He is easily one of the least bullshit-y sources when it comes to handling of COVID. But then there's this right in the middle of the interview: "And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger]". Quite literally, encrypted communication should be illegal and the government should read everyone's private messages. What motivates a statement like this?
What's frustrating about this question is that it (inevitably!) commands the top of the HN thread with a discussion of the least interesting thing in the article. It's an article about COVID and Facebook, and here we're recapitulating the end-to-end encryption debate for the 8-zillionth time.
I would argue that this statement from Bill is the most interesting. This statement shows Bill Gates, someone who has influence on legislatures, making a statement against encryption.
Gates is scared people are passing bad information through encrypted platforms such as whatsapp. Next, he will require 24/7 monitoring of every private citizen to make sure we don’t call him mean names.
I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.
Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.
Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.
Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.
So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"
Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.
Are you sure you haven’t previously searched for window gates? Searching for things is so second nature by now that half the time we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.
Also, if your partner or anyone in your house searched for gates from the same IP, you will be getting ads for gates too, even if you never searched for them personally. That's a very common source of the "I never searched for something and now I'm getting ads for it" complaints.
Positive that I didn't search. I viewed the apartment, and several others, while my wife was in Taiwan with our baby. After I got home (existing apartment in SG) I text (on whatsapp) the agent about this specific apartment. I had not even raise the issue of the lack of gates with my wife yet. The ad's began about an hour after I messaged my agent.
couldn't have they added some kind of mechanidm to extract unusual words in the app itself to feed a separate stream of "interests" ?
It doesn't even have to be sent over the network. Could be a shared file on an app group that apps like facebook read and process.
IP address is one of many signals used to build a statistical profile.
It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.
If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.
I think this has started happening to me lately! I use pihole with the default block lists as well (in the US), which of course doesn’t get everything, but generally works pretty well.
So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop
Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.
That doesn't mean there's no E2E encryption. WhatsApp can take the text of your conversations and also send plaintext to Facebook for ad targeting, while the actual conversation to the other person is still E2E encrypted. Or do "local" analytics on the phone to find keywords for ad targeting. Etc.
So literally defeating the purpose of e2e encryption where the conversations are between me and the other person. Not parsed prior for advertising. In any case people should avoid WhatsApp as it’s clearly less secure now that Facebook owns it.
That in and of itself is a testament to how problematic our man-made legal system is.
Compare a nature made system to a man made system.
Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.
> Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.
There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.
Everyone has a range of opinions and some of them will be factually/morally/logically/practically objectionable. The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting.
What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purchased and the best thing that could have been bought was good information. If that time has been wasted then there should be reform of an evidence-based nature. This is an opinion that really deserves debate, opinions thrown about and evidence dredged up. With encryption, HN will basically just agree that he is wrong and everyone likes encryption. Not much more to say. Maybe we will think of the children on the way thorough.
Encryption is an important issue but frankly that isn't what Gates is talking about, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. It is barely even germain to the topic he is talking about. He is talking about a global pandemic.
It does speak to why he's treated with so much distrust, as is discussed by other threads. Unlike the average person, Gates is someone who can actually make things happen with his incredible wealth. It suggests a form of paternalistic authoritarian attitude towards social issues that undeniably colors his attitude towards this pandemic.
You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.
History of democracy in South Korea is short, and privacy is not recognized as an important virtue. Sacrificing your rights for the nation (or historically the kingdom) is an important duty, and failure to abide by such ‘selflessness’ is deemed as malicious and egocentric. It will take many more decades for South Korea to shed its cultural shadow of being subject to a ruler.
A case and point: Seoul is riddled with security cameras on every street. This makes Seoul an incredibly safe city, but also with decreased sense of privacy. Cameras are everywhere, and this is not recognized much as a potential problem in South Korea.
With Covid, there is a pending legislation to sign in your name and social security number whenever you visit designated crowded areas. I am worried for the increased loss of freedom and privacy in South Korea, but the culture worries less about that, and more about mutual subsistence.
> The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting.
Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.
Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.
It remains interesting that the various powers that be continuously want to take away what little privacy we 99% have. They can't imagine a world where normal people can exist without their oversight. This includes most billionaires and elected officials. I am glad he is contributing his billions to helping solve covid and other global disasters but these little clips can be telling about the individual's belief and to always realize they have many sides to their character.
Bill Gates said something stupid and people are talking about it. His phrasing is what I expect an old person who doesn't have decades of industry pioneering experience in technology to say. So weird.
Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.
He probably feels like he is the subject matter expert on technology but on medical stuff he listens to other people who claim to be subject matter experts.
In defense of the OP, fair balance: a counter complaint
What is frustrating about this comment is that it inevitably commands the top of the HN thread, "for the 8-zillionth time", because its author's moniker automatically attracts "upvotes" due its familiarity, not because the comment is the most interesting.
That said, this comment is probably worthy of being at the top since the E2E debate is indeed a tired one and that sentiment probably has many sympathisers. However, as someone else pointed out, Gates brought this up, not HN. And it does directly relate to discussions about COVID on Facebook (WhatsApp) and the ability to censor them. Of course, there is also the argument that newcomers to HN will not know all the past discussions of E2E, nor are they expected to read them before commenting. We regularly see HN re-post items that have previously been submitted, re-opening discussions that are old hat, inviting us to re-hash them.
While some readers may grow tired of seeing the same topics discussed over and over again, other readers may grow tired of seeing the same usernames at the top of so many threads, over and over again, no matter what their comments.
This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them.
You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch comments. This would force a style where authors would have to provide a two line summary of their comment (if it is a first branch comment) in order to facilitate scanning. With this approach the list of first branches would almost look like the HN home page, where you can quickly scan the short titles and expand topics of interest.
To address your comment directly, if the inevitable makes it to the top of the first branch list it will be easy to scan other first branches on the same page without having to scroll or take any action. This might promote participation in other threads within the conversation and maybe even the bubbling-up of more "worthy" contenders for the top first branch.
I've set up a similar approach with 3rd party apps on reddit.
Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.
I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.
HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are worse than waterboarding", etc.
Exactly, while it is also an echo chamber, I would argue it is one of the better ones. It selects information to echo in a much more effective and useful way than many other platforms. This is why we are here. Not because we assume that it would be somehow 100% objective place where everything is true. Is that even possible? If you have to select, from the tons of info out there, a list of something that can be parsed by a human in reasonable time, you will automatically filter out, and thus create a subjective view of reality.
Aye. Generally speaking, the filtering here is better, and the groupthink is operating at a different level than the broader population. It's groupthink nonetheless, but if you anticipate that you can usually find good info.
Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".
> It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)
I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.
Was puzzled by Gates' statement there. I didn't catch how the 'demon sperm doctors' video was related to encryption.
Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon themselves the authority of what's true and what isn't?
I have to believe the only answer is something they call freedom of speech. You can say whatever the hell you want publicly. I'm appalled by the fact the highest authority in the world retweeted the sperm doctors video as well, but I'm not so comfortable with FB, Twitter, etc. deciding for me what is true and not, or worth me reading, either.
So, the encryption issue doesn't apply here. It's a serious issue, but separate. The problem is not that encrypted lies can be sent. The lies that reach 1000 people aren't the problem. The problem is the unencrypted lies that REACH 80 million+ people.
It was disappointing to see that segue from Gates.
Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].
I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).
But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?
Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.
Yes, objectively the evidence I've seen supports that HCL and zinc, if given early enough, improve the outcome for the patient.
The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.
In the above comment I'm advocating for honest debate, not HCL.
That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).
However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.
It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.
I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.
I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.
I'd like to see people approach the debate with enough nuance to recognize that the science on recent topics is extremely flawed, and the trustworthiness of results is decreased significantly when it becomes politicized.
And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?
Perhaps all top level comments could have a subject or title. It would be as if they were, themselves, submissions.
This is one of the things Slashdot did rather well with its categorization and ratings, though if that system were used then I’m sure everything would just be rated +5 Insightful with little signal over the noise.
Yea, I feel bad about this tangent. I actually enjoyed the article, I just got annoyed about what I felt was a mischaracterization of the entire piece, leading to that mischaracterization dominating the discussion, I'm going to upvote the next comment..
I don't think he is saying that encrypted communication should be illegal. He's saying that spreading lies through encrypted channels should be stopped. It would not be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos, because they have access to the unencrypted information before and after sending. So either preventing people from sharing misinformation or preventing people from reading the misinformation. That's separate from the argument about whether or not it's a good thing (I wouldn't see a problem with it personally).
You know, Snopes has said that running a fact checking organisation is incredibly difficult. It's easy to see why, you have to:
1) decide what the definition of truth is
2) differentiate between subjectivity and objectivity
3) differentiate between misleading and outright incorrect
4) investigate every piece of media thoroughly
5) avoid bias
6) peer review
7) correct any mistakes
And this list is just off the top of my head.
So what bill gates is saying is that you have to do all this at a scale of 1 billion users, all controlled roughly by a few centralised organisations. I think Bill's words are still kind of stupid even with context. The way to fight all of these problems has always been education, and social welfare, and things the government should ACTUALLY be doing, not vetting encryption schemes.
No one is saying we need to replace Snopes or emulate what they are doing. But if a platform like WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter fact checked the most spread thousands videos per day, this problem would evaporate. You could do that with a team of 5 people. But you would need the will to do it, which is the part I think is lacking.
You'd think given the amount of time he's spent working on Coronavirus that he might see the distinction between treating the symptoms and treating the cause, so to speak.
I've yet to see anyone provide any kind of evidence that suggests censorship changes people's minds about conspiracies - if anything it seems to be doing exactly the opposite.
He is thinking about the root cause, but it's at a higher level. We don't have to change people's minds about conspiracies if they are never exposed to those false conspiracies in the first place. This also applies to other corrupting influences like hate and bigotry.
Very few people are actively seeking to become radicalized into some fringe movement. It instead happens more passively or through active recruitment by another member. Negative content is normalized when it appears on a platform intertwined with mainstream content. People stop viewing it as fringe and it becomes easier for people to be passively radicalized or recruited. When that content is only available on sites dedicated to that content, people aren't going to stumble upon it without recognizing what it truly is. There are plenty of stories about people being accidentally radicalized by what they see on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. You aren't going to accidentally be radicalized by visiting Storm Front.
I'm not sure there is evidence for or against. The argument I would make is not about censorship but preventing people from spreading lies. Even in the US where people hold free speech as some amazingly virtuous thing there are still curbs on speech, and what I'm saying is these limitations can be enforced in WhatsApp. Maybe you think that is censorship maybe you don't.
Also on that point, the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories, if only because 1) you can freely spread malicious lies and 2) it can be in a lot of people's interests to do so. I think it's always been in people's interest to spread lies, but I think recently in the very partisan climate in the US the media (and I'm including social media there) have happened upon the discovery that spreading this misinformation is actually very very good for business. It generates outrage in the opposite camp and keeps one side of the divide entertained.
> The argument I would make is not about censorship but preventing people from spreading lies.
Limiting speech is by definition censorship. There's no value judgement required as to the quality or veracity of that speech to determine whether or not restricting it counts as censorship.
