Bill Gates – 3 Myths That Block Progress for The Poor

Wanting to develop cheaper, cleaner sources of energy is not such a bad thing, especially the cheaper part.

@weatherornot January 22, 2014 at 1:32
Bingo. Too bad that most politicians currently in power do not agree. Hence carbon taxes and various other stupidities; all acting as barriers to the improvement of peoples’ lives.

Two scams mentioned in the same paragraph notably:
We will also need to solve the problems that come with affluence, like higher rates of diabetes.
Nope. Not higher rates of affluence. Diabetes or trans-fatty acid poisoning of the modified electron transport chain in pancreatic beta cells comes from the consumption of trans fats as encouraged by the medical profession and big pharma. Its perpetuation, like the climate change scam, comes from control of the MSM and its solid foundation in pseudo science. In fact the world might well have been described as affluent in 1932 when there were zero cases of diabetes (2). The first case was in 1933, just 81 years ago….
…. and you all believed it was natural?
Nope. Its a scam, like Alzheimers, CV disease and many other symptoms of TFA poisoning.

An excellent analysis.
Bill and his organisation have gone up in my estimation.
We have to stop the doomsayers who demand more and more control by frightening us about the future.
If all nations increase per capita wealth the birth rate drops below replacement and we move towards genuine long term sustainability with an improved environment.
I’ve been pointing that out for a while but to see Bill endorse it is a sign that it really is sinking in.
The necessary increase in per capita wealth can only come from freedom and the cheapest possible sources of energy.
Freedom involves the minimum of state interference.
The cheapest sources of energy do not include those sources currently described as environmentally sustainable.
That phrase is Orwellian in that it is the opposite of the truth.
Genuine sustainability is going to come from fossil fuel use simply because it is cheap, plentiful, and leads to levels of prosperity that result in voluntarily reduced reproduction rates.
If we raise the cost of energy by not using fossil fuels freely then we delay global prosperity, delay (and maybe defer indefinitely) the date of worldwide voluntary reduction in reproduction rates and damage the environment more than would otherwise have been the case.
As usual, the power hungry know it all types are promulgating a great lie.
If our CO2 emissions do not significantly affect the sizes positions and intensities of the permanent climate zones then we have been deceived, robbed and betrayed to an astonishing degree.
The evidence is building that that is exactly what has happened.

Nice letter. Thanks for sharing.

Well just look at that … the glass isn’t half empty, it’s half full.
So much for all that gloom & doom talk.

eco-geek says:
January 22, 2014 at 1:52 pm
… Diabetes or trans-fatty acid poisoning of the modified electron transport chain in pancreatic beta cells comes from …”
I’m not sure where you got your history of diabetes from but Type 2 has been known since the 5th century C.E. as a distinct form, different from Type 1. Also, Type 2 was noted to be correlated with increasing affluence by health officers of British colonial agencies in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a matter of great concern.
There is also a known inverse correlation between how long a population has been relying on a modern diet dominated by wheat flour and white rice. Foraging peoples and slash and burn (or “swidden” based) agriculturalists are particularly susceptible when their diets shift to highly processed. starch laden ones. There is no simple, single cause. Both forms of diabetes have been known for centuries.
Trans-fats certainly are something I avoid, but so are high-fructose corn syrup and corn-fed beef. There’s a broad consensus now that even butter!! is better for you than trans-fat laden foods. That, however, is no good reason for walking the conspiracy plank.

Cheaper and Cleaner Energy is necessary for a better and more prosperous world.
But it won’t happen with rising thuggery,
forced social conformism,
more rule of man than rule of law,
and a epidemic of law to numerous to read.
It isn’t a matter of enginering a better world.
It is a “People Problem”

@ ecogeek. What’s the source for your claim about diabetes? My great-uncle died as a youngster in the UK and was one of the first users of insulin. This was in the 1920’s. A quick google would also suggest diabetes was even recognised back in the ancient world.

must be a very small point – I couldn’t see it

… ‘and, I voted for pot, too.’
It’s not a surprise that Bill Gates personally supports the freedom to chose whether to use. But as a major public figure, in the midst of promoting his new Letter, it is a surprise to see him toss into the interview, that he voted for pot in his home state of WA USA.
Particularly, when close observation of the process here in WA says ‘buy a good seat early’, and spend some time leafing through the game-Program … so you can fully appreciate the eruption that looks set to blow.
That Gates ties his Annual Letter announcement to what should be an unrelated matter like this … is kinda curious.

