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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

"Paying penance after the fact doesn't excuse the original actions."

Wouldn't paying penance involve actually doing good in the world? So far as I can tell he's basically an overgrown man-child whose using his billions to basically enslave low-income minorities via school 'reforms'.

Plus he's made a lot of investments into technologies to help third world countries, which have mostly been a bust.

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Even if the malaria vaccine is the only thing that pans out, it would have been worth it: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/10/18/glaxosm...

I doubt the malaria vaccine will pan out, and even if it does I doubt it will be worth it. Because Bill Gates 'donated' millions of dollars to politicians he was able to kill open standards and open file formats. Because of this there are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of college-educated people whose entire jobs revolve around making things compatible with broken systems that were designed that way on purpose to make Bill Gates money.

The net loss to society from this is far greater than the value of whatever money Bill Gates is trying to throw around after the fact.

> The net loss to society from this is far greater than the value of whatever money Bill Gates is trying to throw around after the fact.

You present little data and much hand-waving to back that claim up.

Some programmers having to use Microsoft software is a bigger deal for society as a whole than saving the world's poorest people from malaria and polio?

That is a simply insane stance, if you really believe that.

No, I'm saying that if we had an extra million highly-educated people working on curing malaria then it would probably already be solved, instead of being maybe partially solved in another ten or fifteen years.

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