> the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories
...and water is highly correlated with drowning. We don't say 'water bad, less water'. Just because one thing is a prerequisite for something else doesn't mean it is responsible for that other thing. We have to look to, like you point out, the political climate, as well as the lack of trust in institutions, the education system, and many other factors. Taking a complex issue around how information is shared at an unprecedented speed and scale and saying "just ban it" is, I think, a shallow assessment.
But discouraging the spreading of a message at each spreader, for example by letting the spreader know the message is tagged as misleading by some large number of people before they spread it further is not censorship.
That may limit the rate, intensity, and real-world effect of some kinds of information, without fundamentally limiting the right to free speech.
>censorship but preventing people from spreading lies. Even in the US where people hold free speech as some amazingly virtuous thing there are still curbs on speech
>I'm saying is these limitations can be enforced in WhatsApp.
1) Are you speaking of constitutional curbs on speech (because there aren't many)? Or are you talking about curbing speech that is believed to yield negative outcomes?
2) How, precisely, could these be enforced? I ask because automated moderation at scale is impossible to do responsibly and consistently. This will not change anytime soon.
3) Gates seems to be demonizing encryption. Few options can logically follow that position. Either Gates advocates replacing beneficial (to everyone) encryption with vulnerable (to everyone) encryption or he advocates banning encryption outright. It's difficult to see how either of these outcomes would benefit anyone (other than authoritarian governments and similarly repressive interests).
Even if Gates got his way on #3 (make everyone more vulnerable), #2 remains technically impossible.
Cancel culture probably should be #2, it's debatable if it even scratches the surface of achieving #2. It seems cancel culture is not interested in people being dishonest, or spreading misinformation intentionally and maliciously, it's more concerned with enforcing new social mores against dredged up old statements/actions. That could be a good thing, in and of itself, but it doesn't help solve the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Well, for starters (given two-way communication) you can ask them for the sources of their claims, or at least demand that they defend the logic behind it. Then you can take it from there, and unravel the fallacies for them. Or if you want to be more polite, then carefully point the fallacies out for them and ask what they think about it themselves, when looking more closely at it. This would be the pedagogic approach, for those of you who have the patience.
And if it all falls apart (like it sometimes does when people are faced with their own failure), then you can at least ask them to give arguments instead of ad homs. I always try to be polite the first time around, but if they double down, I let them have it. But really, if it ever falls that low, it usually means that you already won, and so you don't really need to bother any further with the discussion.
My thinking is that most people who read such discussions can think for themselves, and so giving good arguments, unraveling faulty logic, and showing the truth, will always let truth and logic prevail in the end.
Usually you will never get a person to admit that he's wrong anyway, at least not to your face, so don't even worry about it! But people do change their minds about things. It usually happens in private, especially if they just facepalmed right into their own flawed logic. So if they do, never gloat and pretend like nothing happened, and rather commend them for telling the truth later on.
Perhaps I'm naïve, but I enjoy staying positive like that. :)
Mere faceless fake news and conspiracy theories, however, simply needs highlighting and debunking. There are several sites that specialize in that already, with various success. It's not perfect, but IMHO it's preferrable to outright censorship. Because who can be the final arbiter of truth anyway...
> It would not be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos
The problem is there’s no agreed upon definition for what’s “bogus”. A while ago someone commented here with a list of statements ranging from obviously false obviously true to show how hard the problem is, I wish I could find it.
Several commenters point out end-to-end encryption would prevent filtering or tagging messages.
But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy.
Tagging (or removing) a message before you send/forward it, or after you receive it, with "the central message of this comment has been tagged as "probably a hoax" by hoaxtracker.com; check out this CDC notice <here> to learn more".
<here> does not need to be a URL which reveals much other than your general interest in the subject. But if that seems too revealing, it could already be already available as part of the endpoint's filtering data and readable locally.
Lots of people forward (retweet), or write a little something before resharing what is false or misleading information, not realising they're doing so. I would not be surprised if getting those tags, rarely enough to stand out, before they send the message would cause some people to hesitate and check/think a bit more before sending. Maybe rephrase their attached comment into a question rather than confident outrage.
Technically this is not much different from privacy-preserving spam filtering.
Yes, they can analyze it in the app on user devices before it is encrypted and transmitted. The app on user decide need access to clear text in order to encrypt the message. Same on the receiving end. The app on user device can analyze the message once it is decrypted on user device.
Wow did I not read something similar last couple of days about on-device machine learning being better than in the cloud machine learning and how Apple got that right. That's where this may also be going then if we follow your train of thought.
On device is where you want it if it's going to analyse really private data, or something effectively your own (such as homomorphic encryption, or a link to your own computers elsewhere).
You're likely to feel so much happier, freer and easier sharing your most personal life datastream with an AI assistant, if you can be sure its most intimate analysis is just between the two of you.
Coincidence or not, the dystopian AIs are somewhere in the cloud and work for someone else, while the utopian AIs are intimately personal to each user and work just for the user.
Sure why not? As long as no data ever leaves the device unencrypted and the encrypted data can only be decrypted by the client at the other end. Of course you'd probably have to take the app's word for it that that's actually what it's doing if you don't have the source, but that's no different from current E2E encryption offerings from WhatsApp etc.
The part I'm not sure about is whether the on-device certification that the message is "clean" couldn't be (easily) spoofed. But it would probably help curb distribution of illegal material anyway.
No, obviously not. The mental gymnastics involved here are impressive: the point of E2E encryption is to stop the service provider seeing or tampering with your messages. If they do that anyway it doesn't really matter how it's implemented. They could also just use a broken random number generator, or many other ways to implement the policies whilst still having encryption code in the product. It's the end result that matters, not the precise means of implementing it.
Phew, agreed. I mean of course the company "can" read the message. If it does, I would love to see that shown by the app upfront, so I can avoid using it.
Analysis happens on either end, not the network or servers. Of course if both ends are "cracked" this doesn't work, but the goal is to stop mass spread of disinformation. Most people won't modify their client.
> But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy.
This is stupid. Lots of naked baby photos get sent in my culture (Eastern-European country) in a most non-harmful way, i.e. from parents to the kids' grand-parents or even to the parents' close friends (especially from the mother to her friends). Your supposed filter will most probably block that social-sharing process (because it will see photos of naked children => very, very bad), not realising the above mentioned context.
Truth is truth. Saying something is possible isn't the same as advocating that it be done, and it's useful to point out something is possible when people at first seem to think it is not.
Also, I was talking about messages, not baby photos, and with regard to misleading or false information, hoaxes etc that cause people to behave more dangerously to others during a pandemic. Saving lives, that sort of thing.
If it's giving the user advice that others have judged what they are retweeting to be a hoax or bad medical advice, that's not blocking, it's providing context. If they don't like it, they should be able to dial it down.
With regard to baby photos, if a network starts blocking those due to poor filtering, I would hope people switch over to another network that lets them share the photos.
> Your supposed filter will most probably block
I wasn't talking about filtering particularly, the emphasis was on providing a note to the user. Much like when Twitter attached a note to Trump's tweets.
In any case, the analysis I had in mind is not "skin tone filters" and that sort of nonsense. It's not meant to be thought police, working for someone else. It's meant to advise the users themselves to think again about some content. At least at the currently level of sophistication, that would be "we recognise this particular message or photo".
There are better and worse ways to implement it of course.
Something that reveals no information to others is not a privacy violation by definition.
(Although, something that blocks communication (which I don't think I agree with anyway) based on local analysis is an autonomy violation. But not a privacy violation.)
Something that tells you when you've just received a well documented hoax is not malware, it's probably useful, and most people will probably keep it switched on if the quality is consistently good.
By your logic, spam filtering (outgoing and incoming) is also malware, and a privacy violation. (Even though it protects people against malware, and indirectly protects privacy.)
Do you believe spam filtering is bad? I doubt it.
Yes, people ask for certain kinds of anlysis based message blocking all the time. We begged and pleaded for better spam filtering 20 years ago because the vast majority of messages were pure spam and it had made email difficult to use. It's a major reason people switched to Gmail, because other providers' spam filters weren't good enough.
I think the key feature most people would want in any kind of alerting, tagging or filtering is that it does what they want, rather than what the enemy wants, as it were. As people's preferences differ, that can only happen if it's configurable by them rather than blanket imposed. Things like ad blockers work this way - you can change the defaults if you want - and people seem to like those.
The main purpose of E2EE communication between willing participants is that the content of the communication is not checked, inspected, scanned, questioned, sampled, matched, filtered, modified, blocked, altered, or otherwise interfered with in any way whatsoever except that which is explicitly configured and consented to by a party to the conversation. (eg. anti-virus, anti-spam, group membership, etc)
That means no control of communication by the endpoint software either directly or indirectly between willing senders and recipients regardless of justification, and especially on the basis of whether or not data send from a willing sender to a willing receipient represents the "truth". The endpoint software vendor has no standing to judge that unless it's an opt-in anti-spam type feature.
It would indeed be very hard, if WhatsApp's own claim that messages are encrypted end-to-end is true. Either way (and I disagree that this should be a separate discussion) all methods of global speech control are eventually used for evil.
So first off, I think "WhatsApp" is being used in two ways here. 1) is WhatsApp the company or the central server and the other 2) is the app on someone's phone. When people say end to end they mean from the WhatsApp app on someone's phone to the other WhatsApp app on another person's phone with no way WhatsApp the company can read the message.
So what I'm saying is it's easy for the app on people's phone to filter or block sharing misinformation, because the app can see what the data is just like your eyes using the app can see what the data is. I'd also be fairly surprised if WhatsApp the app re-uploaded every single shared video, I'd say it's more likely they share a link or hash and encrypt that link in the message (but that is just a guess).
To your second point.
All methods of global speech are eventually used for evil. All methods of communication are eventually used for evil, all methods of food preparation are eventually used for evil. There are some flaws in that argument.
"It would be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos, because they have access to the unencrypted information before and after sending."
Facebook/WhatsApp claims WhatsApp messages are "end-to-end" encypted. For example, here
They could put a tiny truth ministry module in the app and remain e2e:
"I'll be on my way home in five minutes!" [send]
"Sorry, our algorithms have detected that you were about to spread misinformation. Please contact support to reactivate your account. Premium support is available to subscribers of our membership programme"
I'm actually only half joking: while some local library code surely cannot tell truth from lies, that problem remains just as unsolved for arbitrary amounts of central effort. There's a reason truth ministries are a Bad Idea.
And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
Note the []? Was this added in by Medium? Gates as an edit after a read-and-OK-to-release? Did Gates have editorial input?
Regardless, I believe [] means 'edited afterwards for clarity'. But by whom?
Yet in this case, there was no hatred of encryption, but picked quotes where he suggested that in one case, if you have the means, the government should be aided .. eg, a murderer.
There was another article on hackernews, where many lamented how much the media just spins, takes quotes out of context, basically does whatever it wants to. I wonder, how much of this are we seeing here?
(Note, Gates could very much be for back-doored encryption, but my point is, I don't think it's a clear position due to this medium article.. where that stances was in [] and added by someone after...)
The POTUS said CNN is fake news, hundreds of times. So, as you say, people should be prevented from sharing and reading it?! There's no problem with that?!