Caveat Emptor
/archive.org/details/WipeOutHumans-BillGates-VaccinesArebestWayToDepopulatePlanet

Duster says:
January 22, 2014 at 2:55 pm
=========
It is possible that diabetes go way back to the pharaohs of Egypt where they found plaque in the arteries. It’s possible that they consumed excessive amount of wheat but who knows for sure. Just have to read Wheat Belly Diet book by Dr Davis to understand how it affects your health.

The History of Diabetes
Diabetes has been recognize for as long & everywhere people have paid organized attention to health. It’s not hard to realize you’re seeing something specific, once you see a few cases.
We can tell that ancient folks were onto it. The modern situation with it, and it’s name Diabetes mellitus, date from the late 1700s.
Medical records are loaded with cases, through the 1800s. Now, insulin came along in the early 1900s, and experiences were a little rough with it, at first. Might be some confusion, with that.

Lou said @ January 22, 2014 at 3:38 pm;

It is possible that diabetes go way back to the pharaohs of Egypt where they found plaque in the arteries. It’s possible that they consumed excessive amount of wheat but who knows for sure.

Honey is the original sugar. The ready availability of concentrated sucrose-syrup in the form honey held back the development of other sweeteners. Diabetes mellitus is Latin for ‘pees honey’; ‘pee smells of honey’; or “pee tastes of honey’. Pre-recent physicians smelled & tasted urine, often in the process of discharge. ‘Pee on your hand for me … there’s good fellow now’.
People with even mildly comfortable means, used to ‘hog through’ honey, at least as bad as sugar-freaks do, today.

Let us see who is correct.
Jesus Christ: (Matthew 26:11) For you always have the poor with you; but you do not always have Me.
Bill Gates: By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.
Gates is yet another arrogant mortal man who thinks he is God, making ego maniacal prognostications.

@albertalad,
“perhaps Mr. Gates might want to name all those new cheaper forms of energy he has in mind.”
He has. He listed fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, nuclear fission, wind, solar photovoltaic, and solar thermal in his recent TED Talk in 2010. He admits that research is needed in each of those areas to bring costs down.

I think he’s working with a technology blind spot. Most work is not creative, but repetitive. Most people can’t handle a new and different task every day. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to master one thing. It’s darn difficult to be creative. Higher wealth and better education (“However, as more people are educated”) does not make people creative. To be creative in the modern technology world is very difficult, everything easy has already been done. So as the wealth increases, and automation takes over the repetitive tasks, more people just go on the dole. And the society becomes unstable. At some point, when there are too many tax-eaters, decline is inevitable.
Affluent societies become senescent, decline, and are taken over by hungry societies of strivers who have a culture of working hard for every gain. Affluent societies cannot advance unless they are existentially challenged.
Gates is a singularian, describing a post-singularity world. He grew up in the Pax Americana, and cannot imagine, nor does he have to worry about, a world where the wolves are ascendant.

I don’t listen to socialists generally. This one also predicted that we would never need more than 640 kBytes of memory (eh, maybe an urban legend, but it fits). He is also hugely involved with the national reprogramming standards our children are getting through Common Core. It is hard to trust such a soul.
Mark

At this point, “poor countries” are those that lack the rule of law and property rights. Their situation will not improve until their governance does.

Bernd Felsche
“All aid is futile until the rule of law can be established. Long ago (Peace of Westphalia at the end of the 30 years’ war) it was established that interference in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nations was a guarantee of war. Something that is all too frequently forgotten; especially by those whose intentions”
Exactly.
That is secret to increasing wealth and escape from poverty, especially in Africa.

