Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media
wired.com
wired.com
An honest utilitarian would be willing to share their calculations, which would be interesting to see, though I am not sure how you'd balance the interests in the cases described above.
I've fallen into this trap. It led me to realize that, like ideologies, all frameworks are flawed. Assuming otherwise leads to positions that are starved for empathy and compassion - and that are ultimately counterproductive.
So what I'm saying is it's easy for the app on people's phone to filter or block sharing misinformation, because the app can see what the data is just like your eyes using the app can see what the data is. I'd also be fairly surprised if WhatsApp the app re-uploaded every single shared video, I'd say it's more likely they share a link or hash and encrypt that link in the message (but that is just a guess).
To your second point. All methods of global speech are eventually used for evil. All methods of communication are eventually used for evil, all methods of food preparation are eventually used for evil. There are some flaws in that argument.
The problem is there’s no agreed upon definition for what’s “bogus”. A while ago someone commented here with a list of statements ranging from obviously false obviously true to show how hard the problem is, I wish I could find it.
I've yet to see anyone provide any kind of evidence that suggests censorship changes people's minds about conspiracies - if anything it seems to be doing exactly the opposite.
Also on that point, the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories, if only because 1) you can freely spread malicious lies and 2) it can be in a lot of people's interests to do so. I think it's always been in people's interest to spread lies, but I think recently in the very partisan climate in the US the media (and I'm including social media there) have happened upon the discovery that spreading this misinformation is actually very very good for business. It generates outrage in the opposite camp and keeps one side of the divide entertained.
Limiting speech is by definition censorship. There's no value judgement required as to the quality or veracity of that speech to determine whether or not restricting it counts as censorship.
> the freedom of speech in the US is strongly correlated with conspiracy theories
...and water is highly correlated with drowning. We don't say 'water bad, less water'. Just because one thing is a prerequisite for something else doesn't mean it is responsible for that other thing. We have to look to, like you point out, the political climate, as well as the lack of trust in institutions, the education system, and many other factors. Taking a complex issue around how information is shared at an unprecedented speed and scale and saying "just ban it" is, I think, a shallow assessment.
Preventing speech is censorship.
But discouraging the spreading of a message at each spreader, for example by letting the spreader know the message is tagged as misleading by some large number of people before they spread it further is not censorship.
That may limit the rate, intensity, and real-world effect of some kinds of information, without fundamentally limiting the right to free speech.
There are relatively few constitutional curbs on speech. For example, shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater is legal by default but there are a few exceptions. ref: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
>I'm saying is these limitations can be enforced in WhatsApp.
1) Are you speaking of constitutional curbs on speech (because there aren't many)? Or are you talking about curbing speech that is believed to yield negative outcomes?
2) How, precisely, could these be enforced? I ask because automated moderation at scale is impossible to do responsibly and consistently. This will not change anytime soon.
3) Gates seems to be demonizing encryption. Few options can logically follow that position. Either Gates advocates replacing beneficial (to everyone) encryption with vulnerable (to everyone) encryption or he advocates banning encryption outright. It's difficult to see how either of these outcomes would benefit anyone (other than authoritarian governments and similarly repressive interests).
Even if Gates got his way on #3 (make everyone more vulnerable), #2 remains technically impossible.
1. To spread truth
2. To hold people accountable for what they say
And if it all falls apart (like it sometimes does when people are faced with their own failure), then you can at least ask them to give arguments instead of ad homs. I always try to be polite the first time around, but if they double down, I let them have it. But really, if it ever falls that low, it usually means that you already won, and so you don't really need to bother any further with the discussion.
My thinking is that most people who read such discussions can think for themselves, and so giving good arguments, unraveling faulty logic, and showing the truth, will always let truth and logic prevail in the end.
Usually you will never get a person to admit that he's wrong anyway, at least not to your face, so don't even worry about it! But people do change their minds about things. It usually happens in private, especially if they just facepalmed right into their own flawed logic. So if they do, never gloat and pretend like nothing happened, and rather commend them for telling the truth later on.
Perhaps I'm naïve, but I enjoy staying positive like that. :)
Mere faceless fake news and conspiracy theories, however, simply needs highlighting and debunking. There are several sites that specialize in that already, with various success. It's not perfect, but IMHO it's preferrable to outright censorship. Because who can be the final arbiter of truth anyway...
At this point it's been weaponized, and has about as much in common with actual justice as it does with a 1984-style "2 minutes of hate".
Very few people are actively seeking to become radicalized into some fringe movement. It instead happens more passively or through active recruitment by another member. Negative content is normalized when it appears on a platform intertwined with mainstream content. People stop viewing it as fringe and it becomes easier for people to be passively radicalized or recruited. When that content is only available on sites dedicated to that content, people aren't going to stumble upon it without recognizing what it truly is. There are plenty of stories about people being accidentally radicalized by what they see on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc. You aren't going to accidentally be radicalized by visiting Storm Front.
Facebook/WhatsApp claims WhatsApp messages are "end-to-end" encypted. For example, here
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
Are the "end-to-end" encryption claims irrelevant if "they have access to the unecncypted information before and after sending"?
"I'll be on my way home in five minutes!" [send]
"Sorry, our algorithms have detected that you were about to spread misinformation. Please contact support to reactivate your account. Premium support is available to subscribers of our membership programme"
I'm actually only half joking: while some local library code surely cannot tell truth from lies, that problem remains just as unsolved for arbitrary amounts of central effort. There's a reason truth ministries are a Bad Idea.
Hey, the way GPT(-2, -3, ...)s are going, maybe soon we can have an offline classifier of truth. /s.
Several commenters point out end-to-end encryption would prevent filtering or tagging messages.
But that's not true. The message analysis could be done at either endpoint without violating privacy.
Tagging (or removing) a message before you send/forward it, or after you receive it, with "the central message of this comment has been tagged as "probably a hoax" by hoaxtracker.com; check out this CDC notice <here> to learn more".
<here> does not need to be a URL which reveals much other than your general interest in the subject. But if that seems too revealing, it could already be already available as part of the endpoint's filtering data and readable locally.
Lots of people forward (retweet), or write a little something before resharing what is false or misleading information, not realising they're doing so. I would not be surprised if getting those tags, rarely enough to stand out, before they send the message would cause some people to hesitate and check/think a bit more before sending. Maybe rephrase their attached comment into a question rather than confident outrage.
Technically this is not much different from privacy-preserving spam filtering.
You're likely to feel so much happier, freer and easier sharing your most personal life datastream with an AI assistant, if you can be sure its most intimate analysis is just between the two of you.