The very first item on the USA Bill of Rights isn't important?
If we extend this line of thinking, where does it lead?
The goal seems to be removing easy access to communications where governments can't listen for signs of dangerous behavior. But individuals can write custom software. Is there a stage in this arms race where one would need company/nation-state level resources to communicate in private?
Is there a potential future in which every piece of end-user software can't run without being signed by the government and is enforced at the CPU level? I'd hate to think this is even possible, but my (limited) understanding of secure enclaves makes me think there's a chance.
Quick point: the entire controversial/nuanced part of that statement happened in the summary/paraphrase brackets, not his own words.
If you're sitting here going, "gosh, I wonder why someone that well-informed would say that?!", I'd point out that you don't actually know the full detail of what he said.
This is just Gates venting out, dude is sooo frustrated. Imagine doing as much as he did and still getting horseshit accusations about putting chips into people's bodies or whatever new nonsense they will come up in 6 months.
I agree, but Gates has to know that on balance e2e encryption is better than not. I too feel the same frustration to a much lesser degree when talking to family members.
No, he doesn't have to know that. There is a deep divide on that question; it only seems like there isn't because this particular bubble we're in is essentially unified on it. That's not true of the wider world.
I find it impossible to argue against encryption. People should have the tools to do things secretly. If you want to prevent all the bad things Bill talked about, attack those things, not the tools.
IIRC the argument is basically that as tech progresses it will get easier and easier for any one person to destroy the planet. According to Bostrom the only way to prevent that is no secrets and ubiquitous surveillance.
None of what he said is correct and even if it was, it would be easier to destroy every piece of technology on earth than put collars around people to monitor what they do (According to his own idea of destruction, this is doubly true. He thinks destroying humanity can happen very easily so why can't it be easy to destroy devices?). I have trouble trusting this guy, and it's hard to resist calling him names. So I think I'm still going to argue that you cannot argue against encryption.
He doesn't seem to realise however that he's making this far worse.
Literally a core part of the Gates/COVID conspiracy theories goes like this:
"Bill Gates want to track everyone and is using a COVID vaccine as a trojan horse to do it"
Then he goes and says, gee, maybe it shouldn't be possible to say things Bill Gates doesn't like and the way to implement this is to ensure tech firms can monitor and track everything everyone is saying.
He's basically giving his critics an intellectual ammo dump with this interview. Dude doesn't seem self-aware, at all.
That was my take too. Him being frustrated at the problem. Sort of like when Obama rolls his eyes when someone makes a birther joke.
I personally think the solution isn't to make it harder to share lies, but easier to share the truth. Sharing the truth is actually extremely labor intensive.
Gates seems to hint that the way to reduce lie-sharing is by eliminating safe encryption (replacing safe encryption with unsafe encryption). This is an inherently dangerous stance (to everyone except repressive authoritarians).
Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? I hadn’t until I listened to this podcast with NYT investigative journalist. Worth considering how serious the trade offs are https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/
I normally enjoy Sam but found that episode was voiced more by his inner parent than his usual hyper-rational self. Child porn is a scourge that should be destroyed but there was minimal discussion of the following that I would normally expect from Sam:
- Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs
- Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?
To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue they cite a study that around 5% of the population have consumed child pornography. My own experience has been that unsavoury images can be posted in public places and none of the viewers intend to see the material. I suspect (and hope!) this is where the 5% comes from. This is not caused or solved by the masses having access to encryption.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.
E2E refers to end to end. I imagine he means encryption in transport as opposed to encryption at rest.
HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.
Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.
His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.
Presumably like historical encryption, available to the government and the super wealthy. That was what they were attpting when they tried to classify PGP as munitions.
The podcast makes the suggestion that encryption doesn't have to be universal. If most communication were through unencrypted channels then policing would be easier, and the use of an encrypted channel would still be possible for critical communications (although may draw scrutiny).
>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media?
What does that have to do with encryption?
Also, sidebar:
Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet".
Together they're responsible for a bazillion-fold increase of illegal porn. It's imperative that legislation be passed that sabotages the basic functions of computers and renders them ineffective at performing their primary task.
Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.
> Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.
No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.
I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure. I don’t see your point though as we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet... Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped. If currently reported counts from automation in the US are in the order of magnitude of 100 million (I forget exact numbers, but it was near this) from a small number of companies, there’s just no way to combat that manually with “good old fashioned police work” and I don’t know of other options besides those two..
Here's the greater point no one is talking about. Reread Gates statements. Illegal porn was practically an aside tossed in at the last minute. His point was lies.
Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies.
The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty.
LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, along with a corresponding loss of our civil liberties (which translates to increased Gov/LEO power).
re:9/11
All of us remember how tech + new gov powers + gobs of cash were necessary to stop the terrorists (practically in our borders and ready any second to unleash more devastating attacks).
Less remembered is how anti-terror Tech/Power/Cash is being used against low-level offenders (eg: Fusion Centers)
And sickeningly predictable, anti-terror tech is today being deployed against people who criticize cops (eg: protests)
Which is exactly what the history of LEO (Gov,etc) suggested was going to happen (eg: War On Drugs). That same history is now poking at us to realize that we can expect the same from War On Illegal Porn.
At least that's something we could learn, if learning from history is something we wanted to do.
>I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure.
My point was that the creation rate of illegal porn exploded because of computers. Your above statement seems dismissive of that.
>we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet. Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped.
It isn't and hasn't been. Large tech companies intercept and report billions of images to LEO regularly, which are largely captured before and after transport.
Meanwhile, actual police work is what leads police to people who harm children - the importance of which is being increasingly eclipsed by the obsession with safe encryption.
Sidebar: I don’t understand your flippancy. There literally are children to think about. Is your privacy really more important that children being raped? So yes “for the children”.
Usernames and passwords are just one "privacy" related item that are transported over networks. Without encryption they are trivially easy to retrieve from any number of points along the network.
I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.
Such an off beat example, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.
Is that sarcasm? Logging into sites w/ usernames/passwords is literally a thing people do many times a day. That's the opposite of off-beat.
>We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.
End to end encryption is primarily about transport encryption. Scanning for content on media servers strongly suggests you're talking about encryption at rest - a very different application than transport encryption.
So this is where the miscommunication is. I didn’t know people were attacking TLS, that seems absurd to me. When I hear e2e, I interpret it as no one except the communicating parties can see the data. Facebook messenger DOES use TLS but it does not have e2e encryption.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page, your definition is the original one but in the last 6 years it’s evolved to the meaning I was using.
He's thinking from a pragmatic, utilitarian mindset. He has no principles surrounding privacy. If it has to be sacrificed to get the job done that's fine in his mind as long as it's a net positive.
Anyone who rigorously follows an ethical framework will eventually be lead to some conclusion(s) they dislike; utilitarianism is no guarantee of satisfaction.
An honest utilitarian would be willing to share their calculations, which would be interesting to see, though I am not sure how you'd balance the interests in the cases described above.
>Anyone who rigorously follows an ethical framework will eventually be lead to some conclusion(s) they dislike
I've fallen into this trap. It led me to realize that, like ideologies, all frameworks are flawed. Assuming otherwise leads to positions that are starved for empathy and compassion - and that are ultimately counterproductive.
His view is both utilitarian and short sighted. They don't always go together but they often do since there isn't time enough to work everything out from first principles.
Yes, that is certainly true and rather scary since people are quite short sighted and currently in a mood for doing things for the greater good while sacrificing individual freedoms.
There's a lot to unpack in that quote and much of it is up to our interpretation.
I feel that the following statements could both be true.
1. Social media platforms should be able to monitor what content users are sharing on these platforms. Therefore these platforms maybe shouldn't have end-to-end encryption.
2. People need to have access to encryption for their own usage outside of social media platforms.
Where this might get tricky is in decentralized platforms which nobody owns. But we don't need to deal with this right now because it's not yet a problem. This will be a cat and mouse game always.
EDIT: Points 1 and 2 aren't necessarily my beliefs. I haven't put enough thought and research into it to have a more fully formed belief. These points are just my interpretation of what Gates could be saying. The context of encryption is in these platforms. He's not attacking encryption in general. Though other sources may reveal more information which could change my interpretation.
>>> Social media platforms should be able to monitor what content users are sharing on these platforms.
Then you’re not a platform, you are a publisher and should be held accountable for what you choose to publish. A platform is literally that: a platform for use by users as they see intended. I’m not talking about trolls, spammers, hackers and those who post illegal content. When platforms move down to editorialize content, they cease to be defined as a platform.
Section 230 allows internet companies to control which content is shown on their platforms and also gives them liability protection against being held accountable for content created by users.
Interesting. Facebook did argue for being a publisher in one case so that they could limit their liability for defamation. But that move would then limit their protections as a platform (as mentioned by another user as a reply to your comment.)
Kinda rich he spearheaded his own control of what people do with his bytes to now say others can't. I wish it wasn't true that enabling something like this would compromise all of our collective security.
Problem (lie, fraud, child pornography) is real. IMHO, Bill is not proposing a solution to disable encryption. He is simply saying that government should not allow these activities encrypted. Industry, governments, academics should figure out the best solution.
He's a billionaire. The government defends his billions from being redistributed by angry dying people. He doesn't want potential revolutionaries to be able to communicate easily.
This is the right answer. HN likes to think of Bill Gates as a techophile because that’s where he started, but today he’s foremost a billionaire with more to lose than to gain.
And Warren's actual proposed rate, 3% for everything over $1 billion, is outpaced by the 11% annual rate of return for the S&P 500 over the last 30 years. A wealth tax would just slow down how fast the rich get richer.
Because they know what awaits them if they try to leave the "chosen path" (a path that also helps them remain billionaires, so not that difficult a moral compromise to make). See Joseph Nacchio [1]:
> Joseph P. Nacchio is an American executive who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International from 1997 to 2002. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Perhaps you should take pause and reflect on the broader issue Gates is talking about.
Social media is destroying our society in front of our eyes. Identifying how and why that is happening is something that matters too. The hardline techie position that all communications must be completely encrypted with obfuscated origins is a position whose consequences are not fully understood.
"As someone who has built your life on science and logic, I'm curious what you think when you see so many people signing onto this anti-science view of the world.
Well, strangely, I'm involved in almost everything that anti-science is fighting. I'm involved with climate change, GMOs, and vaccines. The IRONY [emphasis added] is that it's DIGITAL [emphasis added] social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, "OK, there's just an evil person, and that explains all of this."
Well, you're friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Have you talked to him about this?
After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he's got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there. The lies are so titillating you have to be able to see them and at least slow them down."
Gates has a reason to be against the spreading of information on social media because recently he became a target of conspiracy theories spread on social media.
If encryption is an imediment to stoping people from spreading theories about him, then he obviously has a reason to be against encryption when used to spread these theories.
Maybe what is more interesting is when he uses the word irony right before he states he is against encryption.
What does he mean?
What is ironic about the fact that it is "digital social media" that allows "oversimplistic explanation[s]"?
HN readers can probably make better guesses than me. Disgreement with the guesses I make is expected.
For example, perhaps it is ironic because:
He has been such a strong proponent of using computers for anything and everything.
