Gates Donates $500M+ To Fight Malaria and Other Diseases 106
jones_supa writes In the 63rd annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans, Bill Gates announced that he will donate over $500 million to fight malaria and other infectious diseases in the developing world. Gates described the Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 4,900 people in West Africa since the beginning of the year as a "critical moment in the history of global health", and said it underscores the need for stronger efforts to stay ahead of disease threats such as drug-resistant malaria and dengue fever. The more than $500 million announced Sunday includes over $150 million to the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative to advance development of next-generation malaria vaccines, and $29 million to the Clinton Health Access Initiative to support malaria elimination efforts in Southern Africa and the Greater Mekong Sub-region of Southeast Asia.
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How long will it take slashdot to spin this? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
How many Apple fans will make fun of him, in spite of the fact that Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity?
How many of you will take a potshot at Microsoft, even though Bill hasn't worked there in years?
Re:How long will it take slashdot to spin this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long will it take slashdot to spin this? (Score:4, Informative)
How many Apple fans will make fun of him, in spite of the fact that Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity?
Did he? Even if he wasn't as generous as Bill, it seems you are wrong:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
Now... how many Apple haters will try to use this to take cheap shots at Apple and to crap on the memory of Steve Jobs?
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wow 10's of millions, from a guy that made billions off over priced devices. Pretty freaking cheap of them to only donate that pocket change.
Just because you guys hate Apple products it doesn't mean that you get to crap all over the some person's memory without being called out for being petty hateful trolls you are. I'll gladly burn karma to do that. He said, and I quote: "Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity" which is demonstrably wrong no matter how you try to spin it. secondly how lazy do you have to be to not do a simple google search before making a stupid statement like that? ... and then he gets modded +5 insightful to boot... slashdo
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Gates is now pretty much a full time philanthropist. When he says he's going to give $500 million, I think we can take him at his word.
Anyhow, good for you Mr. Gates. I think this is money well directed, and hopefully will be well spent. For all of our first world problems and complaints about our health care system, we sometimes forget that there are still many millions of people suffering and dying because they don't have the advantages we have.
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I really don't give a crap about how much/little someone donates to charities, they shouldn't need to exist as alternatives to proper government spending in the first place. (Yeah, blah blah, socialism I know).
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Well, now that you've ruined the entire thread, what's the point in posting? You killed every point a loyal Slashdotter should cover. Nicely done, sir.
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Your comment paints all people with your brush...
Many people with a lot less money do much more than Bill Gates to help the poor, every day in communities all
over the earth...people who give their time and materials without a thought of recompense or worrying
about honor and glory, these people do not make announcements, or have publicity teams, they make a real
personal difference in other's lives.
Gates and his ilk may give money, it may even do some good, but it is the day to day work
of the unsung hero that
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Money may not solve all problems, but it makes most of them a lot easier.
Re:How long will it take slashdot to spin this? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
I don't know the man personally, but I don't see why doing something good should remove anyone's right to have some level of "hate" for the man. Setting aside the particular example of Mr. Gates, does it seem fair to say,"[Person X] has done a good thing. Therefore, nobody can dislike him or object to anything else he does!"
How many Apple fans will make fun of him, in spite of the fact that Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity?
I'm not sure why the those things should be connected, or how you can be so sure that Jobs "never gave a dime to charity". There's been at least a couple reports that Jobs did give money to charity, but didn't publicize the fact because he was very private.
But again, what does that have to do with anything? I'm sure there fans of Apple who are not huge fans of Jobs personally. I'm sure there are people who admire Jobs who also admire Gates. I'm sure there are Windows users who hate Gates.
How many of you will take a potshot at Microsoft, even though Bill hasn't worked there in years?
Ok, I'll do this. I'm annoyed at Microsoft because they still haven't included support for non-Microsoft file-systems. Microsoft sucks!
Now what? Have I offended you by criticizing the company connected to The Great Gates?
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Setting aside the particular example of Mr. Gates, does it seem fair to say,"[Person X] has done a good thing. Therefore, nobody can dislike him or object to anything else he does!"
