Who is Your Hero, Gates or Jobs? 660
feranick writes "Wired and Ars Technica are both running articles comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not for their business/technological achievements but for their humanitarian involvement. I am curious to see what you are thinking about the issue. What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"
What about Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? (Score:2, Informative)
Linus is also a great manager [businessweek.com] and both he and Richard won the 1998 EFF Pioneer Award. [wikipedia.org]
Free is the best charity of all.
Which Gates is the Best Gates? (Score:2, Informative)
Now, Bill Gates Sr. - he is definitely a hero.
Look at the work he's done in Responsible Wealth, a group I joined, which points out the effective tax rate for most millionaires is aroud 10 to 12 percent whereas billionaires tend to pay 8 to 10 percent, and corporations mostly (two-thirds) pay no tax at all or get federal "refunds" so that we pay them.
But we were talking Bill Gates, Microsoft Visionary. He's a different person.
Re:The Devil on the Left or the Devil on the Right (Score:2, Informative)
The reference would be their filed tax documents and the recent time magazine article. Not quite sure why you can make unfounded statements, but we have to back up ours. It would have been easy enough for you to check out yourself in any case.
The highest paid people at the foundation are the political and public health experts, not the administrators. There really aren't very many levels of administration there either. As far as I know they are still in that three story office building on the eastlake (they are building a new larger one near Seattle Center) there isn't room for all that levels of administration.
Jobs saved me (Score:5, Informative)
I was on my deepest depression crisis ever and I was already planning my suicide. I was sure that day would be my last day when I came across his speech at Stanford University [stanford.edu]. And his words made me rethink everything I was going through at that moment, and gave me enough strength to give up the plan and keep going.
So yeah, Jobs is my personal hero. No matter how great amount of money Gates throw at projects, Jobs is the guy who said the right thing at the right moment.
[And I tried to send him my story, but I'm almost sure he would never see it]
Re:Correction (Score:5, Informative)
You are so ridiculously incorrect that it's not even amusing. I know, this is Slashdot, and we've become used to this sort of thing. The Bible doesn't say a single thing about "hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies". Not once. Sorry, bub. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated that it was more important to love than it was to enforce the law. An example of this is when the pharisees looked to condemn him for healing a man on the sabbath (in the OT, it is unlawful to perform any work on the sabbath). At no point was the message to "hate" anyone for anything. Regardless of whether homosexuality is a sin or not, we are told to love each other (friends and enemies both).
I'm sorry, but reasonable Christians have to simply accept that there are some real atrocities in their religion's history and that there was valid grounding in their holy scriptures for them.Must the muslims accept what happen to the World Trade Center? I don't see either as needing acceptance. If I bomb fundamentalist Christians in the name of Durandal64, is it your problem? You clearly seem to not like them and I took it to mean that you thought the world would be a better place without them. Please accept my actions as they were done in your name.
Those people had unquestioning faith. Saying that they weren't Christians belies a staggering ignorance of history.
Was Ptolemy not a scientist? Did he not get the whole solar system completely wrong? Does that invalidate all of science? No, but you learn from it that sometimes scientists are wrong. The same goes for Christians. Big whoop.
But what's bad is pretending that their take on Christianity is the only valid one. They start from the assumption that Christianity must be tolerant and loving and interpret the Bible from that framework, completely disregarding history and the text on the page.
You really don't get the Bible or the religion. Sure, you can pull out one liners and short stories, but when you take them out of the context of the entire thing, they're useless. It's not surprising that you don't get it. I don't, either. Jesus three times told his disciples (who followed him around constantly and heard everything he said) that they didn't get it.
I'll give credence to this "true Christianity" claim when major churches start putting their money where their mouths are and declare the racist, sexist, morally abhorrent parts of the Bible invalid.
Won't ever happen. It's part of the story of God's relationship with man. It's a part that you don't seem to understand, but that doesn't make it wrong or morally abhorrent. It's neither of those things.
Warren Buffett's plans for his foundation (Score:2, Informative)
- Universities that already have large endowments;
- Medical research that already has lots of money thrown at it (i.e., cancer).
It'll be interesting to see down the road what he does eventually decide upon.Re:The Devil on the Left or the Devil on the Right (Score:3, Informative)
Don't you wish you could get away with paying taxes like Microsoft doesn't [seattleweekly.com]?
Re:Depends on the question (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs is donating money to charity anonymously, and if so he would be wise to not take the bait.
It's easy to do it, and you don't have to be a millionare. I opened an account with Fidelity's Charitable Gift Fund [charitablegift.org] a few years back, and since then have made every charitable gift through it, anonymously.
The Fund is a public charity. The donor makes a non-revocable contribution and receives a charitable deduction at that time (subject to the usual limitations). Subsequently, the donor makes grant recommendations to the fund. The recommendation is reviewed for compliance (i.e. the recipient is a US charitable organization), and the grant is made. The donor's name can be included, or the donor can request anonymity.
The donor cannot receive any benefit in return or recommend a grant to satisfy a pledge. The grant cannot be used for political purposes. There are other restrictions, described here [charitablegift.org].
In the past fiscal year, the Fund made grants totaling nearly $700 million, and has exceeded $5 billion in grants since inception in 1991.
Re:The Devil on the Left or the Devil on the Right (Score:3, Informative)
That's only sort of true. Bill Gates Senior is one of the three co-chairs of the charity (along with Melinda and Bill himself). As co-chairs, I'd be surprised if any of the three receives any salary from the foundation.
I'm sure most of the normal staff do receive salaries -- working for a charitable foundation doesn't relieve them from having to eat and such. The foundation website lists their executives [gatesfoundation.org]. According to the foundation's tax return [gatesfoundation.org] the total salary for all executives of the foundation totalled just over eight hundred thousand dollars. The rest of the employees received a total of about $18.7 million in salaries (though I've no idea how many employees that is, so it's hard to guess how well they're paid).
The foundation's web site also has links to various other financial info [gatesfoundation.org] for anybody who really cares -- things like how the foundation has its money invested, but take careful note of the file sizes. The listing of the foundation's investments is over 2200 pages long, and is an 80+ megabyte download.