[logjammin]

Excuse a bit of hyperbole, but what sort of medieval nightmare-world are we living in when the citizens of the world's most revered democracy are waiting with bated breath for the pronouncements of the wealthy on fighting a viral pandemic?

Gates Foundation, research, etc etc. I get it. He's been involved with health stuff for a while. In theory, too, I'm open to a good idea regardless of its source. But this remains a guy who dollars to doughnuts I'd bet does not know how much milk costs at his supermarket. And he's telling us about chipping and digital tattoos?

It'd be legit pretty hilarious if it weren't so insane.

[Reedx]

It's not really about wealth, though. No one is asking or cares what the Walton heirs would have to say.

It's the fact that Bill is smarter than the people in charge of our institutions. And he has a lot of experience in this domain. And has been warning about exactly this problem for many years. Indeed he warned that pandemics were our biggest blindspot and threat.

E.g., See his TED talk from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI

[logjammin]

Put aside for a second the fact that being rich enough from word processing software to surround yourself with experts and repeat what they tell you does not (necessarily) make you an expert. Apart from that, I agree with the thrust of what you're saying: he's not the Waltons, and he's funded meaningful public health work.

The point I'm trying to make in my original comment isn't about BG himself, it's exactly about "the people in charge of our institutions". Rereading it, I didn't make this as clear as possible, so let me take another stab:

We think of ourselves as an advanced democracy (or democratic republic) and economy. We certainly pay for that in taxes and in other ways (obviously we're not Nordic in terms of income tax, but still). But when it's go-time for that advanced democracy, for the institutions and experts we pay to train through years of schooling in public universities and then pay to command highly specialized bodies at local, state, and federal levels, their performance is, excuse my language, so fucking dismal that the vaunted CDC cannot make a working test, that there are not enough latex gloves in that advanced democracy to keep doctors and nurses from getting sick ... their performance is so dismal and we're so untrusting of the basic decency and competence of our experts and elected officials that we crowd into a Reddit AMA to hear a software magnate maybe have a better solution ... Is that not just bizarre to you? Infuriating? Sad?

I fully grant that I may be alone in feeling this way. On some level I'm reacting strongly to the fact that the country I immigrated to as a teenager is revealing itself to be profoundly third-world in certain ways - like, this isn't what I thought I signed up for. Like I said earlier, there's something truly funny about it at the same time that it's terribly sad. (One funny thing is that the solution the guy comes up with is "let's put a microchip in everyone!".) Don't mean to impose my views on anyone, and again, I'm not saying Gates has enabled, via Windows wealth, zero good in the world. It's not about Gates; it's about us.

[thawaway1837]

Considering the person who is surrounded by the best experts, and should be in charge, spends his press conferences contradicting what those very experts just said minutes ago, we are kind of forced to listen to other people who have access to the best knowledge here, and that’s usually the wealthy.

[logjammin]

Right, yes, exactly: my point is that that state of affairs you describe is fucking bananas. That's all.

[FuckButtons]

Yeah, it is, but that’s no more true now than it was before Coronavirus. Trumps presidency has laid bare just how enfeebled American democracy is.

[jiggawatts]

You're not the only one! My experience of simply growing up was this in a nutshell.

In the last year of primary school, I was shocked that our teacher was so bad at basic science that he let me, an 11-year-old student run the class. We had this neat physics "kit" with magnets, simple electrical circuits, and an easy to follow instruction leaflet. I simply followed the instructions and helped other students. I remember feeling shocked that the teacher couldn't follow these simple instructions himself. Plug the blue wire in the "A" socket. That kind of thing.

Then in high-school we had specialist teachers. The maths teacher who actually knew maths, the history teacher who actually knew history, and so forth. Still, it was fun to ask probing questions to see what the limits of their knowledge was.

At University... wow! They had electron microscopes! Super computers! A chip manufacturing lab! The professors were often actual researchers, with time on the Hubble telescope! I vividly remember a computer networking class where we used matrix exponentiation to estimate the maximum total throughput of an arbitrary network topology.

The whole time I was thinking to myself: If primary school was shit, high school was okay, and University is such a huge step up from that, surely when I get out of here into the "corporate world" it'll be amazing.

What a shock I was in for!

The real world was a spectacular step down. It was worse than the primary school. At least that teacher knew his limits, admitted them, and delegated to someone who knew what to do.

This doesn't happen in the real world! The manager has to save face. He has to "control the messaging". The issue doesn't exist if it's not reported. As long as the auditors don't find out, it's not really a problem. It doesn't matter if the computer network is slow as molasses, as long as it technically meets the requirement specification, no matter how badly. Nobody tries to do anything well. Hardly anything is optimised. Nothing is measured, certainly not scientifically.