No, but if there's a conversation going on about said "good thing" it is a little unreasonable for people to jump in the middle of it to shout "Yeah but he did this bad thing 15 years ago!". Yes, Gates did bad stuff. There are plenty of articles on Slashdot about the bad stuff that he's done (and that his legacy continues to contribute to). This isn't one of those articles. Couldn't we just take a minute to say "Mr Gates is doing something worthwhile with his money".
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Gates is doing some good things with some of his money. You can take a minute to point that out, and we're free to use that minute however we see fit. I'm not looking to get into an argument about whether Gates is wonderful or terrible, but sorry, no, you don't get to tell all the rest of us that we have to worship the guy. Because ultimately we get to make up our own minds, and the fact that he has given some portion of his enormous money to charity does not make him immune to criticism.
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it is a little unreasonable for people to jump in the middle of it to shout "Yeah but he did this bad thing 15 years ago!"
And I want to comment on this, also, and say that I don't think it's unreasonable. If you're going to praise a man for donating millions of dollars to charitable causes, then it's fair game to criticize him for how he got those millions of dollars.
Now we could argue about whether "that bad thing" he did 15 years ago was actually bad. I don't want to argue about that right now. But if without having done "that bad thing" he wouldn't have the millions of dollars to give to charity, then it's relevant to t
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But if without having done "that bad thing" he wouldn't have the millions of dollars to give to charity, then it's relevant to the conversation.
The problem is the disproportionate view taken of the "badness" of Microsoft on sites like slashdot. He produced an inferior Operating System and for a while prevented Linux from taking off.
He didn't massacre babies for fun.
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So now you're turning this into an argument about the particulars of the "bad things" he did. I'd like to point out that, in general, the people who are bringing this up are pro-Gates people saying (and I'm going to exaggerate to make a point), "Gee, look at how wonderful and amazing a person Bill Gates is. He's perfect and wonderful and lovely, and is the ideal human being. Not fair criticizing him! No fair saying anything bad or bringing up his past! We shouldn't even talk about what he did int he pas
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I'm not sure that he has done "more to help the poor than all of us put together" - one might argue that our particular choice of global economy (often called "capitalism", but it's certainly not that) is what creates and maintains an under-developed world, and he's a staunch upholder of the current system. In the long term, it is not clear what contributions will be of greatest benefit, so it's really stupid to rank the living or the recently deceased - though men love to.
OTOH, I believe that he is acting
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Pretty simple: Bringing better medicine to areas that have not mastered population control (and are unlikely to master it soon) will create a lot of pain and suffering. The logic is pretty old and it validity is established: Reduce the rate of people, and especially children, dying and there will just be a lot more dying a generation down the road when they exceed what they can feed/house/employ/etc. again.
As such, I can confidentially state that BG continues his evil ways, as so many goody two shoes before
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Reduce the rate of people, and especially children, dying and there will just be a lot more dying a generation down the road when they exceed what they can feed/house/employ/etc. again.
Actually, this has it almost exactly backwards: reducing infant mortality has been a major cause of stabilizing population growth. Increasing prosperity also helps a great deal, and there's a strong argument that malaria is a huge economic drain.
If you are messing with a complex system and do not understand its inner working
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Re:How long will it take slashdot to spin this? (Score:4, Insightful)
All he does is pushing corporate interests
What corporate interests are involved in curing malaria? The entire reason that Bill Gates is subsidizing these efforts is that there isn't much financial incentive for Big Pharma to develop drugs for diseases that primarily afflict people in Third World nations.
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Before he got into health issues, I'd agree - mostly he invested in pushing developing countries towards using Windows PCs for education. But more recently he's investing a lot into healthcare issues that are important to the developing world, and without his money, unprofitable for the drug cartels to research.
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He "earned" his monopoly because all his potential competitors at the time damn near sold every price of technology and accompanying rights to MS. These were business decisions that benefited both parties. When MS gained it's monopoly it was investigated and penalties, both monetary and operational, were implemented. And who really cares what you think if you can say the Gates Foundation almost 2 Billion dollars worth of world healthcare investments have not helped anyone.