Gates was initially a skeptic of the internet, but later believed Microsoft's "internet strategy" was of primary importance. This led to projects like Internet Explorer and MSN. The company is now preparing to spend billions to acquire a social media company.
In amassing the fortune that allows him to pursue these philanthropic causes he and his company presented countless titillating, oversimplistic explanations of the value of using computers for seemingly anything. He wanted us to believe that the computer (running Windows of course) was the great enabler.
I have no idea what he meant and I am grasping at straws.
Where did he say government should read everyone's private messages? Governments can access my security box at the bank. That is different from governments rifling through it all the time.
In practice there is no scalable way for the government to check everyone's security box every second. However, it is possible for them to scan every message sent in real time and past leaks have shown that they will if given the opportunity.
I think that's the problem. We need to be able to trust they wont, in the current climate there is no chance of that.
If there were strong privacy laws defining how and when data could be collected and accessed then in theory I'm happy for the right people to have access to investigate criminal acts. Under a warrant that a judge has reviewed.
But currently it seems to be a free-for-all with tech companies being the ones in control of most of the data.
> However, it is possible for them to scan every message sent in real time
Gates didn't suggest that the messages be sent unencrypted through government-controlled message routers either. Presumably, he is promoting systems that work like MS Teams or Slack.
Right here.
"And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger]."
Unless you're alleging the stuff in the brackets isn't attributable to Gates and doesn't reflect his position on encryption.
He is saying encryption as used in WhatsApp. What's in the brackets reflects his position if you read it in the proper context, which is not what you are alleging it to be. He is fine with the encryption in Slack and Teams.
Just to make it clear, this seems very much like Gates to me as an Indian. He has bank rolled several very problematic studies in India in collusion with the fascist (at least super right wing) government, including the very controversial biometric national ID (AADHAAR) project. They were quite literally holding newborns hostages[1].
If you want to completely eradicate crime one way to do it would be to completely eradicate privacy.
Would you sacrifice your privacy if it could eliminate child pornography? The theory is hard to say no to, but in practice that kind of power has never worked out. If we want to retain privacy we have to accept some amount of crime going unnoticed.
Such a premise begs the question that those given the power would sincerely use it to shutdown child exploitation and other crime.
It seems to me that there are many instances where child exploitation is ignored when it is politically convenient such that giving up our privacy wouldn't be of benefit to society, and would be largely to our detriment.
You somehow imply that it's impossible to get rid of crime without getting rid of privacy which is an absurd claim.
Finally if you take a look at pure math - most of worlds suffering, evil and death is inflicted by world's governments. You'd put your trust in that over individuals?
I won't just imply it, I'll say it too: It's impossible to stop ALL crime while also retaining privacy.
I also said in my (very short) comment that such an extreme level of power never works out in practice. So we need to accept that as long as privacy exists, some amount of crime will. We can't eliminate privacy without giving someone too much power.
This is a general debate either for or against more government. It’s why the libertarian movement is closely related to open source, free speech, encryption and bitcoin.
Not sure how one could make such an ill-considered comment. It is always useful to ask 'cui bono?'. Who benefits the most from e2e? Is it the individual? Or is it Facebook and friends, who can use it to drastically lower content moderation costs, legal liability and the general smell from transmitting harmful content, while making a fortune. To me, they are doing what all 'great' capitalist enterprises manage to do, which is make someone else pay for the negative externalities of their business. For other examples see the fossil fuel industry, processed food, and the grandaddy of them all, big tobacco. Gates is not swallowing the koolaid.
The desire to own all the information to own the whole world.
And it's obvious that this is not "his" statement, but a statement from the mouth of a puppet who is absolutely dependent on spreading the agenda in order to maintain his status quo of an "independent billionaire"
Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? I hadn’t until I listened to this podcast with NYT investigative journalist. Worth considering how serious on of the trade offs are... https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/
So, let's walk through this. You have to either have a bunch of people look at child pornography and vet out all that content, or train a neural network on gigabytes worth of child pornography. Either way you want to fight child pornography by collecting and viewing tons and tons of it, as opposed to, I don't know, preventing children from being sex trafficked? Not letting children marry adults?
The biggest porn website on the planet still has trouble solving this problem. Everyone in this thread including bill gates has assumed that this is an easy one to solve.
This is so asinine, especially because bill lumped this problem in with fact checking, which is in a completely different realm of problems.
Even on Covid. He warned in Feb that covid could result in 10 millions deaths in Africa, when we knew already from the Chinese numbers that the demographics of covid deaths was massively skewed toward 70yo+, and Africa has a very young population. I classify him in the FUD spreading category.
It wasn't about the demographic, but about the fact that their healthcare system would get overloaded, which impacts a lot of treatments for everybody else.
Also the problem with predictions of epidemic is that if you actually do a better job than expected at confinement / protection measures, then predictions are meaningless. You "could have" a lot of bad things happen, but once you do things right, they disappear. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have done those things, it just means that people have been warned properly. He said, if they get hit severely, impact would be much bigger than in the west. He didn't say the 10 million was a done deal.
Why not? Africa has almost 1.3 billion people. The notion 0.8% could die from a pandemic which, let loose, can infect virtually everyone and has a 1% casualty rate is not so strange. Obviously measures were taken, but it's not so weird to talk about a scenario in which no measures are taken, in February when many countries had no clue what was coming to them and didn't take it too seriously yet.
No virus in history has infected virtually everyone, and there are lots of experts calling foul on that particular assumption right now. It's baked into epidemiological models but those models are always wrong, and the assumption of very high susceptible populations is being floated in several papers as one of the possible reasons.
Is this the quote you based your classification on? Seems like he is talking generally about the threat of a pandemic causing 10 million or more deaths. He also mentions Asia.
"This is a huge challenge, we’ve always known the potential for a naturally caused, or intentionally caused, pandemic is one if the few things that could disrupt health systems and economies and cause more than 10 million excess deaths.
This could be particularly if it spreads in areas like sub-Saharan Africa and some Asia, it could be very very dramatic.
We’re doing the constant science to provide the tools to do the diagnosis to provide vaccines, to provide therapeutics and hopefully contain this epidemic, but it’s potentially a very bad situation."
For Africa it's just "one more disease" that probably won't even show up much in mortality numbers because there's just so many other slow disasters at the same time.
Bill Gates is a public health expert. He has been working on these problems with some of the smartest minds in the field for decades now. How long does someone need to be working on a problem before they're worthy of being a "go to source", in your opinion?
Well anyone who has extensively published novel research that has altered best practise in the field for the better and has a track record of being sensible, well-reasoned, logical, has an understanding of how humans organise not just the natural world and has wonderful command of spoken and written expression would be near the top of the wish-list.
It's not how long it took that person to demonstrate this. It's that Gates kinda hasn't really done it.
He's far from terrible but he gets pretty low scores on most of those attributes. He's not going to be listened to if he didn't bring the money. His experience in making microsoft a juggernaut in the 80s and 90s is not super-relevant here but that's why he's being held up as an "authority." That position of authority is one he seems very happy to hold and use as a pulpit.
Is it deserved at all? Maybe it is. He did bring the money to a lot of programs and I believe he is even bankrolling the WHO nowadays (worthwhile after their multiple screwups that continue? I don't know. Maybe it is and a vital service he's performed there). Gates an expert? Hmm. Don't think he's really demonstrated that conclusively. He'd use his position to get advice from one or more, one would think.
To be clear. More power to him giving his vast wealth away to try and make the world better in tangible ways. You can't possibly spend more than $100m in your life on consumption even if you're totally nuts. Go for immortality. Do it in a way that's kinda good. Go Bill! I pray your good intentions don't pave a road you don't want built as I do everyone's good intentions, including my own.
> but that's why he's being held up as an "authority."
Look at his prepandemic warnings of a pandemic and how it would play out. And real money and action in trying to prevent it. That's why he is being held up as an authority.
Presumably Bill Gates was a good manager and CEO, he became the richest man in the world by running a very successful software company.
And in his current field of "global health" he hopefully has as good of a grasp of the issues, the proposed solutions, and since he's a smart man he's hopefully able to separate the bullshit from the effective solutions.
A financial stake is usually about making a profit. The Gates Foundation is not going to make any profit here, it's looking at funding vaccines at super low cost and giving them away or the manufacturer selling them for as little as possible to governments who would give them away. I hated Gates the monopolist and the foundation has messed up on a few questions (see: efforts in Education), but how in hell can you say that it has a financial stake? If anything, the most successful people are at finding a solution, the more he's going to deplete the coffers of the Foundation, as a vaccine manufacturing force multiplier.
Bill Gates certainly doesn’t have the credentials of a public health expert. His work with health experts has extended to funding and choosing what problems to solve.
You’d presume he’s learned a fair amount about it over the years. But I’ve learned a fair amount about accountancy through my years of working with corporate accountants. I’m definitely not an accountancy expert though.
What qualifications do you imagine he has? What significant work do you believe he has personally contributed to?
There are credentials and there are credentials, right?
The difference between a trained lawyer or accountant and someone with a lot of exposure to such knowledge is very specific skills and procedures. The difference between someone who is a trained manager with a degree and someone who's managed a medium sized organization is more or less nothing just an ability to use jargon.
I've actually looked online courses and documentation on epidemiology and public health. Unlike medicine (which I know nothing of) or advance mathematics (which I know and I know it take specialized skills), epidemiology seems to be a "smattering" sort of fields. A mix of public policy, simple medicine, biology and experimental methods and statistics. I could be wrong but it seems a field that's wide, not deep.
If your full time job is to lead corporate accountants / head a large corporate accountancy firm and you've done it for several years, I'd consider you an accountancy expert.
It's not corporate in the sense of a successful business. It's a self-funded personal project with nothing to hold it accountable for competency. This is one of the major criticism of Gates in the NGO world.
Sure, but that doesn't make him not an expert. Accountability != expertise. People believe Bill Gates is credible because he has a long track record of being credible.
I guess that makes the guy who manages my software engineering team a software engineering expert too?
As far as I can tell, the person who actually leads the Gates Foundation health division is Trevor Mundel. Even then, the work of the Gates Foundation has been in funding projects lead by other organisations, rather than in implementing those projects themselves.
So if an engineering team is successful, then their manager is necessarily an engineering expert? You’re really not providing any rationale to support this rather extreme position. Bill Gates experience in the field of public health is choosing projects to finance, and even then he is not the primary person responsible for that in his foundation. Bill Gates has no credentials you could point to, and has done no work you could point to, that would support an assertion of him being a public health expert. It is frankly a ridiculous proposition.
His work in eradicating Polio.
Choosing which projects to finance is a skill in itself, something he's likely more capable of than a traditionally credentialed expert. I can't help but think that you have an arbitrarily narrow definition of expertise.
What public health expertise do you believe Bill Gates personally contributed to the
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative? As far as I can tell, Bill Gates contributed $110 million USD
to The Global Polio Eradication Initiative in funding, but personally contributed no polio eradication expertise at all to that project.
There is no basis at all for claiming he’s a public health expert. He might be an effective philanthropist, but that’s a completely different topic.
