EPTOn January 30 2010 11:45 mrgerry wrote:
2013 Bill Gates pays off National Debt (Just dreaming dont mind me)
2013 Bill Gates pays off National Debt (Just dreaming dont mind me)
this is way more important than the national debt
Bill Gates donates 10 billion for vaccination - Page 7
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jalstar
United States8198 Posts
this is way more important than the national debt | ||
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peidongyang
Canada2084 Posts
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keV.
United States3214 Posts
More Bill goodness here (old though) an email rant after stepping down as CEO + Show Spoiler + From: Bill Gates Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM To: Jim Allchin Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH) Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday. I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there. The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up. This site is so slow it is unusable. It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45. These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear. They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange. I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing. So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist? So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!). I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came. I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download. In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations. This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker? So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes. Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows? Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff. This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg. So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time. What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished. Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time? So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state. So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker. So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP. What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker. So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is. At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download. So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do. The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing. So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there. It is not there. What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3. Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information. What an absolute mess. Moviemaker is just not there at all. So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package. I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself. I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed. I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again. So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?) When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback. | ||
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sqwert
United States781 Posts
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KwarK
United States43187 Posts
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sagrado_corazon
United States100 Posts
On February 03 2010 08:38 love1another wrote: <3 Microsoft. man, you beat me to it  Thanks BG! | ||
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Biochemist
United States1008 Posts
On February 03 2010 11:23 KwarK wrote: You need big families when infant mortality is so high. The problems of poverty, infant mortality, overpopulation and disease are all interrelated. You have as many children as possible because they're your retirement, your bank etc... But every time one dies that's like having your house robbed. It's not just a personal tragedy, it's an investment destroyed. And it's not simply the food and time involved in raising a child either. When you have high birth rates and poor hygiene you also get hit with extremely high rates of mothers dying during childbirth. And they have significant value too. If you look at it from an economic perspective the way the third world functions at the moment is like pailing water from a leaky boat. There are fundamental problems (ie the leaks) but the short term solutions (like pailing) do nothing to solve them long term. The short term solution to poverty, short lifespans and high mortality through large families is self destructive and wasteful. What Bill Gates is doing here is plugging a leak. He's not just giving them food. He's not making their life easier for today with a quick cash injection. He's rectifying a fundamental flaw so one day the boat will float. I like this way of thinking. Where can I learn more? | ||
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Ludrik
Australia523 Posts
On January 30 2010 11:45 mrgerry wrote: 2013 Bill Gates pays off National Debt (Just dreaming dont mind me) Haha he's rich but not that rich. Anyway vast US national debt is essential to destabilise their economy so that wealth can be redistributed to others. | ||
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3clipse
Canada2555 Posts
On February 03 2010 11:23 KwarK wrote: You need big families when infant mortality is so high. The problems of poverty, infant mortality, overpopulation and disease are all interrelated. You have as many children as possible because they're your retirement, your bank etc... But every time one dies that's like having your house robbed. It's not just a personal tragedy, it's an investment destroyed. And it's not simply the food and time involved in raising a child either. When you have high birth rates and poor hygiene you also get hit with extremely high rates of mothers dying during childbirth. And they have significant value too. If you look at it from an economic perspective the way the third world functions at the moment is like pailing water from a leaky boat. There are fundamental problems (ie the leaks) but the short term solutions (like pailing) do nothing to solve them long term. The short term solution to poverty, short lifespans and high mortality through large families is self destructive and wasteful. What Bill Gates is doing here is plugging a leak. He's not just giving them food. He's not making their life easier for today with a quick cash injection. He's rectifying a fundamental flaw so one day the boat will float. You seem to be going on the assumption that productivity in the 3rd world is dictated by manpower. We've evolved past this point in the 1st world (productivity is dictated primarily by demand), but I believe that a lack of resources and infrastructure holds back the vast majority of the countries that will receive this aid. Labor is bountiful, which is why sweat shops can get away with paying subsistence wages. By inflating the population of a country with massive unemployment and poverty, starvation will likely take most of the lives that the vaccines have saved (and these deaths will be much, much slower). We obviously want to achieve the same ends, but until economic development evolves to the point where the populations primary needs of food and shelter are being met, fighting disease seems to me like a massively inefficient form of aid. | ||
