Showing posts with label Gates Foundation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gates Foundation. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

"Large, Complex Systems Spanning Entire Industries"

Bill Gates Addressing Health Ministers at Meet...
Bill Gates Addressing Health Ministers at Meeting on Polio Organized by the Gates Foundation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Bill Gates on the future of education, programming and just about everything else
..... he cautioned, the world of programming probably has to evolve if we’re going to accomplish some grander goals such as large, complex systems spanning entire industries. There are more programmers and they’re better than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but there is no objective metric by which someone could say the state of the art has significantly improved...... In 20 or 30 years, Gates predicted, maybe robots in remote areas without a lot of doctors will be able to perform C-sections. ..... systems as complex and multifaceted as ecosystems, oceans and forests. ..... interestingly, Gates said, rich individuals in China tend to be more generous with their money than those elsewhere because so much of that wealth is first-generation wealth. There aren’t ruling-class families who consider themselves dynasties, but rather people who recognize the ridiculousness of one person accumulating so much money so fast. .... nuclear and bioterrorism as the thing we most want to avoid — but not the world’ biggest problem. .... the “ongoing disaster” that is 7 million children a year dying. .... 20 million when he was a kid and 12 million when the Gates Foundation began, citing new vaccines as a major cause for the improvement. In several years, he predicted, the number of children dying each year should be down to 3 million. ..... political disfunction, unemployment and war are all important concerns. So is the fact that malnourishment and other environmental factors have reduced the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa to 82. But, Gates said, “Childhood death gets pretty high up for me.”
Bill Gates is easily one of the most remarkable individuals of my lifetime. For me computers are exciting because of the Internet and this guy is primarily a PC era guy, but his software contributions are revolutionary enough. What really gets me is his foundation work. He has been breaking a lot of ground with the Gates Foundation.

As for tech, a true challenge is adding artificial intelligence to the planet's entire ecosystem, all of the atmosphere, so we have an exact idea as to the planet's environmental health at any point in time. The same could be applied to the domain of people, so political and social and economic mass movements are not as arbitrary and we collectively have a greater say in uplifting humanity.
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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Rich People's Kids

Macaroni and cheeseImage via Wikipedia
So Bill Gates is on my BlogRoll, (so is Amitabh Bachchan), one the richest dude on the planet, another a fairly rich dude, but the most recognized face on the planet. And I was just reading one of his blog posts for the first time. In it he talks of a Buffett son. "Contrary to what many people might assume, Peter won’t inherit great wealth from his father." Well, why thank you, Bill Gates!

Bill Gates: Life Is What You Make It
Contrary to what many people might assume, Peter won’t inherit great wealth from his father.
Warren Buffett gave most of his money to the Gates Foundation, an entity I am a fan of. I never called myself a fan of Microsoft, although I have admired Gates' path in business greatly. I hope Buffett left at least one billion, or half a billion for his kids. Or I am going to think the guy is cheap, a rich cheap guy. Buffett's logic has been, "but I did not deliver my children myself either." As in, his children perhaps are not the best professionals to be doling out money. Let Bill G do it.

Sam Walton went the other way. Many people don't know this but Walton created more wealth than Gates: there is more money in people skills than in software, always will be. That Republican dude left everything to his children. I don't approve of that either. That is taking family values a little too far.

An honest rich guy is Larry Ellison. He was not born rich. He was born in "Chicago's Jewish ghetto" - his words - where you could hear "gunshots." He talks of having to eat "macaroni and cheese" late into his 20s. He claims his first wife left him because he "did not work hard enough." He went ahead and bought a boat, and that sent the wife into therapy. His second wife left him because he "worked too hard."

About money and children he said, "I am not going to pretend that my children are going to have to work for a living." That's my kind of a rich guy: brutally honest, interesting.

Although, did I say, I am a huge fan of the Gates Foundation? I am a Third World guy, after all. Bill Gates has challenged many racist viewpoints about the "bottom two billion," as he calls it. He is not talking about the first two billion he made, but the two billion poorest people.

Steven Spielberg once said about his huge wealth. "It's just numbers. Some accountant takes care of it." Bill Gates said only a few weeks back about being rich, after a few million, it does not really matter. Makes no material difference to your life. I buy into the Spielberg line. I have 47,000 followers on Twitter. I remember being very excited when I hit 2,000 followers. Me? What? Popular? At 47,000 it just feels like numbers.

Larry, again, has quite another attitude. "There is nothing that can be bought with money that I can not buy," he boasted to a biographer. Well, that car you see is going down Larry Ellison Boulevard.

There has got to be joy in actively giving. Dying and letting others figure it out can't be joyous. You are not even around. But I am not against financial freedom for one's children. They can still end up normal people doing good, productive work. I think.

Larry Ellison

There are only two income/wealth brackets that fascinate me: the dollar a day people, and the self-made billionaires. In between lies the gray zone.
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