It puts me in mind of the two kinds of AI in Manna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
Coincidence or not, the dystopian AIs are somewhere in the cloud and work for someone else, while the utopian AIs are intimately personal to each user and work just for the user.
The part I'm not sure about is whether the on-device certification that the message is "clean" couldn't be (easily) spoofed. But it would probably help curb distribution of illegal material anyway.
This is stupid. Lots of naked baby photos get sent in my culture (Eastern-European country) in a most non-harmful way, i.e. from parents to the kids' grand-parents or even to the parents' close friends (especially from the mother to her friends). Your supposed filter will most probably block that social-sharing process (because it will see photos of naked children => very, very bad), not realising the above mentioned context.
Truth is truth. Saying something is possible isn't the same as advocating that it be done, and it's useful to point out something is possible when people at first seem to think it is not.
Also, I was talking about messages, not baby photos, and with regard to misleading or false information, hoaxes etc that cause people to behave more dangerously to others during a pandemic. Saving lives, that sort of thing.
If it's giving the user advice that others have judged what they are retweeting to be a hoax or bad medical advice, that's not blocking, it's providing context. If they don't like it, they should be able to dial it down.
With regard to baby photos, if a network starts blocking those due to poor filtering, I would hope people switch over to another network that lets them share the photos.
> Your supposed filter will most probably block
I wasn't talking about filtering particularly, the emphasis was on providing a note to the user. Much like when Twitter attached a note to Trump's tweets.
In any case, the analysis I had in mind is not "skin tone filters" and that sort of nonsense. It's not meant to be thought police, working for someone else. It's meant to advise the users themselves to think again about some content. At least at the currently level of sophistication, that would be "we recognise this particular message or photo".
There are better and worse ways to implement it of course.
(Although, something that blocks communication (which I don't think I agree with anyway) based on local analysis is an autonomy violation. But not a privacy violation.)
Something that tells you when you've just received a well documented hoax is not malware, it's probably useful, and most people will probably keep it switched on if the quality is consistently good.
By your logic, spam filtering (outgoing and incoming) is also malware, and a privacy violation. (Even though it protects people against malware, and indirectly protects privacy.)
Do you believe spam filtering is bad? I doubt it.
Yes, people ask for certain kinds of anlysis based message blocking all the time. We begged and pleaded for better spam filtering 20 years ago because the vast majority of messages were pure spam and it had made email difficult to use. It's a major reason people switched to Gmail, because other providers' spam filters weren't good enough.
I think the key feature most people would want in any kind of alerting, tagging or filtering is that it does what they want, rather than what the enemy wants, as it were. As people's preferences differ, that can only happen if it's configurable by them rather than blanket imposed. Things like ad blockers work this way - you can change the defaults if you want - and people seem to like those.
> (I wouldn't see a problem with it personally
The POTUS said CNN is fake news, hundreds of times. So, as you say, people should be prevented from sharing and reading it?! There's no problem with that?! The very first item on the USA Bill of Rights isn't important?
1) decide what the definition of truth is
2) differentiate between subjectivity and objectivity
3) differentiate between misleading and outright incorrect
4) investigate every piece of media thoroughly
5) avoid bias
6) peer review
7) correct any mistakes
And this list is just off the top of my head.
So what bill gates is saying is that you have to do all this at a scale of 1 billion users, all controlled roughly by a few centralised organisations. I think Bill's words are still kind of stupid even with context. The way to fight all of these problems has always been education, and social welfare, and things the government should ACTUALLY be doing, not vetting encryption schemes.
That means no control of communication by the endpoint software either directly or indirectly between willing senders and recipients regardless of justification, and especially on the basis of whether or not data send from a willing sender to a willing receipient represents the "truth". The endpoint software vendor has no standing to judge that unless it's an opt-in anti-spam type feature.
When I look at the medium article, I see this:
And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
Note the []? Was this added in by Medium? Gates as an edit after a read-and-OK-to-release? Did Gates have editorial input?
Regardless, I believe [] means 'edited afterwards for clarity'. But by whom?
I Googled, and found this:
https://wccftech.com/bill-gates-hate-encryption/
Yet in this case, there was no hatred of encryption, but picked quotes where he suggested that in one case, if you have the means, the government should be aided .. eg, a murderer.
There was another article on hackernews, where many lamented how much the media just spins, takes quotes out of context, basically does whatever it wants to. I wonder, how much of this are we seeing here?
(Note, Gates could very much be for back-doored encryption, but my point is, I don't think it's a clear position due to this medium article.. where that stances was in [] and added by someone after...)
The goal seems to be removing easy access to communications where governments can't listen for signs of dangerous behavior. But individuals can write custom software. Is there a stage in this arms race where one would need company/nation-state level resources to communicate in private?
Is there a potential future in which every piece of end-user software can't run without being signed by the government and is enforced at the CPU level? I'd hate to think this is even possible, but my (limited) understanding of secure enclaves makes me think there's a chance.
Not for walled garden platforms. See also The Digital Imprimatur:
It wasn't about the demographic, but about the fact that their healthcare system would get overloaded, which impacts a lot of treatments for everybody else.
Also the problem with predictions of epidemic is that if you actually do a better job than expected at confinement / protection measures, then predictions are meaningless. You "could have" a lot of bad things happen, but once you do things right, they disappear. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have done those things, it just means that people have been warned properly. He said, if they get hit severely, impact would be much bigger than in the west. He didn't say the 10 million was a done deal.
"This is a huge challenge, we’ve always known the potential for a naturally caused, or intentionally caused, pandemic is one if the few things that could disrupt health systems and economies and cause more than 10 million excess deaths.
This could be particularly if it spreads in areas like sub-Saharan Africa and some Asia, it could be very very dramatic.
We’re doing the constant science to provide the tools to do the diagnosis to provide vaccines, to provide therapeutics and hopefully contain this epidemic, but it’s potentially a very bad situation."
(found this here -> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/15/coronovirus-bill...)
No virus in history has infected virtually everyone, and there are lots of experts calling foul on that particular assumption right now. It's baked into epidemiological models but those models are always wrong, and the assumption of very high susceptible populations is being floated in several papers as one of the possible reasons.
I personally think the solution isn't to make it harder to share lies, but easier to share the truth. Sharing the truth is actually extremely labor intensive.
- Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs
- Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?
I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.
HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.
Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.
His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.
I use reduced to mean non universal.
What does that have to do with encryption?
Also, sidebar:
Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet".
Together they're responsible for a bazillion-fold increase of illegal porn. It's imperative that legislation be passed that sabotages the basic functions of computers and renders them ineffective at performing their primary task.
Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.
No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.
My point was that the creation rate of illegal porn exploded because of computers. Your above statement seems dismissive of that.
>we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet. Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped.
It isn't and hasn't been. Large tech companies intercept and report billions of images to LEO regularly, which are largely captured before and after transport.
Meanwhile, actual police work is what leads police to people who harm children - the importance of which is being increasingly eclipsed by the obsession with safe encryption.
Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies.
The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty.
LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, along with a corresponding loss of our civil liberties (which translates to increased Gov/LEO power).
re:9/11
All of us remember how tech + new gov powers + gobs of cash were necessary to stop the terrorists (practically in our borders and ready any second to unleash more devastating attacks).
Less remembered is how anti-terror Tech/Power/Cash is being used against low-level offenders (eg: Fusion Centers)
And sickeningly predictable, anti-terror tech is today being deployed against people who criticize cops (eg: protests)
Which is exactly what the history of LEO (Gov,etc) suggested was going to happen (eg: War On Drugs). That same history is now poking at us to realize that we can expect the same from War On Illegal Porn.
At least that's something we could learn, if learning from history is something we wanted to do.
I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.
Is that sarcasm? Logging into sites w/ usernames/passwords is literally a thing people do many times a day. That's the opposite of off-beat.
>We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.
End to end encryption is primarily about transport encryption. Scanning for content on media servers strongly suggests you're talking about encryption at rest - a very different application than transport encryption.
Source: Day job.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page, your definition is the original one but in the last 6 years it’s evolved to the meaning I was using.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-bostrom-mass-surveillan...
IIRC the argument is basically that as tech progresses it will get easier and easier for any one person to destroy the planet. According to Bostrom the only way to prevent that is no secrets and ubiquitous surveillance.
He doesn't seem to realise however that he's making this far worse.
Literally a core part of the Gates/COVID conspiracy theories goes like this:
"Bill Gates want to track everyone and is using a COVID vaccine as a trojan horse to do it"
Then he goes and says, gee, maybe it shouldn't be possible to say things Bill Gates doesn't like and the way to implement this is to ensure tech firms can monitor and track everything everyone is saying.
He's basically giving his critics an intellectual ammo dump with this interview. Dude doesn't seem self-aware, at all.
Gates didn't suggest that the messages be sent unencrypted through government-controlled message routers either. Presumably, he is promoting systems that work like MS Teams or Slack.
Gates attacked encryption. Nothing beneficial (to the public) follows that.
Where did he do that? Slack and Microsoft Teams also use encryption, and he wasn't opposed to the method they use it.
Right here. "And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger]."
Unless you're alleging the stuff in the brackets isn't attributable to Gates and doesn't reflect his position on encryption.
If there were strong privacy laws defining how and when data could be collected and accessed then in theory I'm happy for the right people to have access to investigate criminal acts. Under a warrant that a judge has reviewed.
But currently it seems to be a free-for-all with tech companies being the ones in control of most of the data.
He is demonizing encryption. There are few options that logically follow that stance.
And it's obvious that this is not "his" statement, but a statement from the mouth of a puppet who is absolutely dependent on spreading the agenda in order to maintain his status quo of an "independent billionaire"
Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.
So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"
Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.
And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?
How did you know gates are expensive?
So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop
Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.
It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.
If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.
Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.
This was 1 year ago.
Compare a nature made system to a man made system.
Nature changes over time. Our laws and regulations however do not get updated to reflect the times. That is the reason why human progress is slow. It's because humans don't change. That is the root cause of all evil. Humans like the comfort of not having to change.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard today. It took a billion plus years for nature to come up with humans and about ten thousand years for us to go from written language to causing a mass extinction. To call such a comparison "hyperbolic" would be an understatement.
You have put together arguments that make sense individually, but do not make sense when you weave them together. Nature changes over time, but over a long period of time (e.g. evolution is slow). Our laws and regulations do not get updated to reflect the times, yes, but the times that are changing is because of humans, not nature. A manmade part of society is having a tough time catching up with another manmade part of society. Human progress is NOT slow, at least when you are comparing it with nature. Humans do not change on an individual level, but they change a great deal en masse culturally, psychologically, etc. We are actually almost built for adaptation and change intergenerationally.
There is a subtle point here about institutions refusing change, but you cannot make a valid comparison of speed between human institutions and nature.
What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purchased and the best thing that could have been bought was good information. If that time has been wasted then there should be reform of an evidence-based nature. This is an opinion that really deserves debate, opinions thrown about and evidence dredged up. With encryption, HN will basically just agree that he is wrong and everyone likes encryption. Not much more to say. Maybe we will think of the children on the way thorough.
Encryption is an important issue but frankly that isn't what Gates is talking about, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. It is barely even germain to the topic he is talking about. He is talking about a global pandemic.
You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.
A case and point: Seoul is riddled with security cameras on every street. This makes Seoul an incredibly safe city, but also with decreased sense of privacy. Cameras are everywhere, and this is not recognized much as a potential problem in South Korea.
With Covid, there is a pending legislation to sign in your name and social security number whenever you visit designated crowded areas. I am worried for the increased loss of freedom and privacy in South Korea, but the culture worries less about that, and more about mutual subsistence.
Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.
Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.
Someone like Gates pushing for the end of private speech at scale is always going to be of interest to the HN crowd.
Rather the very difficult and important issue, how do you stop someone with 80 million followers from spreading lies and large numbers of people believing them, and who determines what are facts and what are lies. By Facebook, Twitter, etc.. removing Trump's posts for instance, aren't they taking upon themselves the authority of what's true and what isn't?
I have to believe the only answer is something they call freedom of speech. You can say whatever the hell you want publicly. I'm appalled by the fact the highest authority in the world retweeted the sperm doctors video as well, but I'm not so comfortable with FB, Twitter, etc. deciding for me what is true and not, or worth me reading, either.
So, the encryption issue doesn't apply here. It's a serious issue, but separate. The problem is not that encrypted lies can be sent. The lies that reach 1000 people aren't the problem. The problem is the unencrypted lies that REACH 80 million+ people.
Consider that the pile-on of that doctor - an African from Cameroon where Christianity is blended with traditional tribal superstition - happened around the same time as the Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health published a Newsweek piece on how HCL is a valid early-stage treatment [1].
I understand this is how the media works: an advocate of HCL who has fringe cultural beliefs was retweeted by Trump, so the story was irresistible and endlessly amplified (including here by Gates).
But the quality of debate would be so much better if the media engaged with the (superficially) strongest proponents of a position (such as Harvey Risch) and aimed withering criticism and analysis at them instead. Shouldn't the focus be on dismantling the claims of the most, not the least, credentialed proponents?
