Posted on 01/26/2014 8:36:21 AM PST by lbryce
“almost no poor...”
There’s his out. Can’t miss.
I notice few, if any addressed the point of his comments, which is that everyone’s boats are rising, and the poor people of today will be living at a much higher standard in the future.
We only have to look at the United States, and often even our own families, to see how that has come to pass. Gates is saying the same will happen in large parts of the world, not just here.
It is coming to pass because Gates quit his day job, put himself and his money at risk and created a computer revolution that changed the world.
It also is coming to pass because companies like Monsanto are willing to risk their capital to produce GMO seeds, seeds that even today, only 20 years down that road, are feeding tens of millions who would otherwise have starved to death. Detractors seldom, if ever, mention the immorality of not providing a means to those who want to feed themselves. They curse the darkness and curse those who are lighting candles.
These and many other modern technologies are changing the civilized world, and creating a better standard of living.
Except that some men who worked at Redmond said that it was a noisy whorehouse.
Our economy is depending more each year on a rising pile debt, as are other western culture economies. There’s not enough manufacturing on our own soil (disregarding U.S.”based” manufacturing on foreign soil) for sustainable revenues to support big government and government-connected businesses. Economic support for despotic, foreign regimes does no one any good.
Bloated, expensive code is costly to the whole economy and costs more than it benefits. Dirty deals for general surveillance against everyone are also a problem. Such code is also being replaced by open source efforts superior in ways that count.
Corporations making patented GMOs are anti-competition tyrants (see legislation attempts against small farms) and are setting the world up for a super-famine with their implied assumptions that they’ve protected crops against every possible future blight or weather condition.
Try microcode, with operands representing the processors 8- or 16-bit registers, implicit operands or indirect memory address references. Otherwise, your spiel has the whiff and terror of what could easily transpire to lesser-experienced or -talented employees in his presence.
HF
former Senior Consultant to Microsoft
All:
Bill Gates supports gun control and several other pursuits of the left. Look it up.
The problem here is the word “poor” is being used without definition. Gates is using it more as “can get adequate nutrition/shelter/sanitation to survive indefinitely”, vs “anyone not in the top 13% income bracket is legally poor”. Much arguing about not the same issue.
When a guy’s got 50 billion dollars, he can live in a bubble of grandiose splendor and blissful isolation.
The problem is that the author of the article used the term 'poor'. If you actually read the article, Gates uses the phrase 'extreme poverty'
Living on $10/day is poor. Living on $1/day is extreme poverty
Gates is actually right. Most of the world is above extreme poverty and probably, tho not certainly, those residuals in Asia and Africa will rise out of extreme poverty in the next few decades.
So Gates wants to dispel the myths and these myths arise because those who live on a $1000/day, $100/day, or $75/day look down on those at the lowest incomes of $1/day and $10/day, $20/day and can't differentiate between them.
But the guy living on a $1/day can easily see how much better off he would be at $10/day, or $20/day, or $100/day.
sure thing ask the real techies in Silicon Valley who knew him when ( and yes I did)... not even close. He did understand marketing and how to create tools...not the same thing.
The phenomenon of lottery winners is all the proof the world should need that there will always be poor people.
Only the foolish think those are implied assumptions.
The experts, including every farmer who farms for a living, knows better. They base their cynicism on real life experiences to the contrary.
Stick to something you know something about.
One of those uber-crops, eventually used on too many acres in a nation or around the world, is going to fail. Diversity is good for plants—not for balkanizing a nation’s population. Investors and managers aren’t the new deities (”experts”) that they imagine themselves to be.
And it’s common knowledge, that Bill Gates is a lefty on every issue.
What about the morality, or immorality, of not providing the means for those who would rather not starve to death a way to feed themselves and their families?
That’s a good point, but there’s more than one way to accomplish that, each way with its advantages and perils.
As someone who has been in food production on a rather large scale in the past, I follow rather closely what is going on in farming.
I am unaware of any solution to our own, and especially the worlds, food production requirements that does not include GMOs in a large way. GMOs have already solved many food shortage problems, from here in the US, to Europe, Africa, Russia, and everywhere people need food.
However, I am always open to hear of new practices that I might be unaware of.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.