Let us see who is correct.
Jesus Christ: (Matthew 26:11) For you always have the poor with you; but you do not always have Me.
Bill Gates: By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.

You do realize that Gate’s remark has an asterisk by it, right? The headline is to grab people. He specifically said poor by today’s standards and specifically said that there would always be people and countries that are less well off than their neighbors.
Jesus’s statement is that there will always be people less well off than others… the poor. He didn’t quantify “how poor.” Doesn’t sound like the two statements are nearly as far apart as you’re trying to make them sound.

Mr. Gates admits the key to his optimism is cheap energy.
Yet governments world-wide have colluded with the UN to make energy scarce and expensive by supporting the absolutely evil notion that CO2, aka “plant food”, is destroying the world.
Ironic how the UN is accusing a colorless, odorless, beneficial trace gas of doing their dirty work.
Until governments stop marching in lockstep with the UN and their brand of shadow totalitarianism, this world will not progress.
Why Gates selects 2035 as a mile marker for unprecedented progress in the world is anybody’s guess.
Today live ammunition was approved for “handling” dissenters in Kiev, Ukraine, where for several days a bloody street battle has been waged between EU-leaning citizens and the police of a hard-line government that is forging closer ties with Putin.
Putin’s energy policies are largely to blame, and when dictators like Putin use energy policies to political advantage, the UN cheers—what Putin is doing in his sphere is what the UN states they will do world-wide.
What’s going to transform the UN from an assemblage of capitalist-hating power-mongers into a flock of benevolent care givers?
I have no clue.
And neither, from what I’ve read, does Mr. Gates.

Well I have mixed feelings about BG.
First off, I don’t begrudge Bill Gates, one brass razoo. I believe he is one of the very few people one can point to, and say; this person has made the opportunity for a better living, for nearly every person on this planet. Can you imagine the world we have today, without the PC, and M$ Windows ? Now to me, an Apple is just a PC; maybe it preceded the IBM PC; but it is just a PC. And I think of Steve Wozniak, as its creator; not Jobs. I will acknowledge that Jobs made a business success of that Company. I wonder what Apple might be today, if the Woz’s open architecture had prevailed over Jobs’ closed shop.
But I digress; thanx Bill Gates for this gizmo.
But I’m not even going to stick around till 2035, to see your prediction fail to materialize. You put too much faith in the willingness of people to give up their freedom, in favor of a managed utopia.
Of course I believe the world is going to get better; but only because there will always be plenty of people who believe in freedom, for its own sake.
I haven’t read your full letter Bill, but I will.
Speaking of those new energies; I noticed, that you didn’t mention thermo-nuclear fusion; the energy of the future; it always will be, the energy of the future.
The reason is two-fold; (a), gravity sucks ! and (b), Earnshaw’s theorem .
Earnshaw’s theorem says no stable static configuration of electric charges exists. It is inherently impossible to use static electric fields, to compress matter to a high enough density, at a high enough temperature, for long enough to get continuous fusion. It is an inherently unstable situation. Numerous fusion experiments that simply blew up, spectacularly, demonstrate that.
Mother Gaia, has shown us, about how big a thermo-nuclear reactor needs to be, and also what is a safe distance from human habitation to build one. And that design only works, because gravity sucks.
Anything that get in the vicinity of a large enough mass, is automatically attracted, to the center of mass, completely without human intervention. The pile (pun intended) just keeps on getting bigger, until it eventually lights up, all by itself. Gravitational thermo-nukes, just happen all by themselves.
So nyet, on the fusion dream.
But thanx again Bill for what you and yours, have created. The world is a better place now.

“””””…..Patrick says:
January 22, 2014 at 6:55 pm
“Mike Jonas says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:52 pm”
While there is significant waste in aid programs, in particular in Africa, it’s corruption that pevents most of the aid from doing what it was intended to do by being siphoned off…….”””
So it’s just the same as in the USA ??