Instead the media from all quarters deliberately amplifies the most fringe proponents, so now HCL is shorthand for expressing disdain for particular cultural beliefs, and those 10 million views were significantly driven by most media outlets covering her.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exis...
The media, which is mostly left leaning, ignores this and instead prefers to take cheap shots at Trump whenever possible on the subject. It seems very biased, very childish, and entirely divorced from reality - actually that more or less sums up the state of US politics lately.
That debate has of course not been particularly honest: amplifying the weakest proponents, fabrication of negative data with the Surgisphere scandal [1] and fixating on studies which don't replicate the claimed beneficial outpatient (pre-hospitalization) treatment processes (low-dose HCL, zinc, azithromycin).
However none of that means HCL is actually effective, just that the public debate being prosecuted is quite weak when looked at carefully.
It could just be that once a mainstream position is established (which might be correct!) it becomes easier to engage in influencing to enforce or signal tribal commitment to the established consensus in place of continued honest debate.
I really don't want to hear about the cultural beliefs of the weakest advocates, or of studies which don't replicate the claimed treatment.
I want to see engagement with the strongest advocates, and studies which irrefutably rule out the specific treatment, and if they rule this out as just another alluring low-cost, ineffective treatment, then at least we've reached that point honestly.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/covid-19-studi...
And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?
Point is, who cares what else he has to say if he says stuff like this? He's as much an expert on technology as he is on pathology, so if his opinions on technology are bad... well you get the point.
This is one of the things Slashdot did rather well with its categorization and ratings, though if that system were used then I’m sure everything would just be rated +5 Insightful with little signal over the noise.
Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".
I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.
This is one of the reasons for which I proposed that HN, by default, display discussions collapsed down to first branches. Just show the text for the first branches and collapse their corresponding conversations. Readers would only expand branches they find relevant or interesting and comment within them.
You could take this one step further and only show the first two lines (or n characters) of first branch comments. This would force a style where authors would have to provide a two line summary of their comment (if it is a first branch comment) in order to facilitate scanning. With this approach the list of first branches would almost look like the HN home page, where you can quickly scan the short titles and expand topics of interest.
To address your comment directly, if the inevitable makes it to the top of the first branch list it will be easy to scan other first branches on the same page without having to scroll or take any action. This might promote participation in other threads within the conversation and maybe even the bubbling-up of more "worthy" contenders for the top first branch.
Give me top threads and a level below them to see a rebuttal -- if I want to see more I'll break them down.
I do wish there was a way to see if there are high value or low value posts below, like someone got gilded or got 400 upvotes or something. Not sure how this would be implemented though; I could see terrible pun threads getting too many upvotes and throwing that off.
What is frustrating about this comment is that it inevitably commands the top of the HN thread, "for the 8-zillionth time", because its author's moniker automatically attracts "upvotes" due its familiarity, not because the comment is the most interesting.
That said, this comment is probably worthy of being at the top since the E2E debate is indeed a tired one and that sentiment probably has many sympathisers. However, as someone else pointed out, Gates brought this up, not HN. And it does directly relate to discussions about COVID on Facebook (WhatsApp) and the ability to censor them. Of course, there is also the argument that newcomers to HN will not know all the past discussions of E2E, nor are they expected to read them before commenting. We regularly see HN re-post items that have previously been submitted, re-opening discussions that are old hat, inviting us to re-hash them.
While some readers may grow tired of seeing the same topics discussed over and over again, other readers may grow tired of seeing the same usernames at the top of so many threads, over and over again, no matter what their comments.
Something I've wished for; hacker news only with top level comments
Because billionaires don't need encryption to keep themselves safe. The billions take care of that just fine.
If you're sitting here going, "gosh, I wonder why someone that well-informed would say that?!", I'd point out that you don't actually know the full detail of what he said.
Lie, fraud, child porn is real. Government should install 24-7 cameras in every private room of every citizen to curb all illegal activity.
I feel that the following statements could both be true.
1. Social media platforms should be able to monitor what content users are sharing on these platforms. Therefore these platforms maybe shouldn't have end-to-end encryption.
2. People need to have access to encryption for their own usage outside of social media platforms.
Where this might get tricky is in decentralized platforms which nobody owns. But we don't need to deal with this right now because it's not yet a problem. This will be a cat and mouse game always.
EDIT: Points 1 and 2 aren't necessarily my beliefs. I haven't put enough thought and research into it to have a more fully formed belief. These points are just my interpretation of what Gates could be saying. The context of encryption is in these platforms. He's not attacking encryption in general. Though other sources may reveal more information which could change my interpretation.
Then you’re not a platform, you are a publisher and should be held accountable for what you choose to publish. A platform is literally that: a platform for use by users as they see intended. I’m not talking about trolls, spammers, hackers and those who post illegal content. When platforms move down to editorialize content, they cease to be defined as a platform.
Decent article about section 230: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/business/section-230-inte...
This is so asinine, especially because bill lumped this problem in with fact checking, which is in a completely different realm of problems.
Would you sacrifice your privacy if it could eliminate child pornography? The theory is hard to say no to, but in practice that kind of power has never worked out. If we want to retain privacy we have to accept some amount of crime going unnoticed.
Finally if you take a look at pure math - most of worlds suffering, evil and death is inflicted by world's governments. You'd put your trust in that over individuals?
I also said in my (very short) comment that such an extreme level of power never works out in practice. So we need to accept that as long as privacy exists, some amount of crime will. We can't eliminate privacy without giving someone too much power.
It seems to me that there are many instances where child exploitation is ignored when it is politically convenient such that giving up our privacy wouldn't be of benefit to society, and would be largely to our detriment.
Social media is destroying our society in front of our eyes. Identifying how and why that is happening is something that matters too. The hardline techie position that all communications must be completely encrypted with obfuscated origins is a position whose consequences are not fully understood.
Well, strangely, I'm involved in almost everything that anti-science is fighting. I'm involved with climate change, GMOs, and vaccines. The IRONY [emphasis added] is that it's DIGITAL [emphasis added] social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, "OK, there's just an evil person, and that explains all of this."
Well, you're friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Have you talked to him about this?
After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he's got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there. The lies are so titillating you have to be able to see them and at least slow them down."
Gates has a reason to be against the spreading of information on social media because recently he became a target of conspiracy theories spread on social media.
If encryption is an imediment to stoping people from spreading theories about him, then he obviously has a reason to be against encryption when used to spread these theories.
