can only have one, or that doing one will obstruct doing the other. Available resources in general, and in particular those available to specific individuals/foundations, are limited, hence it is not possible to pursue both worldwide internet access and malaria eradication with the same strength as you can pursue either of them. Of course, there may well be factors where by doing A, you also achieve parts of B, but given that the timeframe before ‘world-wide internet access’ helps ‘researching a malaria vaccine’ is at least ten-or-so years (the absolute minimum time it takes someone with no education to get anywhere where they can actively develop vaccines), I doubt that this is feasible.

tosic 13y ago

While this is obviously a good statement, it is besides the point. There's no reason you can't work on both and since he is caring about malaria, others can work on internet access. The question to ask would be, if working on both slows progress in either and what the "sweet spot" is for balancing funds and efforts to achieve the best overall progress.

nirnira 13y ago

Nice to see that even with a few dozen billion under his belt he still's the same guy: unable to help himself from mocking ideas he thinks suck! Who cares if you agree with him, his honesty and passion are amazing.

Qom 13y ago
You've got it the wrong way: with his billions and fame, he is more likely to be honest and to mock others. People will listen to him and respect no matter what he says.

StefanPatelski 13y ago

Give a man a vaccine, and he lives for a day. Give a man the opportunity to educate himself, and he will be able to find vaccines to last a lifetime.

yen223 13y ago
*Give a man the opportunity to educate himself, and he might die from malaria.
- StefanPatelski 13y ago
  You are right, but I hope you do understand my point. This is about short term vs. long term. Bill Gates could have made the choice to not found Microsoft, and instead give the seed money to a charity that solves a disease. But then he wouldn't have been able to spend billions on malaria research. Both the short term and the long term are important. So it is strange to make the comparison. Both these investments can co-exist.

DanBC 13y ago

An excellent example of why HN doesn't allow submitters to fuck around with the article title. rshlo has editorialized this title, and thus some comments here are pointless knee-jerk reactions to a bad title, rather than a reaction to what's actually in the article.

sanoli 13y ago
I'm with you. I also hate when submitters mess around with titles, since the journalist has already (a lot of the time) messed around and hand picked a quote or chose a sensationalist header. Then comes the HN submitter and double-fucks around.

nnq 13y ago

Gates is right, but the reasoning is a bit more complicated: Starting with "connectivity" is basically "putting the cart in front of the ox". There's this utopical view that once you give them internet access smart African children will start freelancing and provide for their families, but it doesn't work this way: once you give him internet access, the African child with an IQ of top 0.001% will just learn there are better places in the world to be and live and he will find a way to leave his country and pursue a better life for himself, leaving his family and all the other around him behind in the same state of poverty. By putting connectivity first you'll basically end up building a better brain-drain, which might be exactly what some of the new generation billionaires want, but this is not socially responsive philanthropy! Smart people are empowered by connectivity, indeed, but they don't use this empowerment to pull the others around them up, not at the risk of pulling themselves down in the process. You need a social and economical infrastructure, with the basic healthcare and poverty problems solved, so the smart people empowered by connectivity can "pull up" the rest of the society without the risk of pulling themselves back down into misery! I agree that "connectivity is a social good in itself", but I think that you don't need to do anything in particular to get people "connected". Once you solve the basic health and poverty problems of a community, they will get themselves connected in no time, without any direct outside effort - lots of small local companies will spring to provide cheap services and the big companies are already building cheaper and wider infrastructure as we speak.

vidarh 13y ago
The smartest kids already knows that there are better places. Most kids knows that. Yet there's still lots of kids that do get the opportunity to go somewhee else, that still goes back to make things better.
icebraining 13y ago
he will find a way to leave his country and pursue a better life for himself, leaving his family and all the other around him behind in the same state of poverty. The World Bank estimates that migrants transfer around $500 billion per year back to their home countries; that's around 4x times the global amount of foreign aid. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/Migrants-from-developing-countries-to-send-home-414-billion-in-earnings-in-2013 http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/Migrants...

stesch 13y ago

Knowledge isn't important? There are more problems than just malaria.