I mean but you can take this even further using your logic: Why even listen to Dr. Fauci, then? Is Fauci at Moderna right now actually making the vaccine? Get me the lab tech running the tests and I'll settle for nothing less!
Like it or not, he's become a highly controversial figure for a large fraction of the population, particularly within the societies that his foundation works. In my opinion, they'd do good to pick a figure whose name is less tarnished if they want the message to be more broadly accepted.
3 : he wants to use his money for philanthropic cause. I can't overstate how great it is. The way he uses his money though, has been pretty controversial. From pushing a pro patent agenda in countries that are too poor to afford medicine made under that system to accusations of straight up using his money so his ideas are applied, even when they go against actual experts with data (and actual expertise) to back their positions.
I'm not interested in digging up the information on this because it was over 10 years ago, so take it with a huge grain of salt.
He had this huge presentation about a laser zapping mosquitoes. The patent was fed to a patent troll, the whole board was stacked with his friends, the company produced nothing and was set up to sue anyone who did try and produce anything. 10 years later they still haven't produced more than the one prototype. The 'charitable' donations were literally just tax write offs that paid for his friends salary.
Since then I really don't take him seriously at all. His charities are just a way to reduce his tax bill and look like he cares, while he's just paying his friends to work on projects they find interesting regardless of the chance of success.
In short: hubris, corruption, white collar rico and tax evasion.
The point of this article appears to be that the Gates foundation simultaneously promotes vaccination and helps pharmaceutical companies with their vaccine research. While that is technically a conflict of interest...it's not much of one. They do both of those things vaccines because vaccines save millions of lives per year.
It'd be like saying it's a conflict of interest to promote access to clean water, while also investing in companies that supply clean water. Sure. It's a conflict. It's also exactly what you would do if you just wanted people to have clean water.
I think his biggest mistake is that he's focused so much on two issues that make it easy to paint him in a negative light. If I was a native Nigerian and some rich white guy started building abortion centres and injecting people with needles all over my country it would be easy to become skeptical.
If I were in his shoes I'd focus more on issues like education, improving basic utilities in urban areas, fighting corruption and enabling economies to expand.
No matter who you put forth saying what Gates has been saying, they will quickly be tarnished by the same baseless bullshit. Effectively 0% of people knew who Facui or Birx were before the pandemic. Now they're the target of the same kind of controversy.
It’s the same mechanism over and over. If I say something on a blog or newspaper like : “user Creato makes apps that make people dumber”
It is you who have to go on the defensive, especially if it gets spread far and wide, regardless if it is true or not. But the lie is out there and your truth has to catch up.
I think if someone was gay and or dealt with HIV in some form, they likely heard of Dr Fauci. Researchers definitely know who is. From his CDC bio: “In a 2020 analysis of Google Scholar citations, Dr. Fauci ranked as the 41st most highly cited researcher of all time. According to the Web of Science, Dr. Fauci ranked 7th out of more than 1.8 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2020.”
Maybe zero young people but I’d say well informed middle age and up would know who Facui is. It’s hard to debate this with a source but these people have even in the news for decades when things go wrong. I disagree with the “effective 0%”
“author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks.“
“Dr. Fauci ranked 7th out of more than 1.8 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2020.”
Note this isn’t just 2020. It’s a long history.
“Dr. Fauci was appointed director of NIAID in 1984.” And has served under 6 presidents. Most of which had more than 1 term.
If you are looking for a long list of awards and honorary doctorates head over to his Wikipedia page.
To the replies I got
- I don’t consider 30’s middle aged. I guess I was thinking if you were around with AIDS news in the 80’s you might remember him. Oxford dictionary considers middled aged 45-65
- google trending searches isn’t how I would evaluate the history of someone over decades of time.
For fun I did fin a bunch of videos of times he was on TV via YouTube. So again my point is that 0% is far from right.
But Gates is controversial because of the work he did that make him a qualified source, so it's not unlikely that any reasonable alternative would also have their name "tarnished".
So... do you keep picking new spokespeople when each one becomes unreasonably tarnished?
Because each and every person who promotes public health and (particularly) vaccination, eventually has so much baseless shit thrown at them that they become 'tarnished' before long.
Or should we try to make some sort of stand, and let the wingnuts know their opinions don't matter?
We see the effects of this sort of compromise in the vaccine space - perfectly safe additives were removed in an effort to assuage fears, but that action was twisted into a victory by antivax campaigners - "see, we were right, it was harmful, they lied, we forced them to remove it".
(Gates is tarnished in my eyes for computer industry reasons, but I have no issue with his record in public health)
Makes no difference. Ohio had Amy Acton, a medical doctor who specialized in public health. She did a great job but the right wing nutcases still sent her and her family death threats to the point where she was forced to resign.
Yes, it's really weird, also that he is actually supporting the WHO financially. But here's the reality: U.S. doesn't spend enough to WHO (in fact now they even want to leave), so he gives them money - which is actually possible for everyone. Also Bill Gates wasn't the only "Cassandra", practically every popular science magazine (and probably also HN) has written about the possibility of a future pandemic since years. And yet, Government did nothing. Actually in Germany there were even pandemic simulations about 10 years ago, showing how bad Germany is prepared. Still, nothing was done to improve that.
I think the summary is: this is really odd but it is even more odd how governments are unable to work on long-term topics unless shit hits the fan.
> this is really odd but it is even more odd how governments are unable to work on long-term topics unless shit hits the fan.
Not so odd. This is a common human behavior. We humans are very slow in responding to low probability but high impact events, especially if they require coordination.
E.g. upcoming climate disaster ("climate change" is a euphemism at this point), or nuclear weapons stockpile and the military systems which are effectively a dooms-day device for humanity.
At a smaller scale, various preventable accidents like Beirut explosions or most industrial accidents.
Ironically, a well functioning bureaucracy is one of the best answers, as you can see from Taiwan or South Korea's preparedness and response to COVID pandemic.
> I think the summary is: this is really odd but it is even more odd how governments are unable to work on long-term topics unless shit hits the fan.
This is just because there is no incentive for any politician. It's just like how security is at the bottom of the budget list for most IT companies. Unless we have a framework where people are accountable, nothing will change.
That’s not true. GWB took it very seriously and put a plan in place. Obama modernized the plan. Trump is the one who ignored his predecessors and set the stage for the mess we are in.
I believe you’re downvoted for mentioning politics but it is true. The US had an effective pandemic infrastructure, which got dismantled in 2018.
This isn’t unique to the US. Canada had an extremely effective pandemic forecasting agency. This got dismantled by two separate governments since 2014. I can’t find the article but the globe and mail had a big exposé.
The Atlantic article above is one of the top five articles I’ve read on the pandemic disaster and is worth reading.
You can set google to search articles from 2018, when everyone referred to it as the team being disbanded and warned of trouble. Administration officials have tried to spin it as not disbanding it, but it’s not obvious why they should be viewed as being correct. Some 2018 articles:
Pandemic preparedness was merged with WMD control. The below article refers to it as streamlining but notes
>The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
For a couple of reasons; Gates is well known and will draw more visibility. He’s a well trained public speaker. He knows enough about the subject matter to communicate it effectively. Also, a short interview probably isn’t long enough for someone with deep subject knowledge to scratch the surface.
Zuckerberg and Musk and Trump are billionaires and no one wants to hear their ramblings. Gates has run a huge public health organization for over a decade.
Eh, Musk is well respected when it comes to space matters. Check out his conversations with Everyday Astronauts, Scott Manley, Tory Bruno, Peter Beck as well as space journalists.
Zuckerberg grants an interview to opine, he can get that in any newspaper or magazine and it's on the front page here.
Musk's ramblings are always covered and he's used them to build a brand in Tesla the equal of Mercedess without spending a single dollar on advertising.
President Trump is the actual president of the USA. God bless us all.
I see the point you're trying to make and I wish were true, but it just isn't as supported by the precise examples you've given.
I'm not a fan of Gates, but he's clearly a smart person. Think of him as a sort of CEO of the organization that coordinates lots of the work done by the "really smart people", a CEO smart enough to be able to give Levy a better summary than Levy would come up with himself if he spoke to 10 actual experts.
He's proven to be reliable over decades. That's the main reason, I think. There was a small reason to talk to him about public health at first, but over time it's grown into a huge reason.
The question remains, is what is he reliable at? Why do I and so many others want to listen to him more over the years? I think it's because of the depth and breadth of issues he discusses. It's a sweet spot for me, between talking in too much depth and not enough depth.
I think he’s like a bored nerd tremendous in managing Windows and using web browsers.
So I’d think his accounts would be as easy and correct as some wiki articles or better, and at the same time would sound “irrelevant” to the public for the lack of emotional components to it.
An excellent question that shouldn't be downvoted. Why is Bill Gates "the guy?" Don't read that in a conspiratorial sense, just in a rational "can someone explain this to me" sense.
He has spent a large amount of time coordinating and strategizing health care interventions in multiple countries over the last couple of decades. Seems like he would be in a very good position to explain this stuff to the public.
His foundation has been in the health space since it's inception. He's very hands on, and consumes and synthesizes health knowledge, which he's been doing for a long time. He has a broad view of many of the factors that go into vaccines, treatments, societal impact, etc. I've never seen him stumped or give a political non-answer on any of the interviews he's been given. I consider him an authority on the topic.
He has broad experiencing in tackling infectious diseases through methods like vaccination & propaganda and he also has doubtless expertise in computers. He has long before COVID frequently been the target of conspiracy theories of him vaccinating people for nefarious purposes.
Thus questions regarding a contemporary infectious disease potentially treated by a disease causing odd politicized conspiratorial behavior on social media is right up his wheelhouse and he's a well known public speaker. There are many epidemiologists you could hear from, and most people have heard from them repeatedly, but Gates offers a fresh perspective due to his fairly unique experience and perspective.
This is misleading at best. Sure, his dad was a lawyer and he was raised in a well-off househould. But he made something -- Microsoft -- through his own ingenuity, effort, and business acumen. I didn't agree with his business ethics, but to pretend he just fell into MS because of his connected family is fairly ridiculous.
Amazingly, he has since turned his fortune into one of the most successful philanthropy projects probably in human history. Now, do I think governments should do what he does? Yes. Would I prefer higher tax rates for people like him so the people could decide what to do, not him? Yes. But he has actually been working for good, you have to give him that.
And now my life is complete: here I am, trying to defend Bill Gates, on the internet.
Gates mother introduced Microsoft to IBM for the contract by speaking with the then Chairman of IBM, who she was an acquaintance of. How many of your parents can do something like that?
Sure, Bill is a very smart person. But it's kind of impossible to say for sure whether he could have been as sucessful, if he was born in a different family. Parents play a major role in shaping the mind of children. For what we know Bill would not even have gone for a programming career and might have been a TV news reporter was he born in some other family.
If he is born in some other family, is he even Bill?
Think of it this way: how many people were as well off and well connected, and lucky as Bill Gates when he started out? let's say 100,000 people, conservatively? How many of those are as successful as he is?
Parents connection doesn't mean you will get the business out of personal experience it can even lead to the opposite to avoid being blamed for nepotism.
No, I just wanted to say that having well connected parents doesn't mean that always will be beneficial for the child it can also work against them, like it did for me.
