Is there anything left to ask Bill Gates? (Other than gissus a million?) One of the things about being the world's richest man and also one of the most famous is that people tend to be interested in the minutiae of your life and in just about every thought you express. And so it is, with him recently hitting his 60th birthday, we are forced to ask: is there anything left to ask Bill Gates? On …
One does not make tea with teabags. Period. And no milk. However, if one insists on being British, then I agree that the milk definitely goes in first.
Yes, I'll certainly have a lot of minutiae to contribute about myself when I get to be interviewed like that about my life. Unfortunately I think I missed the boat - just realized Bill Gates is younger than I am. (And the first million is still nowhere in sight.)
Water first, milk used to have to go in first because of the poor quality porcelain we had - it would result in the cup cracking because (iirc) of the rapid temperature change. Those who were better off always had the hot water first because a) it makes a better cup of tea and b) they could afford good porcelain.
Of course I now have to drink my tea luke warm in a plastic cup from a Mars vending machine because we're not allowed kettles anymore at work. So feel my pain.
"Of course I now have to drink my tea luke warm in a plastic cup from a Mars vending machine because we're not allowed kettles anymore at work. So feel my pain."
Why are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spending money helping people in Africa when there are people right here suffering such inhuman conditions?!?
"Could you please convince the Microsoft brass to throw Windows 8 and Windows 10 in a sack, throw the sack in a safe, and hurl the safe into the sun? And could please convince Microsoft to make a Windows 11 that is exactly like Windows 7 -- complete with an Aero option, a proper backup, a working pre-boot F8 key*, and a customizable start menu organized into a hierarcy -- except with the performance enhancements of Windows 8 and nothing else? And when will Microsoft remove the 'no-right-to-sue' clause and 'Windows is licensed not owned' clause in the terms of the OS?"
*(Who ever thought disabling a pre-boot F8 key should be smacked hard in the head every day for the rest of his life. I have seen several Win8 machines go into a pre-boot BSOD loop and would never go into automatic repair. You couldn't get into the UEFI to boot to a DVD because the key to enter was disabled unless you were in the recovery console, which you could not get into unless you successfully booted, which it would not do because of a problem. Removing the hard drive did not suddenly allow me to get into the UEFI console either.)
"Eventually the software will understand what you should pay attention to by knowing the context and learning about your preferences."
It is wrong to expect software to "learn our preferences" in order to manage our lives. Doing so means expecting human intelligence to abandon the concept of oversight, responsibility and planning, and just handing the decision-making to somebody's code.
Instead, humans should learn to manage their stuff properly, to not frantically dive for the phone when they are already in face-to-face conversation with another human, and to LEAVE THE BLOODY THING ALONE when driving. That last point will, of course, be solved by self-driving cars - which means self-driving cars will become a reality given the massive amount of morons that simply cannot let go of their sexting tool.
With Pascal Monett, that is.
(And Wade Burchette as well, further above, for that matter.)
Since about 1994, with the introduction of the ill-fated Microsoft Bob, and then with Windows 95 and every subsequent version of Office, the hallmark of Microsoft products has been this ill-conceived aim to produce software that "ANTICIPATES users' wishes". (Emphasis added. I believe I am quoting Gates himself, exactly or nearly exactly, from an interview he gave to promote Bob.) Why not just produce software that OBEYS users' wishes, and makes it as easy as possible for users to CONVEY their wishes to the goddam software?
Unfortunately, the two goals appear to be at odds. I don't know whether this is intrinsic, but in EVERY implementation to date by Microsoft, at least, the software's efforts to divine our wishes before we are aware of them ourselves invariably get in the way, taking us farther away from what we want (at least temporarily), and interfering with our efforts to TELL the software what we want.
(Even something as seemingly small as the software's insistence on responding to the mouse's POSITION — instead of waiting for a damn CLICK — gets in the way of accurate and efficient communication from user to program.)
For all his undeniable genius, Bill has blind spots. He's still enamored of cartoon search dogs and talking paper clips as the wave of the future.
Evidently the thought that "I can write a program for that!" has persistently blinded him to the question of whether or not "that" — whatever it is — is a thing worth having software do in the first place. His and his company's efforts to make computers easier for people who have NO idea AT ALL what they are doing have consistently made computers HARDER to use for people who DO know what they are doing.
There's plenty to ask this wolf in sheep's clothing
https://vactruth.com/2014/10/05/bill-gates-vaccine-crimes/
Also is he working against humanity - see his investments in Monsanto - the most despised company on the planet
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto
When I worked for Microsoft years ago, I had several occasions to meet Bill Gates at after-presentation lunches, and such. At one lunch, I saw him standing in the middle of a circle of middle-management-to-peon (like me) people, answering questions, all of which were tech or tech industry related. I walked through the circle--no one was closer than about six feet to him--shook hands with Bill, and asked him how he was doing. We chatted for a moment, then I asked how his wife was doing (pregnant with his first), if they knew the sex of the baby, and that sort of thing. I could see him switch gears, and he smiled as he answered my admittedly-personal questions.