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You can not buy contribution to human society. You can not steal the real efforts of others just by temporarily subsidising their life whilst they do the actually real work. The doctors, scientists and other health practitioners who studied and devoted their life to those causes are the ones doing the real work. By temporarily subsidising their life you under no circumstance take any ownership of their efforts and it is really pretty slimy egoistic to attempt to do so.
You have all those pigopolist based
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I think there are serious questions [newint.org] about accountability, undue influence and private priorities that can be raised without touching how he made his money:
Techrights Critique Section (Score:2)
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Even his "charity" can be bloody and harmful. The guy put $50M for a campaign to promote genital mutilation.
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Even his "charity" can be bloody and harmful. The guy put $50M for a campaign to promote genital mutilation.
Source?
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LMGTFY: "bill gates genital mutilation"
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To be clear, by "genital mutilation" he means "male circumcision", which is incomparably less bad than female circumcision, which is what the term is generally reserved for.
Male circumcision = cutting off the foreskin, which is not a procedure I'm a fan of, but is still performed on the majority of Americans boys, and is fairly harmless, in addition to potentially reducing risk of AIDS. Female circumcision = cutting off the clitoris, and has been condemned as a human rights violation by the UN.
It may not be
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The only shady thing here are claims by the pro-mutilation party that it somehow reduces the risk of transmitting AIDS. The only study that shown this result was Camp Orange, and it: 1. was ran by a group funded by MGM proponents, 2. has multiple claims of scientific misconduct pointed against it, 3. contradicts actually peer-reviewed studies, 4. included the time of recovery from the surgery within study time (a man with a penis in pain isn't exactly going to conduct in sexual contact), 5. gave sexual edu
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How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
Are you counting creating poor as doing something for the poor?
His management of the Gates Foundation is not great for the poor. He is maintaining the unaffordable costs of medicines.
Doctors Without Borders criticizes Gates-backed global vaccine strategy [humanosphere.org]
If his intention is to spend his ill-gotten gains to the benefit of humanity, he should put a humanitarian at the helm. Gates was very good at bullying governments and businesses, and illegal attacks on competition to drain the profits from businesses
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Okay. Now ask yourself how he made that money he is now deciding how to redistribute. Did he make it by making the world a slightly better place or a slightly worse place?
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How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
How many Apple fans will make fun of him, in spite of the fact that Steve Jobs never gave a dime to charity?
How many of you will take a potshot at Microsoft, even though Bill hasn't worked there in years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014, taking on a new post as technology advisor to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.
Board member of: Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway
He still works at Microsoft and the rest of your post is absurd. I believe the correct response here is to mark this post "troll".
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He's giving away 1% of his unimaginable fortune, probably less when tax breaks and other business is taken into account. he could give away 90% and still be unimaginably rich. Compare to the homeless guy splitting his last meal with another.
Percentage wise he has done a lot less then some people I've known, he was just lucky to be born with a golden spoon in his mouth, had amazing luck and timing and took full advantage of that. It's good that since meeting Melinda he has become more generous but considerin
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What could be wrong with Bill donating $500M dollars worth of Windows 8.1 Pro licenses and Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions to fight malaria and other diseases?
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How many of you will take a potshot at Microsoft, even though Bill hasn't worked there in years?
Let me try. Apple doesn't yet depend on government contracts in developing nations.
He should give it back ... (Score:1)
... he took so much, he is having trouble spending it all before he dies.
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... he took so much, he is having trouble spending it all before he dies.
Uhm, isn't this what he's doing?
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According to TFS.
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In fact he has utterly wasted so many hours of so many people that calling him a "mass murderer" becomes reasonable.
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In fact he has utterly wasted so many hours of so many people that calling him a "mass murderer" becomes reasonable.
Talk about a fucking First World Problem.
Ooh, I had to reboot my computer to complete the installation of a piece of software. Literally Hitler.