Gunga Din said @ @ January 22, 2014 at 7:07 pm;

It is true that we’ll need to develop cheaper, cleaner sources of energy to keep all this growth from making the climate and environment worse.

===================================================================
But that will never happen by dumping today’s cheap energy because the Hansenites have decreed that CO2 is “dirty”.
Does Gates really think that Hansen is right and someday we’ll be able to buy fresh boiled lobster right off the boat?

I can’t find anything in the Letter about C02 … greenhouse, warming, carbon, dioxide.
He might be hedging on that toxic CO2 thing.

Re Gates’ list of new energy sources that are cheaper than today. Yes, research is already being done, and progress is being made. He listed specifically fossil fuel with carbon capture and storage. A few companies are working on this and have some promising technologies. As more plants are built and experience gained, costs will likely be reduced. One such technology is IGCC, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle where coal is gasified, the CO2 captured and stored, and hydrogen is burned cleanly in a gas turbine to produce power. Another is mineralization of CO2, which is basically chemically converting the CO2 into dry sodium bicarbonate. With CO2 mineralization, there is no need to liquefy the CO2, and no need to pump the CO2 underground.
He also listed nuclear fission. Costs there are extremely high and are unlikely to come down. He also mentioned drawbacks to nuclear fission: operating safety, proliferation of weapons, and long-term toxic waste disposition.
He next listed wind power, where costs are steadily declining. The decline is primarily due to economy of scale with larger and larger wind turbines. The major issue remains intermittency, which Gates mentioned. This can be solved with the discovery of economic storage. Research is done on several types of storage systems, but nothing is yet economic.
Next he listed solar photovoltaic energy, which has had dramatic decreases in cost in the past decade or so. It suffers from the same intermittency problem as does wind.
Finally, he listed solar thermal, which can have a built-in storage system to produce power after the sun sets each night. Costs for this also can be reduced by economy of scale.
Gates did not say this, but there is nothing that can compete with natural gas burned in modern combined cycle gas turbine plants for low cost, reliability, safety, and zero pollution. There is promising research that converts organic matter from sewage sludge into methane. I can provide details if there is any interest.

William Henry Gates III
Born October 28 1955 to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell.
At 13 Master Gates enters Lakewood School and expensive Preparatory School where his enrollment was payed for by Senior Gates, a very well-to-do Seattle resident, i.e. his father.
In eight grade, the “Mothers Club” used “proceeds” of the Lakewood School to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school’s students!
Oh, so computational the “Mothers Club!” And so well “Financed”, dear dear.
After the Mothers Club “donation” was “exhausted,” [oh my, not good] he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
Ah Ha! Exploiting Bugs!
Well well.
In time, Master Gates would be expelled from Harvard on a certain disagreement of Master Gates and a … err … Professor, where upon the Professor gave Master Gates a grade of FAIL, and Master Gates Famously retorted that his father would cut the balls off the Professor should he proceed. The Harvard Professor proceeded!
Some months later Senior Gates bought a small software company in Albuquerque New Mexico for his son, so his son would be the “President” there of. After all, Senior Gate must save face amongst his “Lakewood” rivals, and his son “must” be a master of industry and commerce after all he is bread for no other roll in his life on this Earth!
So now. Master Gates, having out lived Senior Gates and all … must still demonstrate his “born abilities” his “bread excellence” his “born to rule the masses” in spite of his … physical deformities.
Ah! The “Deformed Dwarf King” William Henry Gates III, and now no other. Good riddance Dwarf King. May your body rot at 2x the “normal” rotting rate for the latitude of … Seattle.
Ha ha

Oh, forgot to add that I appreciate this being shared so more people can see the results of vaccination, and hopefully we can prevent mouthy morons like Jenny McCarthy from convincing anyone else that Polio and Smallpox are better than living babies and a working society.

