Bill Gates charitable donations do real good but they are paltry sums compared to what taxing him would do. Its best to view billionaire donations as at best a guilty conscience and at worst insincere marketing.
This isn’t an ‘either or’ question and framing it that way is deliberate. As though his money alone couldn’t fix both issues for years.
Tax the rich and make them taste reality again. They need to be taxed, its good for them. Ease their guilty consciences of all this sinful monetary excess.
His “donations” are to his own charity, that he then gets to use to reduce his tax burden. Billionaire philanthropy is another avenue of profit for them, nothing else.
Don’t worry, climate scientists who have investigated this issue for decades now, bill Gates says it’ll be fine
Billionaire’s Disease is indiscriminate. We must all work to end its plague upon society.
Bill Gates, the guy who stole MS-DOS.
Ahhh good old QDOS. What a piece of shit.
“If i say what these filthy peasants want, will they forget i was on Epstein list ?”
- Billy Gator, probably
What do the other “subscription rich” think?
Dude wants AI for more money. He doesn’t give a fuck.
Although Gates said investment to battle climate change must continue, he argued that US President Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID threaten a more urgent problem
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/577152/bill-gates-makes-a-stunning-claim-about-climate-change
He’s not wrong. Trump’s cuts to USAID will cause the death of millions in quite a short time.
and yet climate change is still an even more long-term important problem
Bill Gates said too many resources are going toward climate change instead of issues like welfare and poverty…
In the letter, Gates called out the “doomsday view” of climate change and said leaders need to make a “strategic pivot” to focus on issues that have the “greatest impact on human welfare.”
“It’s the best way to ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into,” he wrote.
The “generative AI” part of the headline is not particularly relevant to the article, but is a great test to see who reads the article before rushing to comment.
Bill Gates was recently at the meeting where all the US tech oligarchs kissed Trump’s ring. The article changes nothing about how Bill Gates is very much part of the problem, and this “change” is exclusively based on his oligarch reasons.
Bill Gates knows better than most that there’s enough money in the world to try and tackle both climate change and poverty, and still leave him a billionaire.
I think the wording that really bugs me in his quote is “healthy and productive life”. If all the alarms are true we’re already fucked on climate, so he’s concerned about maintaining a labor force.
It’s not money. It’s timing. You really want UBI before automation. There’s never been a push for AI and robots like this before.
UBI is a pipe dream. Capitalists would never agree to pay for it. And it wouldn’t even matter if they did. Under capitalism, companies and landlords would just raise rent and prices if we all had UBI. Exactly what happened with the Covid stimulus programs.
No, unfortunately the only solution is to do away with capitalism entirely and start doing socialism instead.
Everyone wants UBI but no one explains how that shit would work. And you can bet that you would only get enough to barely subsist in such a system as you are just being paid fake money to exist. That’s no world for humans to thrive in.
I think the idea is if you’re guaranteed a subsistence pay, then you are free to devote your time to creating something. Art, a business, a community, whatever that makes your life meaningful, rather than devoting 90% of your time working for someone elses profit, travelling to work, resting to be able to work, and eating to continue to work.
You want to talk about bare subsistence, that is what most people are doing now in terms of time as a resource.
In our system what would prevent basic necessities from costing “UBI + some amount” after it’s implemented? If this is something that you want to happen, you won’t get it by just discussing the benefits while ignoring/downvoting any sort of critical discussion of it.
I think that is a tough one. As long as we accept the value of a thing is what people are willing to pay for it, the prices will always climb.
For essential products and services, the value should be based only on the effort required to provide or produce it.
The main reason we’re dealing with our current inflation has everything to do with the amount of cash flowing upwards from the working class to the boardroom and shareholders.
The prices are going up on essential items because people can’t afford to not buy gas, or not eat, or not rent. They need those to stay employable, and they slowly sacrificed everything else to keep those. So the price goes up, and people keep buying it, telling the heartless corporations that they can raise the prices more.
Now we have significant portions of the population using short term loans or payment plans to buy their next weeks groceries.
I agree with all this but think it’s going to take fundamental changes to our entire economic structure, which are desperately needed but unlikely to ever happen as long as the nation is run by a collection of millionaires and billionaires all playimg different ‘roles’ while serving the same goal.
A cynical view would be that he realizes that we as a species are doomed, and wants everyone to at least be comfortable as the world becomes unlivable for us.
Actual headline:
Bill Gates softens ‘Climate Disaster’ approach, says strategy needs to shift: Interview
Cool uncle mask falling off. Familiar face emerges.
