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.

Bill Gates wanted to think of himself as a good person. Charity was his attempt to prove himself as a good person, and Effective Altruism got so much funding and PR because it tries to make billionaires look like good people. Effective Altruism argues that rather than looking at someone’s actions, you look at how much better they are than what would replace them if they didn’t do that, and then argues that there will always be more billionaires that are exploitative because that’s how the market works, so that doesn’t count, while not every billionaire makes a charity, so that does count.

The problem for EA is that many of the charities it recommends have to engage in lobbying to be practical, but if you allow for lobbying then obviously lobbying for legislation that reduces billionaire exploitation would be beneficial, and that’s not what their donors want. So EA had to drive itself insane to curve away from that obvious conclusion, with people that still insist on it being pressured out of the movement.

But the result of that is that the ethical philosophy that billionaires wanted to rely on for indulgences for their sins had now become obviously insane, even to most of them. That’s how you get people like Peter Thiel not giving a straight answer to whether humanity should survive, that’s how you get shrimp welfare, etc. etc.

Gates doesn’t like the insanity, but that that leaves him without moral excuses. So with other billionaires throwing their lot in with Trump, he does the same so he can at least stay rich for longer.

Sure, but there is a difference between dickheads who didn’t earn their money because they exploited employees and dickheads that commit genocide on native Brazilian populations.

Though to be fair, Prince William also has ties with dickheads that are committing genocide in Palestine and that commited genocide in Ireland, Bengal, Canada, Australia, and countless other places on account of the whole “heir to the crown of Britain” business.

Financial incentive has surprisingly little to do with capitalist/government actions. They will gladly lose billions as long as it means lower class people suffer, and they will pay billions to bail out billionaire friends that are in a tough spot.

Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.

The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.

They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.

Nukes won’t destroy the planet. All their yields combined don’t measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.

The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn’t evolve to fill the same niches first.

There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.