Gunga Din said @ January 22, 2014 at 7:07 pm;

… [W]hat does “clean energy” and the need for it mean nowadays?
I don’t think anyone would say that Bill Gates is behind the times.

At this point, it’s still a hedge, and the cards have to stay close.
But coal will burn with nothing but water vapor & CO2. It’s the garish lurid-red urban horizons that need “cleaned”, and we have the technology for that. Have, for a long time.
Once CO2 turns out not to be an ogre, the now-elevated prices of energy & fuels could make coal very tempting. Clean energy means using scrubber etc systems … so you can drink the water condensed from the stack-exhaust.
Chem-Eng had a long-running ad-series of a white-hatted Manager tipping back the glass, back when it was worth saving.

Indeed, who would know better about problems of humanity, who would have more experience of poverty and persecution than Bill Gates (and especially Melinda)?

I was never a great fan of Bill Gates, but on these three points I can agree with him.

Good letter with a nice positive message. For many people this will be news, as the media, politics etc are reporting in the opposite direction. The remark on climate change – not too bad, it is a start to a more neutral position. Poverty is caused by corruption, bad politics, absence of free markets. The progress in the last 30 years is remarkable and worth to be cited again and again.
Mr. Gates: not so bad after all – may the Lord help you in your further efforts to fight poverty.

Get rid of the UN myth nr. 4: http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/21/un-global-prosperity-is-causing-global-warming/

But Bill & M are avid AGW supporters. They want the poor to remain poor and the rich to become poor, oh, as long as it isn’t them. Like the other clown Branson they support Oblarny and his lies.

Stephen et al. If you don’t want to listen to the Gates at least lend Hans Rosling an ear:
http://www.gapminder.org/

Paul,
You mean like this?
“By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. (I mean by our current definition of poor.)2 Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer.
…
[2] Specifically, I mean that by 2035, almost no country will be as poor as any of the 35 countries that the World Bank classifies as low-income today, even after adjusting for inflation.”

Co-Process Energy Plants
All across America, and around the world, there are large numbers of little generating-plants that make Belching Old-Time Coal look like a model citizen … in terms of the raunchy, ghastly fuels they burn. But there are no visible emissions from them, no smell, no funny-colored skies under certain weather-conditions. You can warm & dry your newborn baby in the stack-exhaust, no worries. Literally … because even the extra moisture & heat have been removed, and used
These co-plants provide juice to a local industrial layout … but they are really garbage-disposals. The laws under which they operate, favor them accepting multiple streams of bizarre ‘fuel-crap’, from other local economic activities. Often, there is a side-business consisting of an independently-operated 500 horsepower ‘tub-grinder’ that chips stumps, construction debris, agriculture waste & byproduct … and small truckers have little side-contracts, pulling trailer-loads of the chip to the plant, and empty trailers back.
A very big co-production aspect to these multi-func plants, is cement-clinker. They ‘modify’ their firebox ash, so that as it emerges, it is a massaged material ideal for adding to a Portland Cement production stream. Or, the ash-waste can be tuned to be road-ballast. Or asphalt or Portland concrete aggregate. The flexibility is phenomenal.
We have one of these little plants, right here at one of the global epicenters of the Eco-Enviro-Green scene. The Elwha River, with the dams now down and salmon cavorting in free-running waters, supplies water to the port-town of Port Angeles. But not so much to the Eclipse Industrial Plant, since it produces its own water from the plant-gases (yes, you can drink it). It burns a lot of tree-bark, being mainly a sawmill-centered facility.
Our Eclipse plant sits beneath the famous mountain-scenery of Olympic National Park. Park Headquarters are right up the road. Most people don’t even know that the ‘burner’ & plant are there.
These little co-plants have long been an actual, standardized Industrial Product themselves, cranked out by companies like a form of specially construction equipment. Obviously, they are ideal for Bill Gates’ purposes & goals. Poor, developing regions have the crappy coal that makes the best road-ballast & cement-clinker, which such places need. The plants are often mobile, made to break down in pieces and truck up & down the road, as the work-locale shifts.
Once it turns out that CO2 can’t serve as a credible bogeyman, the floodgates will burst.
[Ok … I will scoot outa here before daylight, drive across the famous Elwha, and spend the day working in the woods on a hillside above the Eclipse mill & co-plant, a country mile away. I will usually hear it clanging & buzzing & roaring … but I will never get a whiff of it. Not once, in decades. Will work days in the brush for a week now, out of contact mostly… ]

