multi-window interfaces in the browser... simulating a desktop, or other user navigable environment such as in a game or simulation, where a user my want to customize their environment beyond a grid snap.
The issue then becomes how do you make it accessible to screen readers? It's not impossible, just very tedious and requires cross browser and cross-device testing
They sold the Macbook air with Broadwell processors for over 3 years. They only changed the processors because intel discontinued them. They skipped 3 generations of processors.
It would also be fair to say they didn't skip any generation of processors with that gap in updates, they merely sat out the first two years of Intel shipping Skylake five years in a row.
And in the meantime, they did use those first two years of Skylake for the 12" MacBook; the next update to the MacBook Air was after the last update the 12" MacBook ever got. For a while, the 12" MacBook was the more premium, thinner and lighter alternative to the MacBook Air with more advanced technology (and could plausibly have been construed as the intended successor to the MacBook Air), then in 2018 they merged back together with the introduction of the first MacBook Air with a Retina Display.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say here.
They sold old hardware for the same price 3 years later as if it was a premium product. They didn't really have an excuse, they've been the most valuable public company on earth since like 2010.
Selling an old model for a few years after its replacement shows up is not unusual. The only thing unusual here is that the 12" MacBook didn't end up actually replacing the MacBook Air in the long run, and the next major iteration went back to being called "MacBook Air".
The three-year gap in processor updates you're complaining about disappears when you recognize the 12" MacBook as an attempt to move the product line in a different direction, which Apple partially backtracked on after a few years. That course correction was quite a bit quicker than for the Touch Bar MBPs and the trash can Mac Pro.
> disappears when you recognize the 12" MacBook as an attempt to move the product line in a different direction, which Apple partially backtracked on after a few years.
and if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle.
As far as I can glean this was never something that they intended to do.
That's entirely you choosing to ignore real and relevant products that Apple shipped during the time period you claim they were doing nothing. If you're looking for some kind of absolute consistency in when and how Apple uses the "Air" modifier on their product names, you haven't been paying attention.
1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world.
2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
I'm too poor for Claude Max 20x. Not that it needs that firepower but eh, there's no real way. As I mentioned, almost every single quirk can be willed away with a little bit of attention and effort.
At this point, I'm not sure whether you're a clawdbot running amok..
Like always we have to lean on evaluating based on quality. You can produce quality using an LLM, but it's much easier to produce slop, which is why there's so much of it now.
On macOS, Option+Shift+- and Option+- insert an em dash (—) and en dash (–), respectively. On Linux, you can hit the Compose Key and type --- (three hyphens) to get an em dash, or --. (hyphen hyphen period) for an en dash. Windows has some dumb incantation that you'll never remember.
I've been using Fedora since 2011, haven't had any monitor or bluetooth issues.
Originally had a wifi issue when I first got a Ryzen computer, but it was solved fairly easily and haven't had an issue since. The upgrade from 42 to 43 borked my local postgres, but it seems that they understand what their mistake was there.
Only if we take them at their word.
I remember thinking things were in a completely different state when Amazon had their shop and go stores, but then finding out it was 1000s of people in Pakistan just watching you via camera.
A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.
'...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'
Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".
(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)
Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.
“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
"There are two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price for their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes." -- Larry Summers, according to Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room"
It sounds a bit cartoon villainy, but honestly, I see no reason to doubt that he said this. Everything points to these people being casually desperate to be let into ever innermore circles. Even now that this particularly ugly circle is blown open, notice that they still simply do not talk about what their fellow insiders did except in vague generalities.
I cant help myself. "Adults in the Room ... with half naked teenagers putting the cloth down" or "Adults in the Room ... working hard to destroy the democracy and create violent authoritarian world".
Back to your main point, mafia operates similarly. In fact, there is not much difference between the two. What is Larry Summers not saying there is that being part of this circle is making this circle more powerful. Them not talking about what they know is itself "influencing powerful people and outcomes".
It isn't really surprising that discretion matters to villains. As much as it matters to everyone else.
Except for the parts involving criminal coverups. That seems to plague close-nit groups at any level of society, e.g. world religions, police, finance, families, etc.
The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that.
It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship.
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.
The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
Malaria deaths have fallen by 60% in the last 15 years, saving on the order of 12 million lives. Bill's foundation has donated around $4B to the cause.