Qom 13y ago

Disclaimer: I am not a STEM guy so don't go calling me an elitist. This might seem like a callous view but I think it's better to invest money on helping the scientist caste (wherever they might have been born) than to simply cure a bunch of random people. In the movie Elysium (2013), they send magic machines to help the masses, which achieves nothing since they are just as poor as before but a bit healthier. I left the movie theater feeling depressed and angry. What we need is real technological progress. If we could for example synthesize objects or food easily à la Star Trek, we would solve poverty and inequality more efficiently than thousands of years of social programs. Consider the fact that Isaac Newton's scientific output was worth more than 99% of the work of every other intellectual in the world in the past few centuries leading up to his birth. What's even more amazing is that Newton spent only a tiny fraction of his time doing actual science; he was obsessed with mysticism and other pseudo-scientific doctrines. So giving a billion dollars to the next Newton will be many order of magnitudes smarter than spending that same billion curing laborers. However, it's not politically correct, so I doubt it will be feasible.

Volpe 13y ago
There is more than enough money and resources to go around. It isn't a supply problem. We have heaps of everything. So being able to synthesise it wouldn't change that fact. The problem is we suck at distributing it. We have a system that allows the super rich (and thus super poor) to exist. If we could magically create any object we like, the rich/powerful would make sure they had a monopoly on that technology so they could maintain their richness/power. There is a great talk given by G.A Cohen against capitalism that illustrates this point wonderfully[1] [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA9WPQeow9c [Video] EDIT: Sorry just saw your strange reference to Newton as well. You are saying technological advancement is more important than people, and we should prioritise advancement over people... why? Why should we advance technology for technologies sake?
- Qom 13y ago
  >Sorry just saw your strange reference to Newton as well. >You are saying technological advancement is more important >than people, and we should prioritise advancement over people... >why? Why should we advance technology for technologies sake? That's not what I said at all. On the contrary, I'm saying that if you want to help people technological progress will be vastly more efficient than anything else, and particularly aid programs. I don't care about progress for its own sake, nobody does. I'm saying that some people are objectively more valuable than others in the long term and that we should help them instead of helping huge numbers of less productive people. A single great invention could save all those people better than any amount of aid money.

alan_cx 13y ago

While I find it kind of obscene that ISPs (and many many other businesses) make lots of cash in Africa (third world in general) rolling out connectivity, while seemingly giving little back, which of course could help with malaria (and many other issues), I do wonder if it will blow back on the west in the form of the mass of Africans suddenly knowing how the other half live as it were. As a result, demanding more of what the west have, knowing how the west profits while they suffer. Im sure they do know to an extent, but this might prove it, or make it fantastically clear. Heh, kinda like their Snowden. They suspected, but access to real data will prove it. Another barely considered idea that has just floated in to my head is the idea that some how, say via UN treaty, rich countries and or corporations should be prevented from profiting in third world countries while certain defined baselines of quality of life are below a certain standard. So, for example, you cant profit from internet connectivity until health and education standards are at a certain defined level. Or, perhaps if companies do, then a percentage of their profit must be spent in that country addressing the various issues. OK, I have zero idea how you define that in to law or treaty, especially with out some gits working out how to circumvent it, but as an ideal to work to?

kayoone 13y ago

Making the world a better place isnt limited to one thing at a time. So everyone can work on issues that are most important to him and thats great!