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KnightOfNi
United States1508 Posts
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KwarK
United States43187 Posts
On February 03 2010 14:23 3clipse wrote: You seem to be going on the assumption that productivity in the 3rd world is dictated by manpower. We've evolved past this point in the 1st world (productivity is dictated primarily by demand), but I believe that a lack of resources and infrastructure holds back the vast majority of the countries that will receive this aid. Labor is bountiful, which is why sweat shops can get away with paying subsistence wages. By inflating the population of a country with massive unemployment and poverty, starvation will likely take most of the lives that the vaccines have saved (and these deaths will be much, much slower). We obviously want to achieve the same ends, but until economic development evolves to the point where the populations primary needs of food and shelter are being met, fighting disease seems to me like a massively inefficient form of aid. There's no lack of resources in the third world. Look at DRC, it's basically a layer of gold covered with a layer of diamonds covered with a layer of coal covered with a layer of coltan buried under highly fertile jungle. On the coltan note, the DRC contains 80% of the worlds coltan and coltan is a vital component in all mobile phone technology. DRC are sitting upon a near geographic monopoly on the core resource of the next technological revolution. If you deal with the high mortality rates in children through something like vaccination (which costs very little per child) then the birth rates should go down. Children are expensive, if they don't die half the time you'd end up with way more than you can afford. We're talking exposure/infanticide in the really backwards areas but tbh I don't have a huge problem with that if the family in question can't afford to raise a child. Education rates should go up because it makes more sense for a government to invest in education when the guy they're teaching won't die of curable diseases and correspondingly the amount of competiton between children for education should go down (simply as a result of the lower birth rate). A knockon effect is more advanced skillsets, higher productivity etc... Disease isn't simply a limitation on labour. It doesn't simply stop population growth because the short term solution to disease is to have more children. What it does do is make the population very high in the unproductive areas (the young and the sick) who consume the resources (and for the young the investment) of the productive while the productive part of the population remains stable in numbers. You may see a brief population boom as an entire generation reaches adulthood but that should self correct if the resources don't exist to sustain that higher population. But the point of combatting disease isn't to create increased labour (although I conceed that is a short term result), it's to increase productivity. It's to stop the wasted investment in children who get hundreds of dollars in skill training throughout their brief lifetime and then die because they didn't get a series of shots worth only cents. Those resources can then be allocated elsewhere. | ||
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Quanticfograw
United States2053 Posts
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Archaic
United States4024 Posts
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great effort, but 10 billion is a LOT of money... Just a little confused. | ||
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KwarK
United States43187 Posts
On February 03 2010 23:28 Archaic wrote: Is it just me, or is 8 million kinda low for 10 billion dollars? That's like... $1250 per child. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great effort, but 10 billion is a LOT of money... Just a little confused. I was confused about that too. Best answer I came with from the op was The GAVI Alliance—launched at the World Economic Forum 10 years ago this week—has reached 257 million additional children with new and underused vaccines, and prevented 5 million future deaths. That suggests that vaccines save the life of 1 in 50 of the people who recieve them. So there's only like a 2% chance that measles will be the specific disease that kills an individual for example so a universal measles vaccine would only stop 2% of the deaths. If the same statistics used in the op are typical then 8 million deaths stopped = 400 million children vaccinated which comes in at $25 each. Still pretty pricey but most diseases tend to cripple rather than kill. Also remember the vaccines are comboed with a bunch of other stuff to stop preventable deaths like mosquito nets. The combined package as a whole probably saves more lives but it's difficult to quantify exactly how many people a disease didn't kill. | ||
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J1.au
Australia3596 Posts
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KwarK
United States43187 Posts
On February 03 2010 23:58 J1.au wrote: Just what the world needs, more people. That explains the high birthrates in Europe where vaccines are most prevalent. Thanks for your well thought out contribution. Now if only we could explain the facts suggesting the opposite we'd be fine. | ||
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J1.au
Australia3596 Posts
Bill Gates should've spent the money on research into an elevator to space. | ||
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Fontong
United States6454 Posts
On February 04 2010 00:38 J1.au wrote: Yes, but vaccines don't make a country more stable and affluent. All they do is increase the population. That money would make a better difference if it was invested into education throughout the Third World. However, even then it would probably just end up in the hands of the rich elite who control those countries. Bill Gates should've spent the money on research into an elevator to space. Seriously, you have to read the thread. Kwark covered this ON THIS VERY PAGE. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=111134¤tpage=7#131 | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On February 03 2010 12:59 Ludrik wrote: Haha he's rich but not that rich. Anyway vast US national debt is essential to destabilise their economy so that wealth can be redistributed to others. Yeah... That's it. /whap Critical thinking, learn it | ||
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789
United States959 Posts
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