[js8]

> It merely increases the wealth of those employees by a bit. What about fighting malaria? What about fighting climate change? Do you seriously expect all those recipients of $100k would all contribute as much proportionally?

Yes. In a sane democratic system, I would expect government to finance these projects. And it does.

Now you can somehow make an argument that people in democracy are less likely to support these projects than they are alone as wealthy people. I don't see how it would work. Self-selected billionaires are on average less selfish than ordinary people?

[rubber_duck]

>Yes. In a sane democratic system, I would expect government to finance these projects. And it does.

Have you ever tried to get something funded by a government program ? I would bet 10/10 times that a competent leader (which Gates is beyond a doubt) is going to be more efficient at executing on a goal than a bureaucratic system passed down between governments, parties and agency interpretations.

And that's assuming that money gets allocated towards the said goals, so much stuff gets funded that very few tax payers would support as a result of lobbying (which is always going to happen when you funnel that much money through politicians) and even if it gets allocated to the desired goals it then goes through contractors with connections that add a government markup + the overhead of keeping up with the bureaucracy.

Just having someone as competent and connected as Gates tackling that problem is a huge value add, getting that calibre of a person through a government system is very unlikely.

[mrpopo]

> a competent leader (which Gates is beyond a doubt) is going to be more efficient at executing on a goal ...

Bill Gates was perhaps a competent businessman, exploiting his powerful network, intellectual property laws, destroying the competition, lobbying. He was ruthless. It doesn't make him competent at everything. Especially something like climate change that requires a global policy of reduction in energy use (anyone who tells you climate change will be solved by innovation, energy efficiency, solar panels and fusion alone is lying to you.)

Bill Gates invested billions on nuclear energy innovation for a decade now.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/12/bill.gates.clean.ener...

What are the results? The world's energy use kept piling up, instead of being replaced by clean energy sources. Any decrease in GHG emissions in the developed world is a consequence of globalization and automation. It's just accounting. The GHG emissions have increased elsewhere.

Climate change is a governmental problem that requires investing in energy use reduction, insulation, public transportation, and the like. The solutions are there and have been for decades, but won't be implemented because we keep listening to tech evangelists.

[TeMPOraL]

> Climate change is a governmental problem that requires investing in energy use reduction, insulation, public transportation, and the like.

It's not a governmental problem, it's an inter-governmental problem. Don't forget that governments are in competition with each other as much as your local grocery store is in competition with a Wallmart on the next street.

There are two strategies to tackling global warming that I firmly believe are completely ineffective: hoping for individuals to suddenly reduce their consumption, and hoping for politicians to swiftly pass necessary regulations in their countries. Both are essentially the same: asking someone to make sacrifice and suffer immediate negative consequences, and paying them with hope that others will volunteer to do the same (instead of doing nothing and enjoying the relative increase in status/wealth/power).

The reason to invest in research and new technology is because it gives a way out of the conundrum. Technology gives additional options to politicians. For instance, where no sane policymaker would mandate immediate restrictions on energy production in a nation powered by fossil fuels, dropping prices and increasing availability of solar PVs makes it easy to start funneling money into renewables, which a) makes the politician look progressive/pro-eco, b) allows to decarbonize energy production without reducing it and making the nation less competitive.

So basically - yes, the governments are ones with the power and means to solve this problem. But they won't just go and do it, for the same reason companies on the market don't just agree to do something together. If you want to push them to change, you have to go along with the incentive structures that govern the nations.

[mrpopo]

> The reason to invest in research and new technology is because it gives a way out of the conundrum.

No, it doesn't. At least not by itself. We need a combined response of energy savings, energy efficiency, behavioral changes and green tech to have a chance to mitigate climate change effects.

Anyone who believes into innovation to get us out of this mess didn't make the math. Take aviation. The aviation industry currently burns 10% of the world's crude oil production. The current front-leader innovative "way out" is biofuels. Except if we used 100% of the world's agricultural surface to produce biofuel, we could only replace 25% of the world's oil consumption. Hard to imagine a growing aviation industry with that kind of constraint.

