In case this doesn't get deleted, here's a Bill Gates quotation:
"A few billion people would have to die if we hadn't come up with fertilizer."
Not just in this case but he's confusing the cause and effect. The last century's rise in human population, and any rise in general is caused by more food and resources being available. There's always a balance.
On an unrelated note, I'm sure that his choices about spending his money are better than those of many philantropists, but there is sure room for improvement (education).
He is managing his foundation just like his company. He is not throwing money away. I was really impressed with that vaccine refrigerator which was invented so that vaccines can be kept cool for 50 days without any electricity. I think his focus on using technology to solve problems will be a game changer. In 20 years, we will all be thankful to Bill Gates for solving problems which has been haunting civilization for a long time.
To address your point about education, he is an active supporter of Khan Academy. I think it's better for him to pick something like Khan Academy and give him all the financial support and attach other areas where there are not enough smart people working on to solve hard problems.
I think you're making the common mistake many people make. That is, you're smart enough to understand how to best spend a small fortune but you're not smart enough to earn it in the first place.
From the sidelines, it all seems so easy. The 'critic' vs the Man in the Arena is one of the big problems that humanity needs to solve.
Both undernourishment and birth rates are going down, while food production per capita is going up. Food availability is not the driver of world population levels and has not been for some decades now.
They get people linking to their page instead of the underlying YouTube video, hence better pagerank.
They get people visiting their page instead of just YouTube, and some of them reading other bits of their blog, hence more visibility for other stuff they want people to read.
They get their brand associated with Bill Gates doing cool philanthropic stuff.
The more difficult question is what benefit Hacker News gets from a link that goes there rather than to the underlying YouTube video. Actually, that's not a difficult question either; the answer is "no benefit".
To be totally fair, I hadn't heard of Bits & Bytes before now, so that's a little value I didn't have before. It's not quite accurate to say we get nothing out of linking to them instead of the youtube clip.
I agree with you and flagged this submission...and am kind of surprised to see it on the front page still. This is clearly blog spam. If a post is going to drive traffic with an embedded video, then at the very least, they should transcribe some of the best parts of the video for those of us who prefer reading a little about the video.
What's even more galling is that the source video is most likely a copyright violation...it was not posted by 60 Minutes.
Not just in this case but he's confusing the cause and effect. The last century's rise in human population, and any rise in general is caused by more food and resources being available. There's always a balance.
On an unrelated note, I'm sure that his choices about spending his money are better than those of many philantropists, but there is sure room for improvement (education).