Maybe what is more interesting is when he uses the word irony right before he states he is against encryption.
What does he mean?
What is ironic about the fact that it is "digital social media" that allows "oversimplistic explanation[s]"?
HN readers can probably make better guesses than me. Disgreement with the guesses I make is expected.
For example, perhaps it is ironic because:
He has been such a strong proponent of using computers for anything and everything.
Gates was initially a skeptic of the internet, but later believed Microsoft's "internet strategy" was of primary importance. This led to projects like Internet Explorer and MSN. The company is now preparing to spend billions to acquire a social media company.
In amassing the fortune that allows him to pursue these philanthropic causes he and his company presented countless titillating, oversimplistic explanations of the value of using computers for seemingly anything. He wanted us to believe that the computer (running Windows of course) was the great enabler.
I have no idea what he meant and I am grasping at straws.
> Joseph P. Nacchio is an American executive who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International from 1997 to 2002. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Also, sad to see the actual meaningful content of the article gotten less attention.
[1]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhopal/mps-largest-...
The simple explanation is that there exist people who in good faith disagree with you about encryption.
His biggest contribution is money, which pays for really smart people to tackle these issues.
So why not talk to the really smart people he hired?
Thus questions regarding a contemporary infectious disease potentially treated by a disease causing odd politicized conspiratorial behavior on social media is right up his wheelhouse and he's a well known public speaker. There are many epidemiologists you could hear from, and most people have heard from them repeatedly, but Gates offers a fresh perspective due to his fairly unique experience and perspective.
Maybe it’s just the cynic in me, but it comes across as a bit of “billionaire worship”.
“He’s made lots of money, so he must be brilliant and I want to hear what brilliant people think about Covid.”
Musk's ramblings are always covered and he's used them to build a brand in Tesla the equal of Mercedess without spending a single dollar on advertising.
President Trump is the actual president of the USA. God bless us all.
I see the point you're trying to make and I wish were true, but it just isn't as supported by the precise examples you've given.
He's proven to be reliable over decades. That's the main reason, I think. There was a small reason to talk to him about public health at first, but over time it's grown into a huge reason.
The question remains, is what is he reliable at? Why do I and so many others want to listen to him more over the years? I think it's because of the depth and breadth of issues he discusses. It's a sweet spot for me, between talking in too much depth and not enough depth.
So I’d think his accounts would be as easy and correct as some wiki articles or better, and at the same time would sound “irrelevant” to the public for the lack of emotional components to it.
- Bill Gates: 10 million clicks, $$$
- Joe Schmoe, MD, PhD: 0 clicks, no $$$
I could very well be that his interviews attract far more attention than interviews with experts, but you can't really compensate for that kind of name recognition.
Or is it just about the wealth?
Bill Gates is there because his foundation is responsible for helping to eradicate diseases and coordinate pandemic responses, so without his wealth he certainly has experience in this field.
Nothing against the man. I'm distrustful generally in the richest people in the world wielding control that can make their friends even richer. I really doubt I'm alone.
This possibility has been discussed and researched for decades by experts and policy makers around the world.
There is definitely a billionaire cult going on these days. I don't know when it started but I see more and more headlines "billionaire does X", "billionaire says Y". Somehow being a billionaire gives you credibility on everything you do or say.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Okay let me try to show my side of “0%“ is wrong”
“author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several textbooks.“
“Dr. Fauci ranked 7th out of more than 1.8 million authors in the field of immunology by total citation count between 1980 and January 2020.”
Note this isn’t just 2020. It’s a long history.
“Dr. Fauci was appointed director of NIAID in 1984.” And has served under 6 presidents. Most of which had more than 1 term.
If you are looking for a long list of awards and honorary doctorates head over to his Wikipedia page.
To the replies I got - I don’t consider 30’s middle aged. I guess I was thinking if you were around with AIDS news in the 80’s you might remember him. Oxford dictionary considers middled aged 45-65 - google trending searches isn’t how I would evaluate the history of someone over decades of time.
For fun I did fin a bunch of videos of times he was on TV via YouTube. So again my point is that 0% is far from right.
It is you who have to go on the defensive, especially if it gets spread far and wide, regardless if it is true or not. But the lie is out there and your truth has to catch up.
1. About his work at Microsoft
2. Or some conspiracy theory about world domination, population control etc
I'd be interested to read more on how societies he's directly worked with think of him, if you have any links
It'd be like saying it's a conflict of interest to promote access to clean water, while also investing in companies that supply clean water. Sure. It's a conflict. It's also exactly what you would do if you just wanted people to have clean water.
He had this huge presentation about a laser zapping mosquitoes. The patent was fed to a patent troll, the whole board was stacked with his friends, the company produced nothing and was set up to sue anyone who did try and produce anything. 10 years later they still haven't produced more than the one prototype. The 'charitable' donations were literally just tax write offs that paid for his friends salary.
Since then I really don't take him seriously at all. His charities are just a way to reduce his tax bill and look like he cares, while he's just paying his friends to work on projects they find interesting regardless of the chance of success.
In short: hubris, corruption, white collar rico and tax evasion.
If I were in his shoes I'd focus more on issues like education, improving basic utilities in urban areas, fighting corruption and enabling economies to expand.
3 : he wants to use his money for philanthropic cause. I can't overstate how great it is. The way he uses his money though, has been pretty controversial. From pushing a pro patent agenda in countries that are too poor to afford medicine made under that system to accusations of straight up using his money so his ideas are applied, even when they go against actual experts with data (and actual expertise) to back their positions.
For the lazy, there was a recent video on the topic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-fqcFaZKHQ
Because each and every person who promotes public health and (particularly) vaccination, eventually has so much baseless shit thrown at them that they become 'tarnished' before long.
Or should we try to make some sort of stand, and let the wingnuts know their opinions don't matter?
We see the effects of this sort of compromise in the vaccine space - perfectly safe additives were removed in an effort to assuage fears, but that action was twisted into a victory by antivax campaigners - "see, we were right, it was harmful, they lied, we forced them to remove it".
(Gates is tarnished in my eyes for computer industry reasons, but I have no issue with his record in public health)
You’d presume he’s learned a fair amount about it over the years. But I’ve learned a fair amount about accountancy through my years of working with corporate accountants. I’m definitely not an accountancy expert though.
What qualifications do you imagine he has? What significant work do you believe he has personally contributed to?
As far as I can tell, the person who actually leads the Gates Foundation health division is Trevor Mundel. Even then, the work of the Gates Foundation has been in funding projects lead by other organisations, rather than in implementing those projects themselves.
If they do it very well and can point to measurable results of success, I would think so!