I'm OK with biofuels powering airplanes, but only if we collectively accept flying maybe 10 times less. The same kind of math would apply with hydrogen, etc. There is no exception.

[rubber_duck]

I don't know what to say on the climate change issue - the way I see it it's not something any one government can handle - you've said it - just gets outsourced out of your jurisdiction.

Even with trade pressures, etc. cheap energy is going to get used to increase the living standards of developing nations.

Also all the solutions proposed towards climate change issue seem shortsighted and regressive to me - everyone keeps pretending that if we reduce CO2 the earth will somehow return to a harmonious state and we will all live happily ever after. Even if cutting CO2 in the future fast enough would reverse climate change effects (which we can't really predict) there are still marginal risk factors that could end in global catastrophes (like the previous extinction events in history) and on top of that the globalised society is introducing new problems that we've had to deal with for last 50 years at best. A deadly virus outbreak with a long enough incubation time could swarm the population considering how interconnected the world is, nuclear catastrophes have potentially global impact, etc. etc.

So the politicians are talking about climate change because it's a popular topic with the voters - meanwhile the real problem is that we are dependent on an ecosystem that's incredibly fragile and society is introducing risk variables that didn't exist before.

The world is very interconnected and optimised - but this leads to fragility. We've had situations where a natural disaster in one area (Taiwan) caused major industry problems. Not to mention potential political issues like the recent trade wars with China.

The real solution is working on reducing our dependence on the ecosystem and building more resilient systems - but this is not something an average person would find intuitive - and so it's unlikely to get political support. A perfect example of where motivated individuals can make the difference - and where something like Mars colonisation research can end up providing solutions for earth. And then again it might lead to nothing, and I could be wrong and the climate change campaigning ends up working - it's good we have multiple actors pursuing different solutions.

[mrpopo]

> Even with trade pressures, etc. cheap energy is going to get used to increase the living standards of developing nations.

This is often touted as a reason why we developed countries cannot do anything to mitigate climate change risks. This is first of all false, developed countries together (USA, EU, Japan, Korea, Gulf states) still account for more than 70% of the emissions, NOT including the emissions associated with importations. The lifestyles of the richest 0.54% in the world — 42 million people — are emitting more greenhouse gas emissions than the poorest half of the global population —3.8 billion people.

It's about returning to reality. The lifestyles of most of us in developed countries should not exist.

https://twitter.com/Klimaatzuster/status/1171078178762346496

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0402-3.epdf?share...

> The real solution is working on reducing our dependence on the ecosystem and building more resilient systems

Please come back to reality. The world spends trillions of dollars on the ISS to host 6 people. Anything remotely looking like an artificial ecosystem would be prohibitively expensive, not counting our limited resources on Earth would simply make it impossible for it to sustain life for more than a few million people. You can work hard to be part of the few richest million who would make it in this artificial biosphere, or you can change your own lifestyle and footprint, try to inspire others, and then you can realise that we can still live happily with a lower footprint.

[rubber_duck]

>Please come back to reality. The world spends trillions of dollars on the ISS to host 6 people. Anything remotely looking like an artificial ecosystem would be prohibitively expensive, not counting our limited resources on Earth would simply make it impossible for it to sustain life for more than a few million people. You can work hard to be part of the few richest million who would make it in this artificial biosphere, or you can change your own lifestyle and footprint, try to inspire others, and then you can realise that we can still live happily with a lower footprint.

Right now a global drought for a few years can cause global food chain disruptions and starvation - focusing on stuff like algae/bacteria protein production that can be done in controlled environments, that is space scalable (ie. vertically stackable) etc. This has the potential to solve a lot of environmentally caused problems down the line. Or developing very resilient crops with GMO.

Then stuff like building protective domes around existing cities to protect from natural disasters, quarantines, etc. Maybe start as hurricane shelters for risky areas/small places and start developing the technology.

