Given the question asked, it's a reasonably fair swipe, though. I don't think there is much to argue against: Vaccination and eradication of diseases has a more direct effect than access to broadband on health. The secondary effect of fighting disease broadband is a reduction of poverty which will both lead to better health.

So not sure why the swipe part is added to the title here on HN.

This seems like an obvious point, but when you are dealing with complex systems second-order effects often result in totally perverse outcomes. Often the result of pushing the system in one direction is an outcome in the opposite direction.

In this case, providing medical services results in more children living, which [often] means larger populations, which means more pressure on food and infrastructure, and more unemployment.

So providing medical care can make people worse off.

The book "An End to Alms" points to an interesting example of this phenomenon. Hygiene standards in England were far worse in earlier times than in China [read Samuel Pepys's diaries if you don't believe me]. As a result, more people died from infections in England at a given level of nutrition than in China. As a result, per person calorie intake in China fell until the lower food intake balanced out the higher standards of hygiene.

More in any book on Systems Theory, or "Poor Charlie's Almanack".

> When we get into a field, we do take a point of view, and raising controversy is a symptom. Fortunately, there is what’s called the charter school format that lets you try new things. The system is good at shutting down the ones that don’t work and replicating the ones that do. The big actor is government. If somebody says somebody is too big, it would be strange to point to us.

What a load of shit. What Gates is trying to do isn't using a small number of charter schools as a laboratory for discovering news approaches to education that are more effective, which was the original idea of charter schools. Rather, he is trying to replace most of the public schools for low-income minorities with privatized charter schools, and he wants to be the one person who gets to create the criteria that determine whether a given school is doing well or not.

Here are the actual criticisms of his agenda that the article is likely referring to (with an added quote on his malaria work to illustrate the point):

http://pastebin.com/XUxCmdiN

His foundation makes great play of the claim that they are evidence based and totally, totally use metrics and quantitative feedback to guide their work.

So I go onto their site and look for such metrics, feedback, evidence that they have change their policies and practices based on data.

Nothing.

> In the U.S., if we have an education system where the inner-city kid and the suburban kid have equal opportunity, that would be a huge contribution.

I feel like this isn't the best metric and could have unintended consequences.

I really doubt that he's doing that to create a better legacy. It's just that people at his level can do whatever they like, absolutely anything. So some are buying Hawaii islands and others try and help other people. Gates is one of the latter.

His family sort of has a history of doing this kind of thing.

Is Google really his competition?

It is probably not a competition to the foundation which gets a lot of his time but I'd imagine he probably sees Google as his competition.

Google, along with Apple, will always be the company that beat him.