If he was born into some other family he wouldn't be bill gates but he would still be a very successful if far less notable businessman. To become world famous does take a degree of luck not just merit. People who only have merit are boring.
>And now my life is complete: here I am, trying to defend Bill Gates, on the internet.
I feel the same way. Talk about full circle, it goes from a point in time where Mr Gates appeared to be set on destroying [internet/open source/linux] to now being one of the leaders I actually want to get behind.
In what every role (Mr Gates Villian, Bill the philanthropist) he is at least well informed.
It's not misleading at all, you've just grown up in a warm bath of Bill Gates PR. Gates is a very shrewd business man from a very shrewd and well connected family. There is nothing 'amazing' about his monopolistic practices, which he is now focusing on global bigPharma. Gates hides behind a 'giving it all away' trust based (aka tax avoidance) philanthropy but his wealth has doubled in the last few years.
I wouldn't normally waste time on this but Gates is a dark character once you look beyond the pr veneer and fawning media coverage. We are in a very serious global pandemic where transparency and solutions by, of and for the people are needed, not for profit 'philanthropic' capitalism and social controls.
Did I despise MS od the 90s and their business tactics? Sure. But wether he pays taxes on his philanthropic endeavors doesn't really matter, what matters is that they exist and do some good in the world -- and certainly, spending money on health care is good in my book. So what makes him a "dark character" in your eyes?
Instead of donating to existing public health (and education) organizations, OS programmer Gates created his own so that his personal biases wouldn't be challenged.
@BeatLeJuce You don't have to go very far online to find the answers to you question. James Corbett has amassed a formidable array of facts and history, for example.
A critique of most modern billionaires and millionaires is that they settle for ivory tower philanthropy throwing money around so they can chat with rich experts to figure out which other rich experts to give more money to. While good does come from this, it doesn't seem to make much progress in solving the underlying problems. For instance, how long has the Gates Foundation been involved with vaccines and pharmaceuticals and does it look like solutions are in within striking distance for the underlying issues?
As an example, a millionaire (who recently became a billionaire) decided on two areas where mankind needed dramatic improvement. Instead of ivory tower philanthropy, he started two different for-profit companies, one for each set of issues. Both companies have stuck around for more than 10 years and the issues they are tackling appear to have solutions within striking distance. A tangible difference has been made. If you didn't guess, the two companies are Tesla and SpaceX.
In contrast, it seems like the Gates Foundation is treading water with the issues it’s tackling. I could be wrong, but that is my perception.
As another example, an entrepreneur back in the day decided every desk needed a computer on it and used his for-profit company to make that goal a reality. That entrepreneur, of course, was Bill Gates himself.
Very few people have the R&D and engineering expertise, economic sense, and the money to lead a company to achieve world changing endeavors. Gates did it once. Musk has done it more than once.
Gates could start a pharmaceutical company, run it himself, learn the ins and outs, and reshape the industry along the way (if he could successfully learn the ins and outs). However, he does not appear to be willing to accept the risks involved in starting his own a pharmaceutical company and the problems of the pharmaceuticals industry remain unchanged.
> For instance, how long has the Gates Foundation been involved with vaccines and pharmaceuticals and does it look like solutions are in within striking distance for the underlying issues?
The Gates Foundation joined the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 2000, and has become the primary financial supporter of that body. The Gates Foundation has provided a total of $3.7B to the polio eradication cause.
You are free to do what you claim Gates should be doing. What give you the right to tell him what he should be should be doing with his time and money?
To be fair they said "could" not "should." And honestly, it's a great suggestion. I'd love to see what Gates and a team he assembled came up with (plus it'd just be fun to know there's another superstar entrepreneur out there working hard).
Because he's not just randomly throwing money around and has a well earned reputation for getting a decent return on his investments: he tends to spend money on things that work. So given that he's actively spending money and getting results, his perspective on what things need to be invested in and why is very interesting.
There are plenty of rich philanthropists but very few with Gates's level of understanding and ability to make good policy choices.
Managing the foundation as a business with the goal of maximizing return on investment is precisely one of the criticism leveled at Gates. Note that return on investment refers to financial return, not some abstract notion about improving the world.
I think there's nothing with focusing on ROI in a foundation that presumably does not enrich shareholders (which a foundation does not have) and instead puts any savings to good use doing more of whatever they want to do.
Like on WHO? The organization that lied for months about the potentiality of the covid to become a pandemic and that is excluding on political ground the country that handle best the virus (Taiwan). By still sponsoring this China’s lying organization, Bill Gates lost credibility in my eyes.
You seem to be misremembering WHO's reluctance to declare that the pandemic had reached the criteria to be called a "pandemic" (due to having been accused of being too hasty last time) as something... entirely else.
There are many other people interviewed about Covid and other public health issues. But until recently almost all of the experts were essentially unknown to the general population. Gates is simply a very widely known name, and due to the Gates Foundation actually somewhat relevant to the topic.
I could very well be that his interviews attract far more attention than interviews with experts, but you can't really compensate for that kind of name recognition.
Rich elites have a long history of oversized influence on public policy in the US. I'm not sure why exactly this is happening, but I think it's at least partly because of the relatively low involvement of the government in various social topics.
If you think about it, having public policy being at least partially dictated by unelected and unaccountable individuals is not a good place to be.
Hasan Minhaj had an episode on the Patriot Act about this topic and how:
a) the huge sums of money and foundations these billionaires manage have less of an impact than one would think because of the staggered way that the money is handed out, organizational bureaucracy and the fact that most problems that they're trying to tackle don't really lend themselves to being quashed just by throwing money at them. Many pursue such philanthropy also in part to clean up their public image and as a tax reduction strategy.
b) those huge sums distort the domains that they are injected in and could in some cases cause harm. The Gates Foundation is known for favoring high-impact project and sucking the air out of the room for other initiatives for example.
I guess for the general U.S audience having a well known figure, who has been active in the public health space for some years now through his foundations, speaking as an authority on the ongoing crisis makes sense, giving the lack of ongoing leadership in that country.
However for someone living in a western European country it would not be received very well if a business person, even one with such a big philanthropic side to them, would become the go to authority on public health and wellbeing during this time. For that only be an actually trained and experienced professional can be turned to.
If you can listen to his talk and tell us what part of what he said is wrong then I think you will have a point. Anyone can talk about anything and certainly he can talk about what he and his organizations are working on and what they plan to do about various public health issues.
Please don't misunderstand me, I don't believe he said anything wrong. Nor do I think he doesn't have the right to have a say or to have an opinion on the matter.
My point is more along the fact that he is predominantly a business man who has done a lot of good around the world with his philanthropic foundations. He is a well informed individual with deep pockets and political connections, who is well placed to enact change in what ever forum he would decide to use those resources in.
He is neither an elected representitive nor someone who has to answer for his opinions or actions to any authority within a regulated professional occupation (doctor, professor, publishing researcher etc).
The way that U.S society works, and the level of trust and respect that the general population places on the 'famous' and 'rich' just doesn't resonate with the reality of life where I am.
That is why he, or his like, would never be turned to as authority figures on this matter in my country of residence as they aren't looked at as experts on these matters nor trusted to not have an alterior motive (however small).
My country of residency is not part of the European Union. But you are correct, that there are sadly always problems in most human made systems due to its inclusion of the problematic element it self. Us.
"So why not talk to the really smart people he hired?"
There is definitely a billionaire cult going on these days. I don't know when it started but I see more and more headlines "billionaire does X", "billionaire says Y". Somehow being a billionaire gives you credibility on everything you do or say.
Like it or not money is influence. It’s even more amplified when you have an incompetent government. It would be great if Trump hadn’t bungled the entire response, then maybe BG would just be another person behind the scenes helping with funding.
I don’t understand what your motivation is for saying this. Why do you think Bill is not to be asked these questions? Do you think he would twist or misrepresent facts? Do you think somehow funding so much research makes him untrustworthy?
Oh, they can certainly ask Bill these questions, but I would say there are a ton of people who have far more expertise in infectious diseases than him.
If they were asking him about funding these efforts, then yeah, he’d be the go to guy.
He is not about the details of the research, in the whole article he was simply talking about it as a manager who understands what he is leading. I am sorry but the way you phrased those statements feels as if you are convinced he is lying and has nefarious intent.
He was talking about the performance of the procedure as a whole. He's saying most tests are unacceptably slow in the US because the labs doing the testing aren't paid less for being slow, so they take in more customers than they can handle reliably.
Actually, he blames reimbursement and has this to say "Because the federal government sets that reimbursement system."
That is not an accurate statement. Yes, the government sets reimbursement for Medicare and Medicaid, but not for private insurance which is ~60% of Americans.
Exactly when it takes 2+ weeks to hear back about a test it's pretty much pointless as the person is probably either close to recovering or in the hospital.
Don't forget he gave a TED talk warning the world about the next pandemic. And obviously he knows a thing or two about high-level issues dealing with epidemics (which extend beyond just the medicine). Why would they just ignore him?
But why listen to him either? You could have talked to any disease expert over the last few decades and they would have told you that a pandemic will be coming and that we aren't prepared.
Unlike a field expert, dude has influence, reach and an organization (with experts) in the trenches, and now decades of experience in all of the above. He’s not a couch-commenter. It’s like asking why we ought to listen anyone from Y itself here since they have zero experience with temp/vacation housing, storage, payments... all true, but they have experience with people and what and where and when to listen to. Gates is like that, multiplied by decades of experience.
One reason is incentives. He is an expert who is spending money. Most experts are asking for money. Thus, he is incentivized to find the most effective solutions.
I never said he was the only one who warned the world about the next pandemic. Nor do I believe he sees himself as some kind of prophet on this either.
I’ve heard my own CEO try explain something technical and it’s clear they don’t really understand it (and why should they? That’s why they hired experts).
In this article Bill says “most of the Covid tests are garbage”. That seems like a technical statement that should come from someone who is an expert in testing.
If the question was “what do you think the most promising Covid treatments are?” that’s a good question for Bill, assuming he’s involved in the funding decisions (maybe he’s not?).
The "smartest" (most accomplished?) experts within a field will often disagree with each other - sometimes on very important topics. I've encountered this first-hand. It's more common in certain fields than others, but I've seen at least a little bit of it almost everywhere. I can see value in an independent third-party from outside the field who brings experts together, listens to their best advice, and then decides what course to recommend.
Indeed, if you look at what he was saying at the end of February, there was no concern about the way the U.S. was handling the pandemic. Look at what he wrote on February 28th[1] - his recommendations for the current pandemic are for richer countries to assist poorer countries, and for a vaccine to be made.
If someone like Gates sounded the alarm on the poor way the U.S. was responding, it might have made a difference, but he did no such thing. Like most of the leadership in the U.S., he seemed to have a big blind spot with regards to how bad things could get in America. Some people were sounding the alarm early on (take a look at the last minute of this video[2] for an example), but were mostly ignored.
I mean we have other unelected experts leading the pandemic response (eg Fauci) so does he need to go?
Or is it just about the wealth?
Bill Gates is there because his foundation is responsible for helping to eradicate diseases and coordinate pandemic responses, so without his wealth he certainly has experience in this field.
