Bill gates annual letter, note his point about climate change. – Anthony
By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful. That’s why in this year’s letter we take apart some of the myths that slow down the work. The next time you hear these myths, we hope you will do the same.
…I am optimistic enough about this that I am willing to make a prediction. 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. Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new investments.
A few countries will be held back by war, politics (North Korea, barring a big change there), or geography (landlocked nations in central Africa). And inequality will still be a problem: There will be poor people in every region.But most of them will live in countries that are self-sufficient. Every nation in South America, Asia, and Central America (with the possible exception of Haiti), and most in coastal Africa, will have joined the ranks of today’s middle-income nations. More than 70 percent of countries will have a higher per-person income than China does today. Nearly 90 percent will have a higher income than India does today.
It will be a remarkable achievement. When I was born, most countries in the world were poor. In the next two decades, desperately poor countries will become the exception rather than the rule. Billions of people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The idea that this will happen within my lifetime is simply amazing to me.
Some people will say that helping almost every country develop to middle-income status will not solve all the world’s problems and will even exacerbate some. 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. We will also need to solve the problems that come with affluence, like higher rates of diabetes. However, as more people are educated, they will contribute to solving these problems. Bringing the development agenda near to completion will do more to improve human lives than anything else we do.
Read the entire letter here:
http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/?cid=bg_pt_ll0_012122/
h/t to Barry Woods
By the standards of the future, all nations today are poor, because they can’t provide free and abuntant energy to the citizens. Obviously, that energy wont be coming from fossile fuel (nor solar panels). What we need to fix is the problem that energy today is expensive, and CO2 emissions are simply a symptom of that.
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.
Sh** happens. Endemic in India and elsewhere, various strains of bacteria have shared a new ability to make an enzyme that defeats our most potent antibiotics. The very real prospect of numerous unstoppable dread diseases we’ve almost forgotten about looms.
Get rid of the UN myth nr. 4: http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/21/un-global-prosperity-is-causing-global-warming/
And if you look at all the most rapidly improving nations, vs nations which are not, you will find a correlation between those with smaller governments improving faster than those with larger interfering nations
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.
What is with all the hateful comments about Bill Gates?
I suggested above that Bill may be moderating his stance on CO2. Perhaps he is. That would be sensible, based on the evidence. [CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales. ECS, if it exists at all, is much smaller than 1C/(2xCO2). The alleged global warming crisis does not exist.]
Other than that, I see Bill as a positive individual who is trying to do his best with the rest of his life.
Where is the problem?
Stephen et al. If you don’t want to listen to the Gates at least lend Hans Rosling an ear:
http://www.gapminder.org/
Allan M.R. MacRae says:
January 23, 2014 at 3:17 am
What is with all the hateful comments about Bill Gates?
Hateful? Nah. Ironic, maybe. Everything Gates says are platitudes, a painful explanation of the obvious, toothless at its best, detracting from real cultural problems at its worst.
And who is he to talk about poverty? Bill Gates has never been poor, he is not a self-made man in the sense that, say, Alexander Graham Bell or Nikola Tesla were. Bill Gates’ father was a millionaire lawyer who had connections in the upper echelon of IBM at the right time. Hence: DOS.
I don’t hold Bill’s riches against him. One cannot say that he is as corrupt as some Mexican or Russian tycoons. Programmers cry out that Bill Gates has plagiarized much of his code but it wasn’t copyrighted, and Gates (or his father) was able to see a business opportunity. However mediocre MS software is, it is something that we use, warts, glitches, and all.
Do we really use MS OS or MS Word voluntarily, or are forced to use it? Again, I cannot blame Bill Gates personally for the fact that circumstances force us to use MS software, whereas there are and could be much better choices. But many people dislike Bill Gates simply because he personifies all that unpleasantly inevitability of using that ubiquitous thing that is constantly in our faces and down our throats.
Hatred? Nah. A yawn and a sigh, no more.
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.”
I rather would see Gates stick his energy in a more secure privacy protected software and internet access to protect us from hackers, criminals and Government.
Instead Bill thinks Government spying isn’t bad.
http://fusion.net/justice/story/bill-gates-government-spying-isnt-bad-396916#
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… ]
We put a man on the moon with much, much less ‘horse power’ on the desk, but nonetheless, computing horsepower. In 1993 at work our MicroVAX (and other full-sized VAXs) were accessed using PCs as a ‘dumb terminals’, JUST to put things into perspective …
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What was the name of that company?
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eco-geek says:
January 22, 2014 at 1:52 pm
many other symptoms of TFA poisoning.
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One study that has stuck in my mind over the years was the autopsies of American war dead from WWII and the Korean War. These were mostly young men. The WWII dead showed almost no CV disease. The Korean deaths showed high rates of CV disease.
We are talking about a period of 10 years, in which the young American male population went from low rates of CV disease to high rates of CV disease. Only years later did this show up as increased death rates. But the evidence was there years earlier.
It cannot be due to lifestyle, because lifestyles did not change that much. The most obvious cause is a change in diet. Not an increase in food because if anything food supply was decreased during WWII. What changed during WWII was the introduction of artificial food. Most notable among these was artificial fat, that did not rot or turn rancid, which could be stored at room temperature.
Is it possible that the human body was not evolved to eat fat that did not rot? Doesn’t it make sense that if nature cannot break down a fat, our bodies might have a problem with the fat as well?