This is just so sad to me.

Back at University I regularly used Wolfram Mathematica to fit complex, non-linear equations to measurements, factoring in errors and everything. The last time I found the excuse to do this at work was two years ago, which was five full years after the previous opportunity to do something scientific, rational, and evidence-based.

Literally just yesterday I was at an emergency services department gearing up for work-from-home. The users were complaining that their sessions were slow. Well... no shit. Of course it's slow. The data centre network is for some reason running at 1Mbps effective on some subnets. They are double-hopping unnecessarily because nobody bothered to read the manual on their remote access solution. They have more than $500K in software and hardware and it's markedly worse than my own remote access to my home PC that cost me nothing. All for the want of a few button presses and a couple of hours investigating why they're getting 0.1% of the rated throughput on their gear.

These very same people are the type in charge. They run the government, the hospitals, the emergency services. You vote for them, and they decide the laws, the budget, and policy. They control the armed forces and the electricity.

I'm shocked that anything works at all, and increasingly I suspect that it does so only because of the unsung heroic efforts of a tiny, silent minority...

[samsonradu]

> I'm shocked that anything works at all, and increasingly I suspect that it does so only because of the unsung heroic efforts of silent minority...

I also have the sentiment that many organizations/processes are deeply rotten and dysfunctional.

The only explanation I can find for it is that the society/people are extremely resilient and adaptive - much more than it seems. One of the other days I was watching a WW1 documentary, seeing all those scenes with men fighting in the trenches for months and many who were lucky enough not to be killed came back.

Meanwhile I was thinking to myself - Fuck, if I don't have coffee and some food by noon I'm completely useless. The reality however is that under those circumstances people change and adapt. And it works the same in modern society - there are people living on the streets for many many years, under very harsh conditions. Good or bad, working or not things just move on.

[ManuelKiessling]

> We think of ourselves as an advanced democracy

The US Americans may think that they are an advanced democracy, but betting that the Western European societies see the US as a special case of a third world country or failed state is not exactly a risky bet (albeit one that cannot be validated, I’m afraid).

And no, not „because Trump“. Trump is not the reason that the US is the laughingstock of the civilized world, it is the proof that the judgement of the civilized world was warranted all along.

Don‘t get me wrong: many US Americans are very fine people. Some parts of your industry are really impressive. Lots of notable achievements in science. But „the US“ as a nation, and as a society?

There’s nothing we can look up to anymore.

[beatgammit]

I really don't understand this whole perspective. Europeans seem to come from a perspective of government protecting and providing for its people, which can be seen at least partially by people putting up with royal families throughout Europe. The US comes from the perspective that government can be a huge force for evil, so we should limit its ability to violate our rights. Other cultures come from different perspectives.

I live in the US largely because I was born here and partly because I don't like the perspective in Europe or E. Asia. I guess I feel the same way about Europe as Europe feels about the US, though if I were in control, I'd probably make some changes that Europeans would agree with (open borders, for one).

Instead of bickering about who is backwards, how about we just work together on things of mutual interest, like increasing free trade and freedom of movement? Name-calling isn't doing anyone any favors. Ideally, you should be able to live where you feel the most comfortable, and you should never be stuck because your government made poor choices.

[amorroxic]

Man, don't beat yourself up. Americans are great people and not that bad of a society now. (someone in a WE society). Hang in there, we'll bicker after :)

[curiousgeorgio]

Perhaps this should be viewed as just more evidence that in many cases, private enterprise tends to be more productive than government-sponsored initiatives.

Granted, that may not always be the case (China being a counterexample here), but one must also be aware of the costs (in terms of freedom) that are associated with government control of such a large portion of citizens' lives and the means of production. If that's what you happen to prefer, you're free to move to a nation that embraces communism. You might fare better in a pandemic, but you might also get locked up (or worse) for saying something that your government doesn't agree with.

As for me, I prefer capitalism and the freedom it gives us to either hoard wealth or (as Gates demonstrates) do tremendous good - not by force, but out of genuine altruism. I'd bet on the success of a Gates-sponsored healthcare solution over a government-sponsored one any day of the week.

[foldr]

>I'd bet on the success of a Gates-sponsored healthcare solution over a government-sponsored one any day of the week.

So you'd bet that the US is going to deal with the pandemic more effectively than China has? That doesn't seem likely at the moment.

[godzulu]

Be effective, do you mean by imprisoning and silencing physicians, insisting they had things under control, allowing 11m people to continue with new year, mass celebrations, allowing out of country travel, silencing Taiwanese doctors complaints to the WHO and strong arming the WHO to declare, as late as January 14, 2020 that it is not passable thru human to human transmission?