His work in eradicating Polio. Choosing which projects to finance is a skill in itself, something he's likely more capable of than a traditionally credentialed expert. I can't help but think that you have an arbitrarily narrow definition of expertise.
There is no basis at all for claiming he’s a public health expert. He might be an effective philanthropist, but that’s a completely different topic.
The difference between a trained lawyer or accountant and someone with a lot of exposure to such knowledge is very specific skills and procedures. The difference between someone who is a trained manager with a degree and someone who's managed a medium sized organization is more or less nothing just an ability to use jargon.
I've actually looked online courses and documentation on epidemiology and public health. Unlike medicine (which I know nothing of) or advance mathematics (which I know and I know it take specialized skills), epidemiology seems to be a "smattering" sort of fields. A mix of public policy, simple medicine, biology and experimental methods and statistics. I could be wrong but it seems a field that's wide, not deep.
Why get information thirdhand from the money guy?
It's not how long it took that person to demonstrate this. It's that Gates kinda hasn't really done it.
He's far from terrible but he gets pretty low scores on most of those attributes. He's not going to be listened to if he didn't bring the money. His experience in making microsoft a juggernaut in the 80s and 90s is not super-relevant here but that's why he's being held up as an "authority." That position of authority is one he seems very happy to hold and use as a pulpit.
Is it deserved at all? Maybe it is. He did bring the money to a lot of programs and I believe he is even bankrolling the WHO nowadays (worthwhile after their multiple screwups that continue? I don't know. Maybe it is and a vital service he's performed there). Gates an expert? Hmm. Don't think he's really demonstrated that conclusively. He'd use his position to get advice from one or more, one would think.
To be clear. More power to him giving his vast wealth away to try and make the world better in tangible ways. You can't possibly spend more than $100m in your life on consumption even if you're totally nuts. Go for immortality. Do it in a way that's kinda good. Go Bill! I pray your good intentions don't pave a road you don't want built as I do everyone's good intentions, including my own.
Look at his prepandemic warnings of a pandemic and how it would play out. And real money and action in trying to prevent it. That's why he is being held up as an authority.
And in his current field of "global health" he hopefully has as good of a grasp of the issues, the proposed solutions, and since he's a smart man he's hopefully able to separate the bullshit from the effective solutions.
I think the summary is: this is really odd but it is even more odd how governments are unable to work on long-term topics unless shit hits the fan.
This is just because there is no incentive for any politician. It's just like how security is at the bottom of the budget list for most IT companies. Unless we have a framework where people are accountable, nothing will change.
Not so odd. This is a common human behavior. We humans are very slow in responding to low probability but high impact events, especially if they require coordination.
E.g. upcoming climate disaster ("climate change" is a euphemism at this point), or nuclear weapons stockpile and the military systems which are effectively a dooms-day device for humanity.
At a smaller scale, various preventable accidents like Beirut explosions or most industrial accidents.
Ironically, a well functioning bureaucracy is one of the best answers, as you can see from Taiwan or South Korea's preparedness and response to COVID pandemic.
That’s not true. GWB took it very seriously and put a plan in place. Obama modernized the plan. Trump is the one who ignored his predecessors and set the stage for the mess we are in.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-whi...
This isn’t unique to the US. Canada had an extremely effective pandemic forecasting agency. This got dismantled by two separate governments since 2014. I can’t find the article but the globe and mail had a big exposé.
The Atlantic article above is one of the top five articles I’ve read on the pandemic disaster and is worth reading.
* https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/23/16974012/tr...
* https://khn.org/morning-breakout/global-health-security-team... * https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/05/white-hou...
Pandemic preparedness was merged with WMD control. The below article refers to it as streamlining but notes
>The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
https://www.kff.org/news-summary/elimination-of-nsc-global-h...
However for someone living in a western European country it would not be received very well if a business person, even one with such a big philanthropic side to them, would become the go to authority on public health and wellbeing during this time. For that only be an actually trained and experienced professional can be turned to.
edit; spelling.
My point is more along the fact that he is predominantly a business man who has done a lot of good around the world with his philanthropic foundations. He is a well informed individual with deep pockets and political connections, who is well placed to enact change in what ever forum he would decide to use those resources in.
He is neither an elected representitive nor someone who has to answer for his opinions or actions to any authority within a regulated professional occupation (doctor, professor, publishing researcher etc).
The way that U.S society works, and the level of trust and respect that the general population places on the 'famous' and 'rich' just doesn't resonate with the reality of life where I am.
That is why he, or his like, would never be turned to as authority figures on this matter in my country of residence as they aren't looked at as experts on these matters nor trusted to not have an alterior motive (however small).
I’ve heard my own CEO try explain something technical and it’s clear they don’t really understand it (and why should they? That’s why they hired experts).
In this article Bill says “most of the Covid tests are garbage”. That seems like a technical statement that should come from someone who is an expert in testing.
If the question was “what do you think the most promising Covid treatments are?” that’s a good question for Bill, assuming he’s involved in the funding decisions (maybe he’s not?).
If they were asking him about funding these efforts, then yeah, he’d be the go to guy.
But asking him about the science?
That is not an accurate statement. Yes, the government sets reimbursement for Medicare and Medicaid, but not for private insurance which is ~60% of Americans.
If someone like Gates sounded the alarm on the poor way the U.S. was responding, it might have made a difference, but he did no such thing. Like most of the leadership in the U.S., he seemed to have a big blind spot with regards to how bad things could get in America. Some people were sounding the alarm early on (take a look at the last minute of this video[2] for an example), but were mostly ignored.
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/How-to-respond-to-COVID-19 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8VImMUvz-A
He gets listened to so he does interviews. This wouldn’t be on HN if it were Fauci.
And he gets to say the unedited. He can call BS because he doesn’t have a boss who can yank his budget or job.
There are plenty of rich philanthropists but very few with Gates's level of understanding and ability to make good policy choices.
Like on WHO? The organization that lied for months about the potentiality of the covid to become a pandemic and that is excluding on political ground the country that handle best the virus (Taiwan). By still sponsoring this China’s lying organization, Bill Gates lost credibility in my eyes.
If you think about it, having public policy being at least partially dictated by unelected and unaccountable individuals is not a good place to be.
Hasan Minhaj had an episode on the Patriot Act about this topic and how:
a) the huge sums of money and foundations these billionaires manage have less of an impact than one would think because of the staggered way that the money is handed out, organizational bureaucracy and the fact that most problems that they're trying to tackle don't really lend themselves to being quashed just by throwing money at them. Many pursue such philanthropy also in part to clean up their public image and as a tax reduction strategy.
b) those huge sums distort the domains that they are injected in and could in some cases cause harm. The Gates Foundation is known for favoring high-impact project and sucking the air out of the room for other initiatives for example.