When I left him, I was inwardly pleased by the looks I got from the other people. Perhaps, like many others, they didn't really believe that Bill was human, with human feelings. Of course, they hadn't made much effort to find out...
I have a question I would love to ask Bill G. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be of interest to many others here besides myself. (At least unless Tim Worstall happens to browse the comment section of this article!)
My question in a nutshell:
Why does someone so good at and knowledgeable regarding economics and maths say such silly things about taxation? It's as if he knows nothing about the economics of taxation, or about general-equilibrium theory!
Long-winded explanatory background:
It is well and widely known that Gates is very good at maths, knows a lot of maths, and so on.
Somewhat less widely known is that he also has an interest in economics. He occasionally reads books on the subject to this day, and — together with his friend Steve Ballmer — took a graduate econ class at Harvard. (I've forgotten whether Gates was in his Freshman or Sophomore year at the time, and whether it was the introductory graduate Micro course or the Mathematical Economics course for grad students.) He and Ballmer were the only undergraduates in the course, skipped nearly all the classes, crammed together for the final exam, and ended up getting the two highest grades in the class! (Gates was numero uno, and Ballmer numero two-o.)
So why is he such a moron every time he holds forth publicly on the subject of taxation?
It's not just that he says things I happen to disagree with. He's perfectly entitled to do that. The problem that causes so much cognitive dissonance for me is that the reasons why the things he says are all nonsense all follow directly from the study of taxes in a general- rather than a partial-equilibrium framework — something he, of all people, should be eminently equipped to understand, and ought to be at least passingly familiar with.
Partial-equilibrium analysis is the study of equilibrium conditions in an individual market in isolation. General-equilibrium analysis is the study of equilibrium conditions for all markets simultaneously. It's much more complex, and therefore difficult, than partial-equilibrium analysis, but sometimes it's necessary, because interdependence effects across markets are too significant to be ignored.
Thus, for example, if you are studying tariffs or excise taxes, and you want to know the effect of raising or lowering the rate of tax applied to one particular good (e.g., wheat), you just have to know what rate of tax is being applied to substitute goods that compete with the good in question (e.g., rice). If those other goods are untaxed, then even a tiny increase in the rate of tax applied to the given good will drive consumers to the substitute, and the tax won't raise diddly-squat in revenue. But if all goods are taxed at the same rate, then the market's behavioral response will be very different.
Which is why general-equilibrium analysis is pretty-much universally employed by economists in the area of taxation, and has been ever since the seminal writings of Arnold Harberger starting approximately half a century ago.
Now, the employment of a general-equilibrium approach to the economics of taxation has lots of important implications, and I'm not going to punish anyone who's still reading by trying to go into them all here. But one obvious example is that estate taxes and income taxes cannot be looked at in isolation. Not only are they connected, but the estate tax is in fact simply a special form of income tax!
In modeling people's behavior over their lifetimes, it is common to treat them as having two motives to work, save and invest: They do it to obtain income they want to consume within their own lifetimes, or else they do it in order to accumulate wealth which they will then leave to their descendants (or whomever). The "bequest motive" is a common part of any analysis of people's responses to taxes over the course of their entire lifetimes. Two vital points come out of this:
(1) A tax on bequests reduces the incentive to earn income in the first place! If people know in advance they can't leave it to their kids anyway, why bust your ass to earn it in the first place? Work just hard enough to make what you plan to consume before you kick off, and then stop.
(2) A tax on bequests is a tax on income that has already been taxed! As such it is redundant, and therefore additive, and it typically tends to cause the cumulative rate of tax that ultimately is applied to income that is passed on to be far above revenue-maximizing levels. It's both unfair and an almost certain loser from a revenue-raising standpoint. Eliminate the estate tax and collections from all other taxes will go up over time, by more than the amount that is lost by no longer taxing inheritance.
With his background in maths and in general-equilibrium theory — one of the main topics in any course on mathematical economics — Bill Gates ought to understand all this. And yet he obviously doesn't!
His father has lobbied vigorously to have the federal estate tax in the United States not only preserved — in the face of efforts to abolish it — but increased sharply, and Bill has endorsed his father's efforts. Moreover, his close friend Warren Buffett also is opposed to leaving too much money to one's children, and he has influenced Gates as well. So on this topic, he is swayed by the non-economic views of his father and his current best friend, and all the economics he knows just goes out the window! What's up with that?
Perhaps perversely, and certainly idiosyncratically, that is what I would want to ask Bill Gates if I were to have the chance to meet him!
(Though I might strategically choose to discuss other topics of mutual interest first, in order to lay a foundation and establish a relationship before launching into my pet peeve.)
I'd also probably avoid calling him a "moron", and try to be at least mildly diplomatic in my choice of words. Salesmanship, after all!
(And I honestly believe he would be reachable, and happy to discuss the technical issues — including the many I had to gloss over in the interest of time and space.)
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