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Title should be changed. The actual title is: "An exclusive interview with Bill Gates". The submitter has editorialised it ("Bill Gates says putting worldwide Internet access before malaria is 'a joke'"). The small part of the interview the current title is referring to is this: "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s second-richest man does not hide his irritation: “As a priority? It’s a joke.”" He doesn't say connectivity isn't important. He just thinks that is isn't as important as finding a cure for malaria.

acd 13y ago

We could use the moon as an Internet Relay, so you bounce lasers off the moon latency will be around 1.2 seconds. IRC :) http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/nasa-internet-laser/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/nasa-internet-lase... Solar planes and low orbit satellites could also be used as bounce points from earth uplinks. http://www.o3bnetworks.com/o3b-advantage/service-coverage http://www.o3bnetworks.com/o3b-advantage/service-coverage http://titanaerospace.com/platforms/solara-50/ http://titanaerospace.com/platforms/solara-50/

pearjuice 13y ago

Vaccinations bring up a very controversial debate. The counter argument to vaccinations is that they increase the rate of autism dramatically because they contain a preservative of mercury. Research has shown that in 1992 when they increased the amount of vaccines given to children the rate of autism sky rocketed. Coincidence? Some say that it's a direct link, others oppose of that conclusion. The debate rages on.

schuke 13y ago
This has been busted for ages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about_autism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine#False_claims_about_...
- pearjuice 13y ago
  My issue is that I struggle to trust the pharmaceutical industry as all corporations when reaching a certain size turn corrupt. When corporations are in the business of health shady their concern is about making money rather than human health. It's like trusting oil companies to help humanity when everyone well knows they lobby the government to get their way to access more oil in foreign lands, even if it means to engage in warfare. My issue with putting trust behind the studies saying vaccinations are perfectly fine is that corporations once again are known to fund mislead research to protect their interests. Forgive me to use cannabis as an example, but it's broad enough to show how much effort they put into making false claims that it's extremely unhealthy to both physical and mental health. Today the research has done a 180 because the government is slowly but surely easing up on the research which was once heavily restricted.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    No your problem is you believe your completely unsupported opinion is more valuable then the breadth and depth of scientific literature on the subject, and to that end have elected to do no in-depth reading on the matter. It is an attitude that can only come from someone who's been vaccinated and lives in a country where such programs have practically eradicated common fatal diseases, and will be completely unaffected by whether or not they're dangerously wrong.

malthaus 13y ago

It's not a joke, it's applied economics. Better welfare in developing countries means better ways to cope with / eradicate diseases.

jokoon 13y ago

politics are not as easy as technologies

motherfucker2 13y ago

The funniest thing about this is that he got confused between Peter Singer, the ethicist, and Paul Singer, a venture capitalist and philanthropist. It gets even funnier when you find out that Paul Singer's philanthropic activity is mostly lobbying at similar activities which the argument he's quoted as making would dismiss.

asadlionpk 13y ago

I think both internet(read education) and child health are important for any part of the world. You can't always be fixing their health problems rather than giving them a means of learning how to fix their problems themselves. You need to do both at the same time. "give a man a fish..."

Swannie 13y ago

It is a joke. Worldwide internet access is available today, for a high price, via satellite. Worldwide disease control is an incredibly hard problem. Just think that only 20 years ago the internet was not generally used to conduct business. Sure academia, and some international businesses had embraced it, but it was in its infancy. People distributed information via many other means - means which are cheaper than the internet to this day. Everyone saying that the internet or telecoms enables faster and easier transfer of that information is correct - but it's not the only method, and it's certainly not the most efficient way to educate people.