One of the problems in medicine is that when the doctors cannot find the cause of a disease, they tend to blame the patient. So for example, ulcers were for many years blamed on the patient, too much stress in their lives, when ultimately it was found that the cause was bacteria.
Similarly, when CV disease because a problem, doctors blamed the patient. Too much fat in the diet, without considering it might only be the type of fat that was the problem. So people cut back on fat, and as they did they started getting fatter and developing diabetes. And doctors again blamed this on the patients lifestyle. Without asking the question, what role has the medical profession played in all this? Is it possible the advice was wrong, that people need fat in their diet to remain healthy? That a high carbohydrate low fat diet is not a healthy diet? But that the fat needs to be the right kind of fat.
Is it correct to assume that if a large group of people start getting a disease that the people themselves are the cause?
Reality check:
Debunking the Tesla Myth: False facts about Tesla giving him more credit than he deserves.
http://edisontechcenter.org/tesladebunked.html
In short, Tesla worked the technical ‘arbitrage’* between English-speaking western-world and Eastern Europe, having had access to both the technical journals and patents at the time …
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*Arbitrage – the practice of taking advantage of a price or knowledge difference between two or more markets, striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance.
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albertalad says:
January 22, 2014 at 5:03 pm
cheap fossil fuels on land are severly limited
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coal is plentiful and cheap. if the EPA shuts down coal for electricity generation in the US, coal will get much cheaper and even more plentiful. Power companies currently buy 90% of the coal produced in the US and the US has a couple of hundred years of known coal reserves at current consumption rates. As coal prices drop there are likely to be thousands of micro coal fired generating plants opening to slip in under the EPA limits, unless of course fracking makes natural gas even cheaper.
_Jim says:
January 23, 2014 at 6:49 am
Debunking the Tesla Myth:
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Pretty sure Edison is not the best source for information about Tesla. Something about a battle over AC and DC, with truth as the first casualty of war.
US price of gasoline – $3.30 / gal
1 gallon of gasoline – 33 Kwh
US price of electricity – $.10/kwh
by energy content the retail price to the US consumer of electricity and gasoline are about the same
What I see in the “letter”/manifesto is lots of B-school bozo hand-waving without substance. Great, let’s do good things, develop cheaper, cleaner energy, blah blah blah. We’d do that with our without Bill Gates; we were doing that before he was born. But he’s saying “Look at me! Look at me!”.
“Can you imagine the world we have today, without the PC, and M$ Windows”
Yes. We had better and less expensive micro-computers before Ill-Begotten Monstrosities got into it and before MSFT. (I knew one of the managers on the PeeeeeCeeeee project who was a great guy, and I also had a protege at the U who worked on it, so this isn’t mere personal emotion; I was kind of hoping they’d release something better.) We obviously had operating systems that were at least as good, before Bill Gates’s mommy used her influence to get him the contract. We certainly had better super-computers, and they had much better operating systems. And then MSFT certainly wrecked a lot of good products after take-overs.
Without MSFT we might not have perma-temps (full-time long-term employees on the books as occasional consultants so as to dodge market pay and benefits). We might not have dishonest blather about “talent shortages” while millions of able and willing US citizen STEM/MINT pros have trouble getting interviews for nearly 20 years, now. We might not have false claims of guest-workers being “best and brightest”, but turning out to be mediocre people doing mediocre kinds of non-cutting-edge work that does not require especially high or rare intelligence, creativity, or knowledge.
OK, he’s taken some of his not-completely-cleanly gotten gains and used it to fund more STEM education to worsen the flood of talent and continue to depress compensation, to develop a vaccine against malaria, to distribute mosquito nets, he paid and employed for a number of years the guy who developed his OS, so, in the balance, I can cut him only a miniscule mustard seed of slack.
But the “I know better than all of you millions of people in the USA and billions of people in the world” attitude, “so the government(s) and people better follow my lead, even though I’ve never shown any significant brilliance or vastness of knowledge”, is the most annoying.
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.
“Cheaper and cleaner energies need to be developed”, the world’s energy companies agree. There is a little more than a century of fossil fuels left to be exploited. The profits from this energy can either be used for R&D for these new energies or it can be given to world governments as a tax and used to “save” the world from the boogeyman. One would be beneficial (possibly essential) for the human species whereas one would be a waste of resources.
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.
An unwarranted ad hom without even looking at the website’s contents; please dispute the facts at the website, if able. PS. “Edison” is not the source, BTW. The man moved to the hereafter on October 18, 1931 long before the advent of the internet.
A ‘for instance’, since you may be resistant to a website labeled ‘Edison-anything’:
Myth 1: Tesla invented polyphase AC power: FALSE.
(1) First there was a hand-cranked AC generator developed by Hippolyte Pixii in 1832. (2) Single phase AC power was being used more in Europe by many inventors in the early 1880s. (3) As early as the late 1870’s Germany had developed a 2 phase AC generator.
In New York City Tesla had approached investors in 1886 with his AC system and did not have success. So in the United States in New York there was little confidence in AC power systems.
From a world wide perspective there was many working on AC systems. August Haselwander and C.S. Bradley(a former Edison employee) created the first 3 phase AC generators(1887). Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovsky built the first full 3 phase AC generation and distribution system in the 1888-1891 period. Tesla continued to be stuck in his two-phase system which proved to be less effective than three.
If the previous poster wanted to cite a better historical figure it would be Charles Steinmetz the REAL father of AC. His original work is available on-line too:
“Theory and calculation of alternating current phenomena (1916)”
https://archive.org/details/5edtheorycalculatisteiuoft
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