- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.world
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Does he know that successive climate catastrophes will set the poor back too, even with help?
The man doesn’t know the price of groceries. He’s completely detached from society and real life.
The climate catastrophe is a whole fuckload of problems caused by humans changing the climate. It’s not just “it gets a little warmer” it’s death of habitat for various species, it’s ocean acidification, it’s weather changes, it’s crop failures.
It’ll lead to things like mass migrations of people from places that are no longer habitable due to a loss of access to water or food, or because their homes get flooded or destroyed by severe weather. We might see camps as massive populations migrate, there’ll be infrastructure problems. We’ll see starvation, and disease, perhaps another pandemic.
As people migrate to other places there’ll be border disputes, xenophobia, increased nationalism. We might even see people get shot as they’re trying to enter other countries, it’s not like we don’t see that already.
The problem isn’t “it gets a little warmer” is everything else that follows.
Reminder that Gates has invested billions into fossil fuels, including coal power. Anything he does that’s “green” is to greenwash his other investments.
The foundation has saved tens of millions of lives.
His asset portfolio is invested in everything from energy to farmland.
As far as billionaires go, you could do a lot worse than having a portfolio diversified while saving millions of people by giving away billions of dollars.
How many tens of millions of people are billionaires clinging to fossil fuels going to kill due to climate change? How many billions? Is the human species even going to survive?
You’re punching up numbers like even one death is justified if he saves two more elsewhere. If people are just numbers to you, then I suppose you and he have a lot in common.
You must be real fun at parties.
Perfect is not the enemy of good.
I have a retirement account that invested in broad markets as well, and some of that is in energy for funds that include those stocks in their prospectus.
If that makes me responsible for death while I spend my days working to help save lives, you have a rather lofty set of expectations.
In effect, anyone who takes part in paying for gas, having a target date fund in their 401k, or purchases any product from an energy company is complicit in deaths. No 10 random people in any room live up to this standard.
The transition away from the stranglehold oil as an industry has on the world can’t and won’t happen overnight. He doesn’t run an oil company, he doesn’t work to expand drilling rights, he works to repurpose wealth into human benefit and some of that requires diversification into energy markets.
If that is a step too far for giving away 100 billion dollars, I don’t know what to tell you.
Perfect is not the enemy of good.
Bill Gates is neither perfect, nor good. There are no good billionaires. In this case, the billionaire whose boots you are deepthroating just released a memo to influence the COP30 international climate summit in Brazil by dismissing the seriousness of climate change. This is the same billionaire who has scrubbed climate change essays from his websites. This is the same billionaire that downplays the importance of clean, renewable energy. This is the also the same billionaire that has billions in investments in fossil fuels. Do you have billions of investments in fossil fuels? Can you even find ten people in your city who do?
Now, I don’t know if your comment is born out of ignorance or pure maliciousness, but all you’re doing is boosting the misinformation that Gates has been spreading for the past several years. The absolute gall you have to come to a comm about climate change to peddle your anti-environmental activism is disgusting.
You should be ashamed.
Bill Gates’ PR game is strong, and he has lot of people fooled into thinking he’s a good-guy billionaire. The revelations about his ties to Epstein made a good dent, but I guess a lot of people are too invested in their feelings.
Today’s me is brought to you by the number fourmk
We should focus on both of those things and take all these clowns money away. Seriously, Bill Gates just goes around the world now and makes speeches to people about how to make the world worse. We should just put him in prison and use his money to improve the world somewhat.
Aid for the poor is not something we should focus on, at least not as Bill Gates uses it. Aid inherently creates dependency and a power dynamic. Foreign aid plays an integral part to developing populations’ subjugation to multinational corporations and their corrupt local government allies. Bill Gates promotes aid for the poor because he wants to continue subjugating the poor.
Thanks to aid for the poor, Bill Gates sets standards for the school curriculums of many US American schools, and Bill Gates can heavily influence law in East African countries, where his malaria eradication charity is picking which countries to save tens of thousands of lives in. Including the ones that just happen to be building the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline that Bill Gates is complaining climate activists are protesting against.
What we need is (1) unconditional redistribution of wealth so that poverty doesn’t exist, and (2) mutual aid between equal peers, and never the two shall meet.