It's all in the percentages ... (Score:1, Insightful)
First I think it's commendable that he is giving back. Fortune has been kind to him and it is only appropriate that he reciprocate in some small way.
By small I might point out that Forbes lists his net worth as $76B for 2014(1). So that $500M donation is roughly equivalent to 0.7% of his net worth. To put his donation in a more realistic perspective it is equivalent to someone of median net worth(2) donating $310. Hardly worth lionizing the man over IMHO.
1. http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mel45hdjl/1-bill-ga
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Well, he is trying to buy himself a good public image on the cheap.
Re:It's all in the percentages ... (Score:5, Informative)
You're right. It is percentages.
Maybe the 40 billion he's given in trust to the B&MGF should be in your totals.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org... [gatesfoundation.org]
Gates has pretty much decided to give all of his money to the foundation by (and in the 10 years following) his and Melissa's death.
Oh, and the other richest guy in the world is on board with matching contributions in the form of BH stock.
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Cool story bro.
The B&MG foundation has already disbursed over 30BN, the majority of which came from Bill.
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It only runs in the black until Bill and Melissa (and Warren) finish dumping their live savings into it.
You could have easily given your kids 60BN by any number of creative means that didn't include giving 5BN/year away on things like malaria.
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It only runs in the black until Bill and Melissa (and Warren) finish dumping their live savings into it.
False. The Gates foundation makes investments for profit, and operates on the return. It's a place for Bill to park his money. There's ways to get the money back out again. One way is by heavily investing in Big Pharma, then using your charity to funnel billions to them.
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The Gates foundation makes investments for profit, and operates on the return
Because, of course, every other charity in the world is run so that it makes a loss on its investments each year.
It's practically a badge of honour to show in your annual accounts that you squandered the maximum amount of donations each year on poorly conceived, hopeless investments.
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It's practically a badge of honour to show in your annual accounts that you squandered the maximum amount of donations each year on poorly conceived, hopeless investments.
I'd like to see that the money was spent effectively, in a way not designed primarily to promote profit and control.
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By small I might point out that Forbes lists his net worth as $76B for 2014(1). So that $500M donation is roughly equivalent to 0.7% of his net worth.
Yes, 0.7% of his total net worth, not 0.7% of his salary/earnings in one year.
Big difference.
The World is Overcrowded (Score:2)
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this is natures way of making sure the world doesn't get overcrowded. It's a sad fact but people NEED to die.
Then how do you explain the fact that some of the countries with the highest life expectancies, and almost no severe endemic diseases, are also the ones with the slowest-growing (or even shrinking) populations?
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this is natures way of making sure the world doesn't get overcrowded. It's a sad fact but people NEED to die.
Then how do you explain the fact that some of the countries with the highest life expectancies, and almost no severe endemic diseases, are also the ones with the slowest-growing (or even shrinking) populations?
Because they don't spit out 5-10 kids each?
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this is natures way of making sure the world doesn't get overcrowded. It's a sad fact but people NEED to die.
Then how do you explain the fact that some of the countries with the highest life expectancies, and almost no severe endemic diseases, are also the ones with the slowest-growing (or even shrinking) populations?
Because they don't spit out 5-10 kids each?
Because their 1.9 children will survive long enough to support them after retirement, and since life is not just a struggle to survive, they are productive enough that they can afford to support their parents.
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While I don't doubt the intentions of Bill and others who want to try and people alive, sadly this is natures way of making sure the world doesn't get overcrowded. It's a sad fact but people NEED to die.
Are you volunteering to be the first to die for your cause? Or did you just mean that other people sh
How is this news? (Score:3)
This is less news than Tim Cook being gay.
I'm starting to think those news stories about smart phones and Google running everyone's long term memories may not be such BS after all...
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Let us look at two numbers:
Add up all the money donated by Gates Add up all of the money individually donated by all Linux supportes and contributors.
Enough said!
Thank you Mister Gates for working to improve the lives of millions of people. Thank you Linux "community" for more pointless debates on DMARC vs. DKIM and the merits of systemd.
To improve the lives of most Linux users, Gates should donate to basement air quality improvement efforts!