I love the “you’d have to plant trees everywhere therefore it’s not possible” logic. As if silviculture/silvipasture were not possible. As if we couldn’t take vacant properties and plant there.
silviculture
Oh thats possible, to a degree…
The problem is the vast billions of extra tons of CO2 that far outscales the surface area available. Obviously we should repopulate the earth with trees, it helps biodiversity and will trap some carbon. But we need multiple ways to attack this.
Fuck Gates, he is responsible for many heinous things, most recently encouraging pharma companies to patent publicly funded covid vaccines, which has denied access to the global population, which then encourages mutations.
I don’t care what he is saying whether it’s good or not there are better people worth listening to on the subject. Billionaires are not the answer to the world’s problems, they are the cause of them.
I dont think that covid patent thing is true as the one of the UK parliamentary committees investigated and say they found no evidence. Have you a couple of sources?
Jacobin - Bill Gates Chooses Corporate Patent Rights Over Human Lives
New Republic - How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines
I can keep going if that’s not enough to read. Also lol at you trusting a governmental committee report.
Thanks! Yeah controlling vaccines to profit off them is pretty brutal.
Philanthropy has always been a PR calculation to keep the masses from revolting against the accumulation of wealth.
And leverage against fair taxation.
Thanks! Had a quick scan and yeah thats pretty shitty.
How do I feel about Gates? I’m not even sure I know. He increased productivity by leaps and bounds. He donates unfathomable sums of money to good causes. He has a problem in that his wealth grows so fast that it’s almost impossible for him to donate it fast enough to actually end up with less money at the end of a year than he started out with but that’s kinda the problem with having billions of dollars and trying to actually do good instead of paving a road to hell. He engaged in monopoly practices. He likes to eat the same thing over and over and over again. He is buying up farmland at an insane rate with the idea of big things. I got so many mixed feelings that I don’t know how you would know when I don’t know myself.
That’s a fair assessment. I kind of feel the same, he’s conflicted on some subjects, hypocritical on others. We live in a world where money controls tech and advancement so naturally people assume those at the top must know what they’re talking about. Musk kind of proves that’s folly, at least.
Have you seen the Venn diagram of pey saying “if we shrink government social spending people and charities will step up to fill the void” and “billionaires are using money to control people”?
Thats exactly what people like myself were misled into beleiving when Cameron uttered the very same in 2010.
He’s a horrible human being trying to buy his way into the “good” column in the history books. Spending a shit-ton of money you made through unethical means doesn’t absolve you. Musk will do the same thing when he retires; you going to forgive him, too, because he creates a save-the-children foundation with a tiny portion of his hoarded wealth?
I have no time for Bill Gates, no matter what he’s saying.
Musk will definitely not do the same thing.
People get weird and start behaving uncharacteristically as mortality approaches. They start thinking about things like “legacy.” They start caring about how the history books will talk about them.
I would not at all be surprised if Musk turned philanthropist after he retires; or even just a couple of years before he retires, like Gates did. I expect the same from Bezos.
Amoral billionaires trying to buy off history and public perception. And it works: look at Bill Gates, one of the most loathsome representations of obscene capitalist extremes - he built a monopoly, ran competitors out of business through illegal business tactics, was responsible during one of the biggest monopoly convictions and only barely survived getting broken up because Ronald Fucking Regan getting elected just in time and castrating the penalty phase of the process. Gates makes Bezos look like a saint; I admit he wasn’t a raving Nazi lunatic like Musk, but I still suspect that as Musk ages he’ll start trying to buy public good-will.
Just like Gates.