Delete Microsoft’s patents, give Microsoft product maintenance over to open source volunteers, do the same with all other companies, defund the police, introduce global universal basic income, delete private ownership, see people move into billionaire’s mansions, hijack their yachts to use for ocean plastic cleanup, convert corporate offices to housing, etc. I don’t know if prison would be necessary at that point - he seems like enough of an opportunist that if he understands his best way to be free and comfortable in solarpunk bliss is to never take on any position of power ever again, he would just peacefully retire.
I agree with you right up until you started talking about how he would just blissfully retire if he saw how great it would be.
These people would nuke the entire planet before they’d allow you to remove their wealth from them. It absolutely needs to be done with force and needs to be ensured that it can never happen again.
We should use some of his money to build a nice, comfy, and secure prison for him. Same for other billionaires. They know deep down that’s a merciful outcome for them in the “climate apocalypse” they’ve created.
Nah. Gulag.
Not worth the bloodshed and extinction risk imo. Comfy prisons is the best outcome I can envision there.
My first thought: why do these efforts have to be exclusive? We can do both.
Fuck Bill Gates.
Not a lot of people I hate more than him.
I prefer the usual villain that kills the world and doesn’t pretend to be sorry.
This shithead did so much evil, destroyed education worldwide with his fight against open source, made the whole world poorer and now pretends to be a nice guy.
At leat Steve jobs was an asshole all the way to his grave. I prey for you to die more quickly bill gates.
The Gates Foundation has been a significant player in 3rd world disease eradication.
Lemmy: FUCK HIM!
I was around when Microsoft exploded onto the scene. Oh you bet he did some evil, monopolistic shit to get it rolling, but I also remember what computing was like before Windows.
Between my friends and I we had 5 different home computers. Nothing was interoperable, not even the version of BASIC, total clusterfuck. Tech was crawling compared to after Windows snapped everything into focus. Yes, I wish Linux had come sooner, but it’s a clusterfuck as well.
Yes, fuck a pedophile trying to PR his way into “good guy” status.
Lots of evil white folks go into third world in their old age, where their money is worth 100 times more (yay colonialism) and play “saint”. Their PR then turns it into an “altruism” campaign.
Trump is probably planning the same. And I’m fucking sure yankistanis and dumb people will bend over backwards to defend him cuz all the tax breaks, money silos into their own pockets are hidden behind layers and layers of shell companies and non profits. And he will get the bush treatment.
“Eh? He might have been a war criminal, but he paints now and is friends with Gobamahs wife, so cute”
Disgusting, to say the least.
Does that absolve them of the shit human they’ve been all their lives?
Why do you think the third world is the way it is? These children fucking billionaires are exploiting their resources one way or another, directly or indirectly with whole lot of corruption involved.
Gullible people like you elevating them to their artificially manufactured status are how the rich get to do evil exploitative shit and then manipulate “good deeds” into PR points so they and their family are more likeable.
Fuck you and Fuck Bill Gates!
It’s sorta bizarre to me.
If he had not given away all the wealth trying to fight diarrheal disease, HIV, TB, and try to source the solutions to the countries themselves… he would have been the richest man in the world even in the 2020s.
Did he fuck some strange? Yeah.
Did he act ruthlessly in business to get ahead? Yeah.
Is he responsible for 80 MILLION lives saved? Yeah.
Guy is doing what whole nations have failed to do and it’s on his back. Somehow that gets so much hate.
Lemmy expects the rich to splat their money out and solve everything, all at once. Told this story a few times:
There’s an Indian proverb where a rich man is appalled by the poverty he sees. Gives a rupee to every beggar he sees, until he has no more rupees to give. He finds himself a beggar amongst the very people he tried to help, and didn’t accomplish anything at all.
I’m not getting paid by Gates here. I understand where he came from and what he did to get where he’s at, watched it in real time during my IT career. But goddam is he doing good works. He’s an elderly man trying his best to leave a positive impact on the world. Not gonna act like he’s some supervillain.
I am being paid by the foundation, full disclosure, but my agreement or disagreement with the man has nothing to do with working to further clinical trials that save human lives.
I’ve seen people called corporate shills on lemmy before, but I’ve never seen somebody admit to being a corporate shill.
Sorry what do for work helps progress clinical trials for vaccines that eradicate malaria.
What do you do?