And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.
I have no reason to defend BMGF and enjoy a good comeuppance probably more than the next person, but the article you linked to about the issues in India is far from the smoking gun in the hands BMGF you seem to think it is.
From the article: an already-approved vaccine (by FDA and others) was given to children via a trial run by an NGO (PATH) and was funded by BMGF. The trial was apparently run unethically, and in addition a year or so later it was found that girls administered the vaccine had possibly experienced adverse events, some very serious.
(Based on the article alone) it’s very likely that BMGF would have been totally hands off in overseeing the trial, and would certainly have had strict agreements with PATH. If there were indeed ethical breaches, I’m sure BMGF was very unhappy about this. Moreover, while we of course shouldn’t ignore the safety findings, attributing events causally to the vaccination against the standard background rate of events in a particular population is rife with uncertainty.
And of course, the trial potentially being unethically run doesn’t make the (already- and still-approved) vaccine more dangerous… but does make it easier to whip up sensation and clicks for articles, especially if there’s a big rich US Foundation also tangentially involved.
Interesting to see how this is getting downvoted. Somewhat expected. Many more head would roll from this scandal. Bill Gates, Peter Thiel are just starters
When your main complaint against someone is "illegal vaccines" and you post it several times, it makes you look very similar to COVID conspiracy theorists.
People seem to forget how many companies Bill Gates put out of business by using their designs. It takes years to sue and win damages minus lawyer fees. Then to try to whitewash his reputation by giving the money away.
I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich. They remember that the damage he caused mostly affected capitalists and professionals in developed countries. His businesses mostly didn't abuse labor in developing countries. He didn't cause that much environmental damage. He didn't undermine democracy and the society that much.
People remember that Bill Gates played the game and won, and the damage he caused was mostly limited to the economic sphere and to other people playing the same game. That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
>I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich.
That rags-to-riches myth about Bill Gates is not true.
He was a Harvard dropout, but not some poor kid.
Bill Gates was always rich. But with Micro$oft's success, he became a lot lot richer later.
His mom sat on some major committee at IBM. She had significant clout there.
That's how Bill even got the chance to pitch a new OS when the IBM big bosses were looking to unleash their new PCs.
Do you really think they just yanked a school dropout from the streets into their boardroom to decide important business future for their company?
Paul Allen had started Microsoft with Bill Gates. It was Bill's mom who pitched Microsoft as a potential partner to IBM's CEO John Opel.
Bill Gates scouted and found a chap (Tim Paterson) having a working prototype called 86-DOS. And Bill purchased it (with his family money), rebranded it as PC-DOS and sold it to IBM (but he cunningly kept the copyright as he rightly figured that other manufacturers would clone the IBM PC hardware and would need a DOS for their PCs (thus, he later licensed the new OS to non-IBM PCs as MS-DOS)). I daresay his mom was instrumental in such cunning dealmaking.
>That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
The problem is that he is using his wealth for some shady stuff, so it is not good.
Bill Gates's name is mentioned in the Epstein files, for some unsavory links to that child molestor.
And his BGMF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) got banned in India from funding local NGOs, because a Parliamentary committee indicted BGMF's involvement and funding for shady and shoddy vaccine trials on tens of thousands of poor Indian tribal children without informed consent and under false aegis.
Be careful whom you consider your heroes. They may not be all they seem to be.
I didn't even know that HN has karma! I thought that was a Reddit thing.
I have been using HN for some time, but I don't really know how it works.
People seem to be downvoting my comments that reveal some hard truths, but I don't see any downvote button when browsing HN conversations.
Anyway, I don't intend to downvote anyone. Let people have their own opinions and say, but is there anyway I can find out who is deliberately downvoting my comments?
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. I thank you for the heads up, my friend.
But I feel that if my account gets restricted or suspended on HN because of downvotes on my comments that merely state some hard truths, then so be it.
It would be a judgement on HN, not on me.
I will simply go elsewhere to speak up the truths..
Someone has to speak for those innocents whose voices have forever been silenced by evil people.
This doesn't pass the smell test. People are "telling the truth" every day on this platform and only a small % of users are so disruptive they have restrictions applied to their accounts.
