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Elon Musk is responsible for “killing the world’s poorest children,” says Bill Gates
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Cool story, Bill. Who did you donate to? Why did you cut your philanthropic efforts to fight climate change and disease? Why have you and your buddies fought for minimizing and coopting government for years? Bill isn't innocent in all this, it's just a good time to blame Elon. Don't get me wrong, Elon 100% deserves it, but that doesn't mean that Bill isn't playing the PR game here.
Mmm yes. This is why I Lemmy. This article had so many bots praising him on Reddit. Refreshing to hear something other than boot licking
The problem is that billionaires should not exist but come on. $80 billion already donated. $7 Billion more just for Africa. Hundreds of millions in malaria research.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/11/17/bill-gates-foundation-pledges-7-billion-to-support-africa-health-and-agriculture/
Could he do more? Sure. But attacking someone who is doing a little because he isn't doing more doesn't seem fair.
Years ago Elon said he was disappointed when he met Bill Gates because Gates only wanted to talk about philanthropy and climate.
The 7 billion to Africa isn't as nice as it first seems either; it's investments into venture capitalist solutions, much more restrictive that aid and the profits are not realized by the locals
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/02/perhaps-bill-gates-not-best-expert-hunger-africa
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/10/open-letter-bill-gates-food-farming-and-africa
Bill Gates hasn't been CEO of Microsoft in 25 years. He left completely in 2008.
He didn't completely leave, he's literally the technical advisor listed under "key people" for Microsoft
Bill Gates continues to 'backstage' manage Microsoft despite official departure, as Satya Nadella relies on his advice for Microsoft's transformative AI initiative
Saytalla seeking advice doesn't mean Gates is making the business decisions.
And claiming Microsoft cloud services are worse than RTX's actual bombs that kill children is a stretch.
They all kill children and I boycott them all. You're the only one running defense by minimizing Microsoft's role here.
Claiming Gates isn't heavily involved and influential in the business decisions is just straight up untrue, stop whitewashing his contributions to genocide.
You know what actually supports Israel? Food imports. You should be boycotting American, Swiss, German and Dutch farm produce. Cut off their food and they can't bomb.
Any company with an office in Israel? You boycott every large business? EVERY ONE? Apple, AMD, Intel, ARM? They are all in Israel. How are you even replying to this post without uses the CPU's that you claim to boycott?
AI isn't killing children. Israeli leaders are killing children. OpenAI is super charged spell checker. Have you even used it? It fixes the grammar. It helps write software. But so did autocomplete before LLM's.
Are you an executive at Microsoft? Because if you aren't YOU DON'T KNOW THAT.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107724-sources-detail-growing-rift-between-sam-altman-satya.html
Directly partnering with and providing services/technology/AI to a state's military, that is in the act of war, is facilitating that war.
Using AI to target strikes/etc., is absolutely AI making the decision to kill. They just chose to let AI do it for them.
They all "directly partner" AMD, Intel, and Arm are all deep in Israeli military.
Image recognition was around decades before LLM's became the new "AI". Those weapons only function because of the Arm, AMD and Intel CPUs components What hardware is Microsoft cloud running on?
You said you boycott all of them. How are you posting a reply?
I am not the same commenter.
Providing goods on the free market is not the same thing as directly partnering. Please enlighten me, does Intel, AMD, and ARM specifically and directly sell/provide their specialized components through another mechanism than the free market to that state/military?
What hardware or software Microsoft chooses to power their infrastructure is their choice. Could the companies that provide this hardware boycott Microsoft? I don't know how effective that would be because you can't choose who buys your products on the free market - you, however, can choose who you directly sell to or contract with.
And I don't care how smart AI and specifically LLMs are. The hardware is irrelevant. AI is still determining the targets (and potentially even firing the shots). This technology and the companies who provide this specialized technology are, at minimum, participating in the slaughter. The AI is proprietary and closed-source, these companies are willingly providing access and working with their military to specialize it for war.
The problem is that the theft begins by simply becoming a billionaire in the first place. You don't get to be one by playing nice and not exploiting a lot of people and rules along the way. Sure the government could be blamed some for not having enough regulations in place to prevent/stop that, but capitalism ensures that businesses exploit any available loophole possible to maximize profit, otherwise you're a bad business.
While I can respect a lot of those philanthropic efforts, those should not be his decisions alone to make. That money should've been paid into taxes and distributed in agreed upon ways. $7 Billion dollars to Africa is just great, but it could do a lot of help here, too. I have no issues with sending $7B to Africa, but that sure seems like something the people should agree upon first, through some sort of national aid, and not as an effort to spare the conscience of an aging billionaire.
Fuck all billionaires. Every. Last. One. Forever.
That's why that was my first sentence!
Was your first point. I expanded on it by calling out that it is specifically theft and then going further to illustrate that he was using that theft to make personal choices about how that money should be spent, compounding the reasons I find this distasteful.
Forgiving it simply because it's philanthropy plays exactly into their narrative. Don't buy it! Don't defend billionaires to any extent.
As a capitalist, all of his solutions are capitalist. His efforts to slow climate change are primarily technological, with a focus on unproven horseshit like carbon capture rather than proven improvements like better, less car centric urban planning and reducing meat intake. He would never even consider an strategy of economic degrowth to fight climate change even though available evidence shows that that is exactly what we need.
I think we're well past the chance of urban designing our way out of the climate collapse.
We need to make major changes in our consumption to even make a dent, but I say our best shot is cold fusion and carbon capture. Those are obvious longshots.
We've created a runaway greenhouse gas effect. Even if we cut emissions to 0 temperatures will continue to climb.
Obviously cutting emissions to 0 would give us more time to fix this mess though
Philanthropists hoarding wealth and resources and then getting to choose which of the poors to allow to have any is actually part of the problem, even if it makes you feel good.
We saw that when Gates leveraged his contributions to force a vaccine that had been developed with public money for the benefit of humankind, to become patent locked and hard for the Third World to access or afford.
Gates has history of lawsuits against open source projects. And he actively donates against any real systemic change. For example he has invested heavily in carbon capture technology which is useless to making impact to climate change.
Imagine how much extra money the countries of the world would have if they didnt have to pay for microsoft licenses and stuff like dat
Never would have guessed world hunger and disease are because countries spent all their money on Windows licenses, great take
Lmao. Not windows alone, but i think there is a larger point to be made about recurring costs to governments from licenses, patents, monopolies, unrepairability, etc. Military spending is one that that is heavily affected by all of those and famously the world spends trillions on military, so there should be many billions of dollars that can be saved.