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the WHO tweeted.

[foldr]

No, I just mean that China has had more success than, say, Italy in stopping the spread of the disease.

[curiousgeorgio]

> So you'd bet that the US is going to deal with the pandemic more effectively than China has?

No, that's not what I said.

[foldr]

So Gates is not actually going to do anything to help with this pandemic? If so, how is he an example of the effectiveness of private enterprise as compared to government?

[Kaze404]

> As for me, I prefer capitalism and the freedom it gives us to either hoard wealth or (as Gates demonstrates) do tremendous good

Who is "us" here? Surely you don't think a significant portion of the world population can choose to hoard wealth.

[curiousgeorgio]

As an American, the freedom is mine (as it is for other US citizens) to do what I choose with the money I earn, regardless of the amount. Wealth is relative, after all.

[Kaze404]

Is it though? I don't know about stats in the US, but I'd be surprised if the majority of the people earned enough money to choose what to do with it after basic human expenses. Unless you count surviving as a choice, but at that point anything is.

[dwaltrip]

I don't think it's that he is smarter.

I would bet that plenty of people in the relevant agencies were fully aware of how unprepared we were, and that the decision makers were simply unconvinced that is was important enough oe politically expedient.

[remcob]

I'll take you on that bet. Given his work on poverty, I wouldn't be surprised if he knows the approximate price of milk in supermarkts around the world.

IMHO, The primary thing wealth gives you is the time and resources to understand society in great depth. I just wish more wealthy people took that opportunity, but Gates is one of the leaders here.

[room505]

Bill guessing the cost of household goods - https://youtu.be/ad_higXixRA

[onetimemanytime]

I read it for you and posted why he should be listened to:

>>Over the years I’ve had a chance to study diseases like influenza, Ebola, and now COVID-19—including how epidemics start, how to prevent them, and how to respond to them. The Gates Foundation has committed up to $100 million to help with the COVID-19 response around the world, as well as $5 million to support our home state of Washington.

I’m joined remotely today by Dr. Trevor Mundel, who leads the Gates Foundation’s global health work, and Dr. Niranjan Bose, my chief scientific adviser.

Ask us anything about COVID-19 specifically or epidemics and pandemics more generally.

[Justin_K]

I'm going to go as far as saying you just don't get it. Here is Bill Gates, successfully running global public health programs and is someone who actually does care ... then there's idiots like you criticizing him because he's "wealthy".

[drukenemo]

You ignored this part, which I do find worrisome: “ And he's telling us about chipping and digital tattoos?”.

[jug]

Not sure what you mean. You even invalidated your own argument. If he has a vested interest in eradicating malaria (“involved in health stuff for a while”), why would it be a massive disadvantage there to have money?

[SahAssar]

> most revered democracy

What?

[jlawson]

Bill called this years ago. He's also incidentally done more to save lives from disease than possibly any other living human, having prevented millions of deaths by malaria and other illnesses purely because he wanted to.

There is lots of other information out there from doctors and scientists. We needed that and we got that. The point here is to get Bill's unique and valuable high-level perspective.

Nobody is 'waiting with bated breath for the pronouncements of the wealthy'; this is ridiculous and I think you'll know it if you read it back with even the slightest attempt to look at the situation neutrally.

[foldr]

>Bill called this years ago

Pandemics happen from time to time. Anyone can "call" the next pandemic.

BG is not an expert on any of this stuff and has nothing to add. We need less noise, not more, at times like this.

[logjammin]

If he's so prescient about pandemics, why didn't he spend the last 20 years, I don't know, making sure healthcare workers in his own darned city had enough masks and gloves to deal with one? Surely he could've saved a few lives in his own backyard while we was busy in Africa, right?

[kick]

Isn't this the wrong time for nationalism? If you can save a hundred lives somewhere, or save ten at home for the same price, why are the people "in his own darned city" more important? Especially given that "in his own darned city" there are other billionaires to handle that?

[raisedbyninjas]

This isn't how effective altruism works.

[mistermann]

Maybe it should be.

Think about it this way: had he done this, would it have made things better, worse, or no change?

And don't forget: had he looked into this, he would have realized that they were dramatically unprepared, and I suspect he would have been smart enough to assume that there was a possibility that the same state of affairs may exist in other cities, and then look into that.

Did this thought not cross his mind? It seems like an interesting question.

[glofish]

> Bill called it

If he really called it he would be prepared. Right now it sounds like he was just repeating what he heard from others for the shock value

You give a presentation on pandemic - you are the richest guy on the planet, yet you have nothing that demonstrates that you took it seriously, that's not calling it