Fauci was appointed by an elected representitive. Who appointed Bill Gates? He purchased his position of influence/
Nothing against the man. I'm distrustful generally in the richest people in the world wielding control that can make their friends even richer. I really doubt I'm alone.
Fauci was not appointed by an elected official. His position as head of NIAID is selected by the agency. This position makes him sought by Presidents. He was not put there by Presidents.
He points out that a standard nasal swab test is as accurate as a nasopharyngeal (deep) swab. This is readily available from labcorp, can be done at home, and the results are reasonably quick, within 48 hrs. It’s covered by insurance and includes overnight fedex shipping.
> There’s this thing where the health worker jams the deep turbinate, in the back of your nose, which actually hurts and makes you sneeze on the healthy worker. We showed that the quality of the results can be equivalent if you just put a self-test in the tip of your nose with a cotton swab.
I would love to see someone let Bill talk about covid, the implications of economic damage and increased debt over the next 1-2 years, the inequality which covid magnifies, and future methods of prevention - for an hour or two, with a good host.
This interview is good but barely scratches the surface.
edit: I've just found a recent interview - while still high level, it's a bit more detailed. However, the comments section reads like 4chan, all of the top comments are trolls. What's going on? When/how did it become a thing to hate on Gates for his efforts to eradicate diseases?
>And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
WOW. Why would someone in the tech industry like Gates be anti-encryption for the public? The only argument I can think of against it is "You have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide"
Considering encrypted messages have to both be encrypted and decrypted, I don't think his statement is necessarily against encrypted. I assumed he meant preventing the sending of known materials like that and / or the opening of it (which wouldn't interfere with end-to-end encryption at all).
Would it be a map of unacceptable things, or an on device model like GPT3? Would you allow someone to type the offending thing and just disable the send button, or would you block it at the keyup event?
I don't see any way this could be implemented without kissing freedom goodbye.
I like the other commenter's take that this idea was just a bit out of exasperation.
Well, Apple just stated that they are one of the best in privacy oriented AI because their AI could run on-device. And I suppose the detection of such things would be a good example.
But I see your point: you would need to inform the user without restricting his or her freedom.
He's not some random out of touch congressman though, he personally should know better than to make such an unspecific attack on encryption. The way he said it, everyone will hear that he wants the government to limit encryption which essentially means to ban it.
And they wouldn't be wrong. If the same thing came out of someone else's mouth I assume you wouldn't be seeking out an unreasonably charitable explanation like this.
And if such a plan was introduced by Trump you probably wouldn't even think of this charitable version as a good plan at all because at the end of the day, things like censorship and mass surveillance are tools of oppression in the wrong hands, and you have no control whose hands it will end up in once it's normalized.
Would you consider it an acceptable edge case to privacy/decryption to allow child sexual abuse prosecutors to unlock a suspect's phone which was suspected to contain GB of evidence of abuse?
he said it right there. he thinks child trafficking and misinformation outweigh privacy. i disagree with him but no reason to concoct an argument when there’s one there
> And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability.
What does he mean by that ? That research regarding HIV, malaria and polio is slowing down ? Or that there'll be a rise in HIV/malaria/polio cases ?
A quick, cheap, non-invasive test that is less accurate (in the direction of more false positives) would be far more effective than a more accurate but slow, expensive, and intrusive test.
Source? Governments are quick to brag but the reality in many places is that capacity is overwhelmed and it still takes several days to get results. That might be better than weeks in the US, but it's not black and white.
I strongly recommend watching the impromptu interview Bill Gates gave back in the 90s while visiting the Wired office, for gaining some valuable perspective on his thinking, and how comically wrong he's been before.
My internet is too flaky here at the moment to verify, but I believe this is the URL:
He could smile because it's refreshening to hear questions or other people talk about critical things that are constantly being ignored by even the highest ranking politicians. He could also smile because he might find it funny that people bring those topics to him as if he were responsible for everything. We'll never know.
The charitable take is he's still a socially awkward nerd. The uncharitable take is he's still as ruthless as he was during the embrace, extend, extinguish days and since the pandemic has been great business for him why shouldn't he be happy.
What are you taking about? The man devotes his time and considerable resources to public health and solving the tough to solve issues instead of spending his time owning sports teams and racing yachts. Yet...you still look for the negatives in his motives?
“Great Business?” The man is literally giving away his money, all this pandemic is doing is taking more of his precious time up than normal.
The worst tyrannies are those that are initially put in place for the public good. They're the least scrutinized and hardest to resist. I worry that he and others like him see COVID-19 as an opportunity to remake the world in the technocratic mold they for a number of reasons prefer.
You really thing he's all altruism now? Remember how he got there. It wasn't on the backs of good things. He crushed all of his competition. I don't understand how people see him as some kind of hero now.
He wants more power. The Gates funded oral polio vaccine in India was a fucking disaster!
People can’t change? That’s silly, people are always changing. People mellow out as they get older. They’re less combative, more willing to help and be part of a community.
I don’t think that’s the point anyone’s trying to make.
$15mm probably isn’t enough to make big systemic changes to humanity and Oliver’s donation surely alleviated a lot of suffering and should be applauded. However, Gates has resources on a very different scale than $15mm.
Especially with billions to deploy to try to do some good in the world, it seems reasonable to me that someone would attempt a more ambitious plan that essentially tries to address the root cause of something rather than addressing symptoms.
You're missing my point. EarthIsHome is arguing that someone with that amount of money could give it directly to people in need, which would do the most good for those people right now. bluedevil2k is arguing that it's better to fund research that might help a potentially greater number of people who would need it at some point in the future. bluedevil2k noted that even if Bill Gates helped a million people today, it would be futile because sickness would still exist. The dismissal implies that regardless of how many people's suffering could be alleviated today, it's still preferable to invest in future research. My comment is meant to underline that point. I want to see if there's a point of compromise between these standpoints.
> I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies
Imagine if governments had the ability to silence certain "lies" throughout history, such as the planets revolving around the sun...or the Earth being round.
It sounds like Gates has a severe case of tunnel vision.
To me, the most striking thing about the interview is his idea for just fixing the Covid testing delays. I think he puts his finger right on the problem: we're incentivizing essentially worthless tests by paying full price. Change the reimbursement structure and capitalism will do its job.
I'd like to understand more deeply why this is not happening.
I think the basic problem with the American COVID-19 response is that US elites haven't faced a real crisis for so long that they don't have the institutional knowledge to know how to respond to a national-level crisis that can't be treated as a political problem.
Since WWII, the crises faced by the US have been small enough that American elites have been able to politically neutralize them with a combination of half-measures and concerted efforts to mold public opinion to shift blame onto disfavored groups, such as 'liberals,' urbanites, non-Christians, and/or non-Americans. Until COVID-19, it's seldom been politically necessary for America's elites to actually do something about America's crises as opposed to making sure that someone else takes the blame for them.
COVID-19 is different. It is a global-scale disaster that requires a competent national response and can't be politically neutralized because viruses aren't political actors. American elites, however, have no experience with this kind of crisis and have been unable to respond to it as anything but a political problem and, worse, as a source for graft. The results have been an abject failure in terms of lives lost, health lost, and economic damage.
(This is not a problem unique to the US. I have seen some comparative politics research that found a strong co-relation between poor national-level COVID-19 responses and the depth of internal political divisions. I speculate that highly divided societies make blame shifting by elites a favorable strategy for crisis response and erode the ability of elites to respond to real crises.)
Considering Trump has said things like "slow down the testing" but at the same time bragging about how the US does more tests than anywhere else in the world, it's hard to say. Maybe allowing tests with weeks of delay means they can test more, or at least inflate the numbers? Again, incentives are in the wrong place.
You don't have to understand very much to know that the Trump administration has made so many wrong turns on this issue. This is just a small part of their stupidity, and it has cost the US thousands of lives, and a much longer road to recovery. November can't come soon enough.
The dysfunction of the US healthcare system predates the Trump administration by a lot. I consider blaming Trump a shallow explanation of what's going wrong. Why are other leaders doing such a poor job articulating the way forward? Why aren't governors getting together and doing all they can to work around the obvious failures of the federal response?
Thanks. That thread wasn't very good - perhaps because of the hacky title (which the thread duly complains about). Let's see if this run is better. Early results are...mixed.
The article unfortunately shares that same title, and wired doesn't seem to want to change it. Sometimes these sites change an article title after it has been up for a while, but no luck it seems. Theres definitely some really good stuff in the interview, hopefully having a different title here on HN makes it easier to have a conversation about that.
* Most conspiracy nuts downvoted which is a relief.
* Rehash of encryption. Totalitarianism versus anarchy. Seems to be 90% of the discussion
* Attacks on Bill Gates suitability for interview by people in denial about what it means to be influential in society.
* A few good mini threads about covid testing
(This comment is hidden on the second page so not feeling guilty about whining about discussion)
I think Gates is right. What is the problem with the government controlling communication?
There are clear advantages, like handling illegal things.
What are the disadvantages, the nude photo of your ex-girlfriend being analyzed by a machine?
Also Bill Gates wants full government control because he is practically within the circles of government, obviously he would benefit from such agreements, but same cannot be said for plebs.
Anyhow, even if people like Bill Gates might benefit from such undemocratic agreements, tide can always turn against them and this level of censorship and surveillance can be used against them even more effectively than that is currently used againsts plebeians.
I can't imagine living in a country with chief executives as diverse as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, FDR, and Ronald Reagan, and still being naïve enough to think there's no problem with the government controlling communication. You can't imagine an executive branch led by any of those people using that power inappropriately?
We don't want a government to be the arbiter of truth. Please read 1984 or consider the following:
Iraq clearly has weapons of mass destruction. Censor all communications claiming otherwise.
The American government is not performing mass surveillance on its citizens. James Clapper Confirmed this in a Congressional Hearing. Censor all communication claiming otherwise
South Korea's President is not being influenced by a cult leader. Censor all communication claiming otherwise
And countless other examples where government controlling communication would lead to censorship of topics that the general public MUST hear. One cannot make an informed decision without information.
If you assume the government to be lawful and of high morals, of course. On the other hand, if your country is run by literal Nazis, the idea doesn't sound so good anymore. I hope your ancestry is pure of whatever lineage the rulers of the next fascist empire will be.
You can organize resistance on all levels. People who put their life on the line for others can coordinate inside the country and with forces outside of the country. This is a huge danger to the ruling group since it is only a small minority and many people get not only their freedoms taken away but also their riches. Therefore before establishing a fascist government you must first control communication to a high degree to be able to suppress opposition effectively.
Consider Russia (or the middle east) where it's still Not ok to be gay. Encryption helps you text your significant other without being thrown in jail or sent to a reeducation camp.
This tends to be a hot button issue for many, but just as a counter to your "ridiculous" claim, history tells us many things, including being able to intercept dangerous communication can stop VERY bad things happening to societies. You can't just look at one side. This isn't a black and white issue, it's about trying to find the right balance. I personally think we should favor personal privacy. I also think any attempts to try and control comms will be fleeting and will ultimately fail with the invention of even better decentralized privacy technology.