tete 13y ago

Oh no, so my power point presentation on the cloud won't save the world? What a cruel realization for someone like me, living in the startup world, constantly getting told how great everything I do is. What comes next? The realization that electronics, like the iPhone end up as waste, destroying the environment and its acid causes cancer to children instead of bringing them rainbows and unicorns? It sounds just as bad as the realization that Facebook and other, invade privacy and are used for bullying leading to depressions and suicide. (Sorry for that sarcasm) About technology and evolution of society... Did you know that the neolithic revolution actually caused diseases, famines and made humans more aggressive, less social, less intelligent and lowered the life expectancy so much that it only recovered in the last centuries. Considering technology to solve all the really big problems is naive in a world, where most new technologies come with new diseases physical (posture, various forms of cancers by new materials, radiation, ..) and mental (addictions, depressions, reduction of memory retention). No, I don't want to go and live like the apes. I enjoy the comforts, but given all this it's just self-deception to think that computers with internet would solve more problems to people suffering from illnesses than any other tool, a vaccine or even a change in world politics. Folks, I am a technology and information enthusiast, but please lets keep our help cool and not get emotional over the realization that people may actually need something else and that technologies have dark sides and that there may be many cases where the pros outweigh the cons, but it's not a general rule and shouldn't be the religious dogma of a technocracy.

icebraining 13y ago
This is not a technology vs something else. Vaccines are technology too. This is a discussion on a specific technology vs another.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I don't disagree with Gates. In fact, I find it very difficult to comment on his moral position at all, and that's what makes this such a fascinating discussion. If you had a billion dollars, what would you do to make people's lives better? For most of us, this is like talking about what to do if you won the lottery: the stuff of daydreams, not reality. But if you really sit down and think about this problem, it's not an easy one to get a grasp on. You could do immediate things, like feed them, vaccinate them, or teach them English. These are things where you pay ten bucks, you get ten meals. Easy to measure. You could do systemic things, where you create a system that's then supposed to do things. Build a school, create a farm, build an irrigation system. You could invest in systems, choosing winners over losers. Finance that business, support that government program. There are other options, and it'd probably be interesting to go through them all one day. But at the end of it, you're left with the uncomfortable fact that thousands of other entities have invested trillions of dollars in making people's lives better and have very little to show for it. Entities much smarter than you, operating on a much greater scale than you can. Even if you're Bill Gates. I'm not ready to give up and say the problem is intractable, but it makes me angry that so many snake oil peddlers, many of whom are politicians, sell the idea that these are solved problems; we just need the money. They are not. So I wish Gates the best of luck. I'd probably bet on connectivity ahead of saving lives, because I think long-term it's more important for humanity to solve its own problems than to keep individuals alive, but heck if I'm happy with that opinion. And if I were Gates, I might just take us to task for that, as he's doing. Good for him.

sebastianconcpt 13y ago

The internet is what helps the guy that cares to help those suffering but without expensive vertical and salvationist interventions. Help people help themselves instead of making more dependant. The "more basic stuff" is guaranteed to improve when their own cultural awareness arises way beyond malaria. Internet accelerates that process. Vaccines don't. PD: also, is not about one or the other, it's about attacking the problem in both flanks

jroseattle 13y ago

I find it's important to have perspective of Gates vs the sili-valley-elites in this debate of who will save the world. It reminds me of this Dilbert comic strip from years ago: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-12-23/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-12-23/ The implication: Dilbert => Gates Zuck/Page => Wally The real issue isn't quite this simple, but only in the context of how valuable internet access is in the context of an individual in a disenfranchised part of the third world. I'm with Gates. And Dilbert, for that matter.

kapad 13y ago

Google has let me down, but I remember an article I read a few years ago in the Indian edition of the TIME magazine. It spoke of how millions of dollars spent on medicines for malaria between the late 90s and early 2000s had done nothing in terms of numbers for the malaria problem. The problem had just gotten worse. The antibiotics required to cure a person kept getting stronger and more expensive, since the malarial parasite was becoming immune to common antibiotics. The article then did a case study of on single NGO that did not distribute medicines, but rather distributed mosquitoe nets. There was a sharp decline in the numbers for people affected with malaria in the region in which this particular NGO was operating. Some times connectivity, access to communication and information is much better then spending millions and billions of dollars on medicines, medical staff and medical research (on stronger anti-biotics. Throw all the money you want at vaccine discovery and it is not wasted.) when a much cheaper and easier alternative would have gotten better results. If lack of information and communication was a cause of the bad approach being used, then the internet definitely will help in such situations.