Then there are reliable decentralised energy sources like micro nuclear reactors that can power a city block - that can be scaled up and treated like nuclear batteries with localised/limited risk factors.

I'm not talking about building some random futuristic utopia - just focusing on technology that increases the robustness of society instead of focusing on economic optimisation. There is a joke that if economists designed a human 4 people would share a single kidney instead of having redundant organs on each person. The other thing is the green regressive dogma that the only way to solve the climate change issue is removing the human influence and everything is going to be fine ignoring how volatile the earth can be on its own.

These are all things that could get a lot more attention but the only solution to climate change talked by politicians is reducing CO2.

[TeMPOraL]

There are more important observations to make:

- The budget of a democratic nation isn't under direct control of its constituents, so average selfishness of the citizens has nothing to do with it.

- A democratic nation has lots of interests jockeying for the budget, and can easily swallow arbitrary amounts of money.

- Almost all of that money is spent on improving the things for that nation, so a nation state is not the best organization to task with solving a global/international problem.

Most importantly though, the more diffused the money, the less effective it is. Coordinating people costs a lot (think of how much charities spend on advertising!). With his fortune, Gates can just drop $60M on some promising anti-malaria activity; in the alternative reality d-d/you are proposing, it's unlikely that 600 of his employees would suddenly coordinate to drop their $100k on that operation; most likely, no money would be donated at all.

So the argument essentially boils down to focus. Much like with distractions and personal productivity, both the market and a government budget can absorb arbitrary amounts of diffuse money with little of value to show for it; it takes focused, bulk money under control of a person to move the needle on some issue.

[js8]

I don't buy the focus argument. It looks to me as an argument against free market, towards some kind of central planning. Focus can be surprisingly inefficient.

Isn't the whole point of free market that the money end up distributed to citizens (consumers), who then choose what to do with it, and what problems to tackle?

I also think we have Bill Gates (very focusedly) fighting malaria on one side, and Koch brothers (also focusedly) fighting for coal on the other. I am not convinced that in the sum, the side of Bill Gates has won.

If we perhaps diffuse the money, maybe we will actually find enough people to fight malaria, but there will be less people willing to spread lies about climate change. Because there are actually more ordinary people having trouble with malaria than ordinary people having trouble what to do with a coal mine once coal mining gets out of fashion.

[TeMPOraL]

It is an argument against free market - to the extent that some people think it's a panacea for all problems. It isn't.

Free markets work best when needs are diverse and not easy to identify. The money flows along feedback loops and finds its way to where it serves best. At least for a while, until those with money use it to redirect more money towards them. But that's a topic for another day.

Ultimately, both Gates and Koch brothers got their money in the free market. It's hard to have one without the other. I think it's best to encourage more rich people to be like Gates, because we'll always have plenty of Kochs.

[mozey]

> Coordinating people costs a lot

Does it really? Even before social media and the internet, what put humans apart was our ability to co-ordinate efficiently

[TeMPOraL]

Yes. We coordinate efficiently in small groups. Less than Dunbar's number, generally. Beyond that, we use hierarchical governance, laws, money and markets as crutches.

[mozey]

Progress implies moving in a direction or towards a specific destination. Maybe the reasoning is that with a couple of billionaire philanthropists there is a smaller number of directions or destinations so the odds of hitting them is more likely. With government deciding and ordinary people contributing taxes, there is a multitude of officials and citizens all pulling in different directions. So, basically the same argument you would make in favor of dictatorship.

[eru]

Democracy is good because people can govern themselves. The smaller the unit of decision is, the better. So in a big nation, you have perhaps 300 million people, so each vote only has 1/300 millionth of an influence but over 300 million people.

In a small town, you have perhaps 500 people, so each vote has 1/500th of influence over 500 people.

Well, when Bill Gates decides what to do with his money, it's 1/1th of influence over 1 person's wealth.