"In late February, CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and was asked if healthy people should wear masks. “No,” Redfield responded. The day after that, US surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS.” Fauci himself, in early March, told a Senate committee that the general public didn’t need to wear them because Covid-19 wasn’t widespread enough."[1]
Regardless of opinions on how to respond to Covid, mismanagement by various institutions and media has been agonizing to see. I'm strongly against government paternalism and believe the vast amount of misinformation peddled by institutions many hold faith in led to conspiracy on the rise.
Masks are an open question, there’s still very little actual reliable data on their effectiveness. I think the change in advice is based on two things. One is mask production is now high enough that there’s a decent supply for the public to access, without compromising supplies for medical personnel who definitely need them.
The other is plenty of countries in SE Asia with high rates of mask usage seem to have done well overall so it doesn’t seem to hurt. Anyway information changes do advice changes, that doesn’t mean these people are untrustworthy. Surely if they weren’t prepared to change advice as circumstances changed, that would be even more concerning. What matters is the reasons and context for the change.
How about just tell the truth. Masks work, but we have shortage of PPE for our frontline medical workers, so please do not buy PPE.
I think people can handle the truth. When you lie, you might temporarily achieve your objective, but you're sacrificing your ability to achieve any of your objectives in the future. Now I don't trust the WHO because of this, and I'll be less inclined to take them seriously.
Government concerned about shortages + wasted N95 masks by untrained public -> recommendation against the public wearing masks -> additional evidence for airborne & asymptomatic transmission / opportunity to ramp mask production -> "I heard we recommended against the public wearing masks, so I guess we don't need to do that"
To be fair, there are tons of valid reasons not to allocate scarce masks to the general public (economic panic, inability to properly fit test, inability to properly wear, no decon procedures or facilities, likelihood of proximity to Covid-positive patient). But unfortunately, it seems like the actual rationale (and suggestions it would have for subsequent action) got lost in the simplification, even on the government itself.
That's because the country loosened the restrictions. It worked, and should've been kept. Sadly the leadership here is populist too, which worked at first (the popular thing in Europe was to restrict) but then didn't (the popular thing became to open up). If they listened to our experts instead of being populists, we wouldn't have opened up and the cases would go to zero, as it nearly did a few months ago.
That’s wishful thinking. The US has and had the ability to mitigate covid19, but the Trump administration is incompetent, and our citizens have thrown up their collective hands in frustration, and have settled on the strategy of “what can ya’ do?”
Everyone would probably have started making masks, as happened in the countries without pre-existing mask cultures that did recommend them early. The medical supply wouldn't have changed much, since consumer retailers couldn't get them anyway at the height of the shortage.
Everyone now knows that the wearing of surgical masks by the general public is beneficial. That wasn't clear in late February and early March, and the scientific community was uncertain. That's why a paper finding that surgical masks are effective was important enough to be published in Nature Medicine as late as 3 April (and has been cited hundreds of times since).[1]
It might seem obvious that surgical masks help, but there are a few reasons that people thought they might not:
1. Surgical masks let lots of unfiltered air in.
2. People might feel a false sense of security with masks, which could make them harmful.
3. People might touch their faces more when wearing masks.
Research like the paper I mentioned above, as well as the realization that asymptomatic and presymptomatic people play a large role in spreading the virus convinced the scientific community that widespread wearing of surgical masks is helpful. But blaming institutions for not knowing the right answer early on seems very unfair to me.
>I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
So Gates is against encryption because of CP but flew on epsteins Lolita Express in 2013, years after Epstein was a convicted child molester. He also has numerous other connections to both Maxwell and Epstein.
I mean knowing what i know about him before his "billionare philantropist PR project" of rockerfellian dimensions i was already sceptical but this is getting out of hand.
Do you seriously think he's against encryption for his own class of unfathomably rich peers?
He's against encryption for the commoners, the 99.999% of people not part of the transnational elite, who as we've seen in the Epstein case can fly around and do more or less what they want with both people and money because of connections to "intelligence".
Do what they want, until they end up hanging from a jail house ceiling?
I find it somewhat uncomfortable Posting a comment that might seem pro rich, and he did initially get away with minimal penalties, but you didn’t exactly pick the poster boy for Unlimited impunity.
Well it's all pretty muddy, but so far i think Epstein was expendable.
As i just wrote there are a myriad of links to "intelligence" and a larger structure.
If people are interested go to the Epstein subreddit take deep dive - most likely it was a classic honeypot operation to blackmail high ranking politicians for political gain or for some industrial complex - not a lone wolf with a back story that makes no sense in isolation, suddenly getting rich without anyone knowing why.
Two conspiracy theorist die and go to heaven. At the pearly gates they are let in and allowed to ask god one question. They ask him, about the Epstein suicide, and god replies “no my sons, there was no conspiracy, it was in fact suicide”
The conspiracy theorists turn to one another and remark, “This goes even higher than we thought”
It's a super gray area i agree, and people can become obsessed with "patterns".
I personally find it interesting like i find the Snowden revelations interesting, or the Wikileaks implications or geopolitics in general.
I started majoring in history before going into tech so i don't personally find any of these "conspiracies" fringe or stupid seen in a historical context of for example US intelligence organisations throughout the 20's century - obviously non organic campaigns like qAnon is something completely different but this info is from classic journalism.
But i can see that those top-down campaigns has really turned people away from even the slightest deviation of the "official narrative" now, so well, qAnon and other psyops really are working - there is only the mainstream, and the idiots left.
What he's implying is that Gates' willingness to associate with known child sex traffickers indicates that his concern about CP is likely disingenuous, and merely a posture he's adopting to push a policy goal he supports for less politically palletable reasons.
Gates really jumped the gun on this interview. Overly opinionated, judgmental, and paternalistic.
Listening to Gates talking about since makes the irony of it biting. Excel, the software designed under his watch keeps destroying scientific results, to the point gene names had to be renamed.
>Listening to Gates talking about [science] makes the irony of it biting. Excel, the software designed under his watch keeps destroying scientific results, to the point gene names had to be renamed.
Make sure you warm up before making a stretch like this, folks.
During Bill Gates reddit AMA, he was proposing the idea, even concluding that it would be a necessity to have travel go back to normal. That we have microchips embeded, that store our "public information", such as viral infection and vaccination status.
I say that it quotations, because i do not believe it is the governments place nor right, to make public, crucial medical data about individuals. In a perfect system, without breaches of security, sure, but that is not the real world.
Okay? Do you have a link? Because his foundation has denied it and several organizations have done a fact check on it, finding no evidence. https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648
Can't we just use smartphones or passports for it? Although implanted chips would solve quite a few humanity problems (and create more power for authoritarian nations).
Also I don't believe dangerous people should have all sort of rights to privacy. We already ask pedos to introduce themselves to neighbours (at least in movies), why shouldn't same apply for deadly viruses? I guess this forum is frequented by too many Californians where knowingly giving someone AIDS is not a crime anymore.
The part that saddens me is that when Gates and Trump meet, Trump recommends Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the horriblly misinformed anti-vaxer. This is terrible when a COVID-19 vaccine arrives. Shaking at my head at this anti-science president.
I give Gates considerable credit for being out in front of this issue for years, and for talking about it now without a heavy dose of "I told you so". I'd likely not be able to resist.
I still strongly resent his company's business practices from the 1980s through the 2000s, and arguably to the present.
And yes, the irony of the world's leading enabler of electronic viruses being a leading authority and defender against biological viruses ... is not lost on me.
I can't understand the 'microchip in vaccines' issue. You mean to tell me that my iPhone can't last a full day on a battery charge, however we have microscopic tech capable of tracking location data and relaying it somewhere and doesn't need charging once injected into the body?
That's a 'dumb` RFID chip. I don't think folks are too concerned with offline chips that require close proximity scanning (for power). RFID also doesn't 'track' dogs. They contain information about the dog to get them back to their owner. The info is static and contains NO location data.
You may want to re-evaluate your opinion. The "tracking microchip" conspiracies mostly stem from tracking chips (dumb RFID) used to tag wildlife.
These people don't know how the technology works, but they do know that we tag and track animals. They're not wrong that we use microchips in this fashion.
I'm assuming you are talking about ARGOS tags (more sophisticated tag that actually transmits GPS (last comment was talking about pet tags (which are RFID)), but it's FAR from microscope / injectable via needle. I get it, people's lack of understanding about technology is what fuels the conspiracy theories. They don't realize that no company NEEDS to track them as they have already traded all of that information away years ago.
I have some close friends that subscribe to such theories and no amount of tech discussion will convince them otherwise.
>> The irony is that this is a president who is a vaccine skeptic. Every meeting I have with him he is like, “Hey, I don’t know about vaccines, and you have to meet with this guy Robert Kennedy Jr. who hates vaccines and spreads crazy stuff about them.”
>> Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.
Against encryption/free speech:
>> The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
re: tiktok acquisition
>> But yes, it’s a poison chalice. Being big in the social media business is no simple game, like the encryption issue.
Gates never once said he is against the concept of the government handling of COVID19. He criticized the actual implementation of COVID19 strategy. Totally different thing.
To be fairer, the US isn't just any government. Asides from being the richest and most advanced nation in he world, as Gates points out the US also has the best epidemiologists in the world. One would expect better.
I was suggesting that ffggvv could be more fair in their assessment. I do not believe that the average ‘handling’ has been anything even approaching considered or realistic. ‘Handling’ is perhaps the wrong term.
As Gates touches on, trust in public health infrastructure is important to maintain, because when this crisis is over there will still be other diseases which need to be addressed. If people hold public health agencies to unfair standards, seeing them as simply incompetent for problems which are fundamentally hard to address, the inevitable and very dangerous conclusion will be they can't be trusted to handle things like tuberculosis or HIV.
Why the hell does everyone now see Gates as some kind of superhero?! He was, and still is, a notorious, power hungry, anti-competitive slime ball. He has all the money in the world, so the only thing left is power.
His foundation seeks to create "viable markets" for vaccines and the original name for his foundation was "The Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control."
I don't trust anything that piece of garbage says. I swear he's gotten worse the older he gets and no one remembers all the anti-competitive shit he pulled to get where he is.
Poisoned chalice my ass. He should know. His entire fucking life and legacy is a poisoned chalice.
What's wrong with 'population control' through easy access to birth control and lowering infant mortality? Do you think he was planning on mass killings before he realized he should be more subtle?
He's not a superhero, but it's definitely better to devote your capital to helping others rather than simply accruing more.
Well, for starters he seems quite in favour of a Western Great Firewall except this one will be used for Good(TM).
And although the current US government is pretty bad, Microsoft should buy their own social media platform which is being otherwise kneecapped for political reasons.
The remark about the Congress was cringey. Haha, let's laugh with the convicted monopolist about the good ol days.
> And although the current US government is pretty bad, Microsoft should buy their own social media platform which is being otherwise kneecapped for political reasons.
As I read it, he explicitly said that he didn't think that MS should buy TikTok.
Bill Gates is not an expert. I think I would listen to an infectious diseases professor sooner.
edit: I'm an idiot, I should have read the post, I thought this was about something else Bill Gates had said. Still, my point stands, though the tests are definitely mostly garbage.