Ask me how I know you only read the headline.
more money should go toward “improving lives” and curbing disease and poverty.
“Climate is super important but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare,”
The headline is deliberately misleading and honestly should be corrected or removed.
Please put in slightly more effort next time, thanks.
Kinda shocked that after all the recent info coming out he thinks that it’s not going to be a “climate disaster” lmao. Headline is deliberately misleading but that doesn’t make bill less of an idiot.
The problem with “effective altruism” ideology, it’s dependent on the whims of the wealthy.
By what logic? Can’t normal people donate money to effective causes?
Sure, but effective altruism is a specific ideology. Not just donating to causes.
It’s charity done by following certain principles. Nothing about it is tied to being wealthy, though that obviously helps as is the case with charity in general.
We read more than the headline. His argument makes no sense at all. Please do yourself the fabour of putting more effort into your replies.
Which part makes no sense? You don’t believe that climate spending needs to be considered in terms of overall human welfare? Or you believe that statement doesn’t make sense to you? Or…
His philanthropy was always a response to how much people hated him because of Microsoft. He is so thin-skinned and can’t stand even legitimate grievances against him.
I’ll take a thin skinned billionaire that donates some of those billions to feel warm and fuzzy over a thick skinned one that laughs from a balcony as people lose their homes.
I’ve checked the numbers once. Gates donated to his foundation $20B and today the foundation has over $70B. Bill, through his foundation, controls 3x more money they he donated. He’s using foundation’s grants to influence policy and research at a global scale. This is not about helping anyone, it’s about excreting power over governments while improving his public image.
What he should be doing instead? Paying taxes.
Forgive me but while I could agree the primary purpose for his actions may not be philanthropic intent, it certainly has some positive butterfly effects - like the research you mention. Maybe it’s not about helping anyone, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t help anyone.
Regardless this isn’t the place to get into the minutiae. My point was that if we put the ten digit club in a cage and told them only one is allowed back out, I’d prefer Gates find victory than someone like Musk.
I’ll take neither. Billionaires can all go under the guillotine.
Well sure, in optimism land, why not go for them all. In the real world, that wouldn’t be possible given the amount of insulation they have and protection they can afford.
My meaning here is that if the choice were presented between guillotining one of them that donates money occasionally, and another that doesn’t so much as pretend to give a damn, I’m going to point at the latter.
They won’t have insulation and protection if we do a socialist revolution…
From a quick search, there are around 3,000 billionaires with over ten trillion US dollars combined. Even if we assume the poorest of them only have a handful of security personnel, a socialist revolution in terms of pitchforks and guillotines wouldn’t get far up the ladder.
These individuals have politicians strung up as marionettes, so the world’s militaries aren’t going to help. Surely if more than two of these billionaires end up Thompson’d, the military would probably be used to protect them.
The revolution that could work is pretty straightforward, but it has a barrier to entry. People need to vote. Not just for the top either, but all the way down to city councillors. We’d need to see landslide elections to overcome gerrymandering, but if we managed to elect a significant number of incorruptible politicians all at once, mountains could be moved in one cycle.
Oh to dream.
hes also in epstein files, thats why hes been going hard to reivent his image. His vaccine thing has been accused of nothing more than a scheme by african countries.
Someone got their name purged from the Epstein papers, it seems.
But… but, he’s one of the “good billionaires”, Reddit told me so. He’S A phiLAnthroPISt!
To those friends and people that would always say that to me, I always said he just has a good PR team. His malaria work is genuinely good, but still not even a drop in the ocean of the good he could actually do if he contributed his fair share.
“He is a learned man” -I don’t think I like anything else about him
I believe he was anti green energy before, then made a pivot, and I guess he’s back.
*Now that I read it
In a letter published Tuesday ahead of next week’s COP30 U.N. climate summit, Gates argued that too many resources are focused on emissions and the environment, and that more money should go toward “improving lives” and curbing disease and poverty.
“Climate is super important but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare,” Gates told CNBC’
What he said isn’t exactly wrong in and of itself. Only in the context of when and why he said it. Of course we have to keep human welfare in mind, but the climate crisis has reached a point where all human welfare in the not so distant future depends on how heavily we address environmental issues right now. And he’s only saying that to save face.
First, no editorialized headlines. Second, I have no opinion on the guy but he’s sounding more just wrong than evil here.
He was at the techbro oligarch meeting with Trump, kissing his ring recently. The guy is definitely evil.