> There’s this thing where the health worker jams the deep turbinate, in the back of your nose, which actually hurts and makes you sneeze on the healthy worker. We showed that the quality of the results can be equivalent if you just put a self-test in the tip of your nose with a cotton swab.
This interview is good but barely scratches the surface.
edit: I've just found a recent interview - while still high level, it's a bit more detailed. However, the comments section reads like 4chan, all of the top comments are trolls. What's going on? When/how did it become a thing to hate on Gates for his efforts to eradicate diseases?
Once you light that spark, the useful idiots will help advance that agenda.
WOW. Why would someone in the tech industry like Gates be anti-encryption for the public? The only argument I can think of against it is "You have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide"
Would it be a map of unacceptable things, or an on device model like GPT3? Would you allow someone to type the offending thing and just disable the send button, or would you block it at the keyup event?
I don't see any way this could be implemented without kissing freedom goodbye.
I like the other commenter's take that this idea was just a bit out of exasperation.
But I see your point: you would need to inform the user without restricting his or her freedom.
And they wouldn't be wrong. If the same thing came out of someone else's mouth I assume you wouldn't be seeking out an unreasonably charitable explanation like this.
And if such a plan was introduced by Trump you probably wouldn't even think of this charitable version as a good plan at all because at the end of the day, things like censorship and mass surveillance are tools of oppression in the wrong hands, and you have no control whose hands it will end up in once it's normalized.
What does he mean by that ? That research regarding HIV, malaria and polio is slowing down ? Or that there'll be a rise in HIV/malaria/polio cases ?
How to Beat COVID-19 with At-Home, Rapid Result Testing: 5 Min. Summary by Dr. Mina (Antigen Tests)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZWuyvBAWWQ
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 98: At Home COVID-19 Testing - A Possible Breakthrough (~ 15 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Sv_pS8MgQ
At Home, Cheap, COVID-19 Tests with Results in 15 Minutes: How to Fix Testing with Dr. Michael Mina (~ 1 hr)
https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/covid-19-test-for-public...
I'm also a huge fan of this work and struggling to understand why it isn't more mainstream.
My internet is too flaky here at the moment to verify, but I believe this is the URL:
"That's a good business. It's zero times a number."
He wants more power. The Gates funded oral polio vaccine in India was a fucking disaster!
This is what giving away money is and what really makes a difference in people's lives: John Oliver buys and forgives $15m worth of medical debt [0].
Now, just imagine what a billionaire like Bill Gates could do. Actual material change in people's lives.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/06/john-oliver-...
Yes, he can pay off debt of we’ll say 1M Americans. Then he’s out of money and people are still getting sick. Now what?
$15mm probably isn’t enough to make big systemic changes to humanity and Oliver’s donation surely alleviated a lot of suffering and should be applauded. However, Gates has resources on a very different scale than $15mm.
Especially with billions to deploy to try to do some good in the world, it seems reasonable to me that someone would attempt a more ambitious plan that essentially tries to address the root cause of something rather than addressing symptoms.
Imagine if governments had the ability to silence certain "lies" throughout history, such as the planets revolving around the sun...or the Earth being round.
It sounds like Gates has a severe case of tunnel vision.
I'd like to understand more deeply why this is not happening.
Since WWII, the crises faced by the US have been small enough that American elites have been able to politically neutralize them with a combination of half-measures and concerted efforts to mold public opinion to shift blame onto disfavored groups, such as 'liberals,' urbanites, non-Christians, and/or non-Americans. Until COVID-19, it's seldom been politically necessary for America's elites to actually do something about America's crises as opposed to making sure that someone else takes the blame for them.
COVID-19 is different. It is a global-scale disaster that requires a competent national response and can't be politically neutralized because viruses aren't political actors. American elites, however, have no experience with this kind of crisis and have been unable to respond to it as anything but a political problem and, worse, as a source for graft. The results have been an abject failure in terms of lives lost, health lost, and economic damage.
(This is not a problem unique to the US. I have seen some comparative politics research that found a strong co-relation between poor national-level COVID-19 responses and the depth of internal political divisions. I speculate that highly divided societies make blame shifting by elites a favorable strategy for crisis response and erode the ability of elites to respond to real crises.)
* Most conspiracy nuts downvoted which is a relief. * Rehash of encryption. Totalitarianism versus anarchy. Seems to be 90% of the discussion * Attacks on Bill Gates suitability for interview by people in denial about what it means to be influential in society. * A few good mini threads about covid testing
(This comment is hidden on the second page so not feeling guilty about whining about discussion)
If you got connections to government, you can steal trade secrets from companies and enrich yourself and destroy the competition.
Destroy the lives of your political opponents by blackmailing.
Analyse and control the public sentiment to crush minorities.
I recommend you read a bit of stasi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Also Bill Gates wants full government control because he is practically within the circles of government, obviously he would benefit from such agreements, but same cannot be said for plebs.
Anyhow, even if people like Bill Gates might benefit from such undemocratic agreements, tide can always turn against them and this level of censorship and surveillance can be used against them even more effectively than that is currently used againsts plebeians.
Iraq clearly has weapons of mass destruction. Censor all communications claiming otherwise.
The American government is not performing mass surveillance on its citizens. James Clapper Confirmed this in a Congressional Hearing. Censor all communication claiming otherwise
South Korea's President is not being influenced by a cult leader. Censor all communication claiming otherwise
And countless other examples where government controlling communication would lead to censorship of topics that the general public MUST hear. One cannot make an informed decision without information.
"In late February, CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and was asked if healthy people should wear masks. “No,” Redfield responded. The day after that, US surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS.” Fauci himself, in early March, told a Senate committee that the general public didn’t need to wear them because Covid-19 wasn’t widespread enough."[1]
Regardless of opinions on how to respond to Covid, mismanagement by various institutions and media has been agonizing to see. I'm strongly against government paternalism and believe the vast amount of misinformation peddled by institutions many hold faith in led to conspiracy on the rise.
[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to...
Or told everyone to make them, like the Czech republic did?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/04/czech-gove...
turns out it makes no difference how many you crank out, what you lock down and when
the examples that we should do this or that are pointless,
everyone will run the same fate as Sweden, lots of cases, the epidemic runs it course, then it is over
Source: am Czech.