I know that it's against the guidelines to make comparisons to Reddit, but this is exactly what I frequently see there. People complaining about 4 downvotes and telling everyone how they are being silenced for being truthful in the sea of lies, or whatever else.
Very, very often this is some form of lashing out and has no basis in any reality.
You'd be surprised how accurate your take is on reputation management teams operating on social media.
One time I joked about blocking a domain which would have embarrassed a notorious colour revolution organisation and the next day the domain was snatched up by the named gang.
Reddit and Twitter are cesspools of noise and misinformation since years.
Even whole subreddits are taken over by shady admins, and totally weaponised.
e.g., r/India is filled with anti-India hate posts and malicious misinformation, because that subreddit is controlled by Pakistani admins.
I was actually glad when my Reddit user account got banned for speaking some truths about history of my nation, LOL.
Lot less stress on HN, it is more peaceful, simple, and informative, I like it.
> now threatening to seize Cuba (he's already stopped all oil going to it, in order to cripple this struggling nation that CIA destabilized since decades), Greenland, Columbia, Canada and whatnot.
Interesting you don't mention Iran. Trump has been building up forces in the region for a few weeks and is on the verge of invading, in an exact mirror of Russia invading Ukraine.
meh..Just because he donated doesn't mean one should ignore or dilute the severity of alleged crimes. Infact, I would trade someone who doesn't commit any such acts and still does not donate over someone who donates but does worst of all the crimes.
Bill Gates isn't alleged to have participated in Epstein's crimes. He does seem to have cheated on his wife repeatedly, which I agree is terrible behavior.
I think it's the opposite. Bill credited his parents for his philanthropic drive and Warren buffet as the person who first introduced him to the idea of giving everything away. He's been active and knowledgeable in his philanthropy and posts frequently about global health, poverty, aid, etc.
Melinda also, of course, did work for their joint foundation before she left. Since leaving, she shifted her philanthropic focus more to US women's health and reproductive rights.
Bill has committed to giving away nearly all his wealth (99%) over the next 19 years. Melinda is still committed to giving away over 50% of her wealth over her lifetime.
I don't see any evidence that Melinda was the primary driver for Bill's philanthropy.
Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin.
How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?
Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
I don't think it's that hard. MacKenzie Scott Bezos managed to give away nearly half (not accounting for appreciation) of the wealth she obtained from her divorce in a few short years.
She got them from the divorce. She didn’t have to convince anyone to pry them loose.
Notably, she played a huge part in how Amazon was structured due to her influence on Bezos.
I do find it very interesting though the apparently common pattern here of ‘woman gives away massive fortune she got from x to make the world better/rehabilitate her image’ or something.
Meanwhile, the men all seem to go on hooker binges. See Bezos, and now Gates (vs Epstein files).
No one, including the people getting screwed at the end, are actually innocent, but some definitely are more guilty than others eh?
What an insane take. Are you not familiar with Bill Gates and like his entire business history? Sure he’s old and donates half of his hundred billion dollars to have half another billion dollars white wash his legacy that doesn’t mean he’s not a terrible person just because his charity has a great PR team.
FWIW, Bill Gates is one of the people I would have pointed to as one of the less disreputable modern billionaires, and finding out that Melinda divorced him over his Epstein connections really soured my opinion of him.
Is this the same John Mackey that fired his own father from the board and criticises younger generations for trying to find meaningful work?
I think OP has a point, it's very difficult to accumulate vast wealth without behaving ruthlessly and being kind of an asshole when it comes to making tough profit-over-people decisions.
This. And this also explains why sometimes girls fell love to apparent assholes -- if you are an asshole it doesn't mean you are powerful, however if you are not an asshole then definitely you are not powerful.
A lot of the so-called "charity" by wealthy individuals is anything but. It's placing assets in a tax-advantaged positions where some of the proceeds gets used for "charity" (whatever that means) but they still maintain control.
For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund.
That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power.
Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in.
All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.
Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities.
I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
Also, don't forget, that the work itself can be about 'preparing the ground' for your non-charitable interests (which are probably held in trust, ie not held personally). Eg if you involve yourself in child education (perhaps making it worse) this is not an issue if it makes it more like that your classroom software is adopted. Or, if you are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, singing the praises of vaccines, is just a tax savvy way of increasing the market that you will benefit from.
Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.
Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best"
I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not.
Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from.
Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).
So really it's a two pronged thing:
* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).
* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.
But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
Yes, I don't love that he puts out hits like that on solar and wind in his effort to promote nuclear as a sole solution, but I still find his larger arguments around the dynamics of environmentalism as a movement persuasive.
One thing that has helped me immensely, given that everything that is typed has an agenda (don't worry, I am an anonymous no body, from whom even thinking of having a agenda will be nothing short of fake-puffery), is that:
1. Analyze the written word no it's own merit, regardless of who has written it
2. Look at who has written it and all the agendas that might have been wrapped into it
3. Apply a discount or multiplier, given your own world view.
Else, a lot of good thought gets thrown out (again, at least for me).
I mean literally taxing the literally rich. Most population by "taxing the rich" mean those earning >90k EUR/USD on employment contract. They see the real rich maybe few times in life from a distance on a yacht in Caribbean or Mediterranean but don't connect the dots.
I don't have a magic answer for how to get people on board, but I can say that I make a lot more than that number, and my taxes (in Canada) are way too low.
I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
You're absolutely right in a cold logical sense, even if it makes other people emotionally react to the comment. This was a kind way to react to a lazy false dichotomy, that it's either taxes or donations.
They do pay their taxes. It's just that they wrote the laws too. And, if you use trusts, foundations, corporations, etc, you are able to legally avoid taxes, while retaining the same control.
I saw a recent video by Zizek where he mentioned the original gray eminence - François Leclerc du Tremblay who was Cardinal Richelieu’s right hand man. During the day he orchestrated the thirty year war and during the night he wrote the most beautiful meditations. Does doing good excuse the bad?
Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people.
There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.
I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.
Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery
It's confusing to me how this needs to be spelled out. It seems pretty obvious and anybody in IT should know - long before the general public - that Gates is a complete asshole.
Andrew Carnegie funded a whole lot of stuff we still enjoy today. He was still a piece of shit and responsible for a lot of people winding up dead.
Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?).
You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.
Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich.
If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.
But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
Warren Buffet wrote about this years ago. If you want to judge how "good" someone is you need to look at what they sacrifice. Gates sacrifices nothing. In fact, the entire thing is just marketing and basically worked for a long time. I was shocked to see people talking about Gates like he was a saint a few years ago. Glad to see that's changing.
Its like George Washington and the other founding fathers, didn't become a king voluntarily, helped create the country and modern democracy, but loved his slaves so much they could only be freed after he was dead. You can create good while actually still being a terrible person. Much of this era is people being upset about their fallen "heroes"
>The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?
So he is no longer a billionaire?
And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls?
The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone?
Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was.
What a sacrifice it was for him...
>They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.
It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.
>Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics?
Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
Easy way is not doing charter schools.
Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.
I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.
Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.
That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.
Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)
Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.
Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.
But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.
The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way.
He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.
He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.
The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
>The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
Yeah everyone forgets, he killed Hitler. That was a huge win for Germany. But no one ever gives him the credit.
His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.
I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.
Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
And how many people would have been saved if he didn't forcibly extracted that money from society to begin with?
Because it's almost impossible to not help someone if he just throw wads of money at random. What important is how many people weren't saved because he decided to be a middle man in all of it?
Way, way fewer. Any billionaire you've heard of is almost certainly a net creator of a huge amount of value, by successfully leading a company in a capitalist system that made enough money selling products or services to make its shareholders worth billions of dollars. This isn't forcibly extracting money from society, this is exactly what net-value-creation looks like in the world.
This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.
A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.
Math education has always been a failure, or a "crisis." The number of people who come out of school with any functional math ability has been fairly constant over the decades, and depends a lot on family background and economic class. I'm not even sure that differences across countries are all that significant when people reach adulthood.
Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.
Not to go full pizzagate conspiracy theorist, but, Epstein is just the most out in the open and famous tip of the proverbial iceberg. These people didn't stop being nonces because some of them got caught.
He was the access agent and the one procuring girls for powerful men. He would then produce blackmail and force the men to capitulate to his demands. He was a mossad operative.
Couldn't imagine ever wanting skip grid and flexbox for whatever has been concocted up for JS.
reply