I like his optimism, but I will never get past the fact that becoming insanely wealthy by developing the best software during the computer revolution doesn’t make a person any more omniscient than stepping foot on the moon.
His opinions have been increasingly socialistic, similar to his good friend Warren Buffet. There is no ‘we’ who determine things like this, as what is frequently good for you is not good for me, and nature takes its course. What he wants is world government, which will result in the few (1% or 0.1% or possibly 0.01%) having absolute control over what the rest of us can and cannot do.
Beware uber-wealthy people engaged in solving the world’s problems.

While Bill has some good points, Bono actually has it right. — “Capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.” Free commerce, property rights, the rule of law all do more for the poor than giving them money. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for PRIVATE charity, but without economic rights and freedoms, the vast majority of the poor are going to stay poor.

Jim,
I’ve read your post and understood it. I also studied Tesla’s biographies (many of them) in detail, since I was interested in his personality and work.
Your attacks on Tesla are typical of people with hurting egos who want to diminish greatness to sooth their burning disappointment with themselves.
In the same vein, modern archaeologists still cannot hear Heinrich Schliemann’s name without cringing. He “didn’t apply scientific methods,” he was a “grave robber,” he was an “unscrupulous capitalist using his ill-gotten money to finance his fame,” etc., etc., ad nauseam. But it was Shliemann who [found] Troy and Mycenae (and correctly identified the location of Knossos, too). There’s simply no around it.
The first postage stamp was successfully introduced by Sir Rowland Hill in 1840. It is true that he didn’t invent it. The idea of as postage stamp was first proposed, quite a few years earlier, by the postal service official in Serbia, then a part of Austrian-Hungarian Empire. That official was fired for going over the head of his immediate superiors, and nothing became of his idea practically.
First radio signal was sent and received by Russian Navy, testing the idea of Aleksanr Popov. But it was Marconi who designed an apparatus that was practical and ready to implement on a large scale.
Similarly, Nikola Tesla was the one who designed the first working industrial AC generation grid, and no slurs would ever change this fact. My hat off to Dolivo-Dobrovsky, but it was Tesla, and in the US, not in Europe, who designed, tested, and implemented the first industrial-scale system of electricity generation and distribution.
Please note that I will not continue our conversation if you wouldn’t immediately change your tone to much more respectful one. I don’t suffer jerks gladly.
[Though others would claim he did, indeed, “wound” Troy. 8<) mod]

For the first time I’m starting to believe that Gates gets it.
Now if Mr. Soros would only run out of money, or disappear from the scene, or both.

Bill Gates ..thinks there are too many people on the planet. spends millions on research to save lives in poor countries.
…something doesn’t add up.

I’m sitting right down the road from Microsoft as I write this, and you know – I think Bill misses the point.
My standard of living has been dropping like a rock, much the same as nearly everyone else I know in my generation. Prices and taxes are going up while my income keep going down. I can’t properly heat my home because the government fees to install the right equipment are exorbitantly high. My opportunities for work are shrinking because I can’t afford the licensing.
I don’t think I can name a friend who really cares how the third world is doing; we’re all too busy getting poorer and trying not to get ground under the heel of government.

The deference shown here to Bill Gates,is quite disgusting. This brown nosing of the wealthy on this site is disturbing to say the least. Why don’t you all bow down and make an idol to him? Gates’ twisted ideas and the addled phlosophy he inherited from his father only emphasize how dangerous it is to treat him like royalty. Most people on this thread seem to be shamefully ignorant of what the Gates family stands for.