Government concerned about shortages + wasted N95 masks by untrained public -> recommendation against the public wearing masks -> additional evidence for airborne & asymptomatic transmission / opportunity to ramp mask production -> "I heard we recommended against the public wearing masks, so I guess we don't need to do that"
To be fair, there are tons of valid reasons not to allocate scarce masks to the general public (economic panic, inability to properly fit test, inability to properly wear, no decon procedures or facilities, likelihood of proximity to Covid-positive patient). But unfortunately, it seems like the actual rationale (and suggestions it would have for subsequent action) got lost in the simplification, even on the government itself.
I think people can handle the truth. When you lie, you might temporarily achieve your objective, but you're sacrificing your ability to achieve any of your objectives in the future. Now I don't trust the WHO because of this, and I'll be less inclined to take them seriously.
I disagree. Look what happened when to toilet paper, which was less scarce and less important than PPE.
The other is plenty of countries in SE Asia with high rates of mask usage seem to have done well overall so it doesn’t seem to hurt. Anyway information changes do advice changes, that doesn’t mean these people are untrustworthy. Surely if they weren’t prepared to change advice as circumstances changed, that would be even more concerning. What matters is the reasons and context for the change.
It might seem obvious that surgical masks help, but there are a few reasons that people thought they might not:
1. Surgical masks let lots of unfiltered air in.
2. People might feel a false sense of security with masks, which could make them harmful.
3. People might touch their faces more when wearing masks.
Research like the paper I mentioned above, as well as the realization that asymptomatic and presymptomatic people play a large role in spreading the virus convinced the scientific community that widespread wearing of surgical masks is helpful. But blaming institutions for not knowing the right answer early on seems very unfair to me.
So Gates is against encryption because of CP but flew on epsteins Lolita Express in 2013, years after Epstein was a convicted child molester. He also has numerous other connections to both Maxwell and Epstein.
I mean knowing what i know about him before his "billionare philantropist PR project" of rockerfellian dimensions i was already sceptical but this is getting out of hand.
Listening to Gates talking about since makes the irony of it biting. Excel, the software designed under his watch keeps destroying scientific results, to the point gene names had to be renamed.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Not to mention how Windows did all possible to hamstring Linux for decades, setting back science for god knows how long.
thanks Bill.
Make sure you warm up before making a stretch like this, folks.
He's against encryption for the commoners, the 99.999% of people not part of the transnational elite, who as we've seen in the Epstein case can fly around and do more or less what they want with both people and money because of connections to "intelligence".
I find it somewhat uncomfortable Posting a comment that might seem pro rich, and he did initially get away with minimal penalties, but you didn’t exactly pick the poster boy for Unlimited impunity.
If people are interested go to the Epstein subreddit take deep dive - most likely it was a classic honeypot operation to blackmail high ranking politicians for political gain or for some industrial complex - not a lone wolf with a back story that makes no sense in isolation, suddenly getting rich without anyone knowing why.
[https://www.newsweek.com/alex-acosta-epstein-sex-trafficking...] "back off he's intelligence".
The conspiracy theorists turn to one another and remark, “This goes even higher than we thought”
I personally find it interesting like i find the Snowden revelations interesting, or the Wikileaks implications or geopolitics in general.
I started majoring in history before going into tech so i don't personally find any of these "conspiracies" fringe or stupid seen in a historical context of for example US intelligence organisations throughout the 20's century - obviously non organic campaigns like qAnon is something completely different but this info is from classic journalism.
But i can see that those top-down campaigns has really turned people away from even the slightest deviation of the "official narrative" now, so well, qAnon and other psyops really are working - there is only the mainstream, and the idiots left.
... yes ...
\sarcasm on
let's have some people decide what lies are, and once we define that, make it illegal to encrypt these lies,
teach a lesson to these lie-encrypting bastards
Based on his talks of: Worldwide chip tracking of disease. Destroying encryption worldwide.
I say that it quotations, because i do not believe it is the governments place nor right, to make public, crucial medical data about individuals. In a perfect system, without breaches of security, sure, but that is not the real world.
Also I don't believe dangerous people should have all sort of rights to privacy. We already ask pedos to introduce themselves to neighbours (at least in movies), why shouldn't same apply for deadly viruses? I guess this forum is frequented by too many Californians where knowingly giving someone AIDS is not a crime anymore.
Gates, smiling, replying "You think COVID is bad? Let me tell you about when got hit by Slammer!"
I still strongly resent his company's business practices from the 1980s through the 2000s, and arguably to the present.
And yes, the irony of the world's leading enabler of electronic viruses being a leading authority and defender against biological viruses ... is not lost on me.
I'll take my microchip in space grey please.
These people don't know how the technology works, but they do know that we tag and track animals. They're not wrong that we use microchips in this fashion.
I have some close friends that subscribe to such theories and no amount of tech discussion will convince them otherwise.
People will believe what they want :/
Against how our govt handled covid:
>> The irony is that this is a president who is a vaccine skeptic. Every meeting I have with him he is like, “Hey, I don’t know about vaccines, and you have to meet with this guy Robert Kennedy Jr. who hates vaccines and spreads crazy stuff about them.”
>> Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.
Against encryption/free speech:
>> The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
re: tiktok acquisition
>> But yes, it’s a poison chalice. Being big in the social media business is no simple game, like the encryption issue.
To be fair, there aren’t many governments ‘handling’ Covid in anything like a manner that has been good.
His foundation seeks to create "viable markets" for vaccines and the original name for his foundation was "The Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control."
I don't trust anything that piece of garbage says. I swear he's gotten worse the older he gets and no one remembers all the anti-competitive shit he pulled to get where he is.
Poisoned chalice my ass. He should know. His entire fucking life and legacy is a poisoned chalice.
He's not a superhero, but it's definitely better to devote your capital to helping others rather than simply accruing more.
For everyone else, it is not and never was called "The Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control."
There does exist the "Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health", which has a fantastic mission.
Sources: - https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=%22The%20Bill%20and... - https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=%22The%20Bill%20and...
Like, where to start? Somebody save this one before the edits.
And although the current US government is pretty bad, Microsoft should buy their own social media platform which is being otherwise kneecapped for political reasons.
The remark about the Congress was cringey. Haha, let's laugh with the convicted monopolist about the good ol days.
As I read it, he explicitly said that he didn't think that MS should buy TikTok.
But then he starts demonizing encryption, which requires logic that's nearly as unsound as antivaxism.
Harmful positions are even more dangerous, when they're espoused by people who doing otherwise good work (and being attacked for that good work).
edit: I'm an idiot, I should have read the post, I thought this was about something else Bill Gates had said. Still, my point stands, though the tests are definitely mostly garbage.