Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage Bill Gates has announced his marriage has suffered a BSoD – the Blue Screen of Divorce – after 27 years with his partner Melinda. "After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have decided to end our marriage," Gates said in a statement. "Over the last 27 years we have raised three incredible …
@macjules
We evolved from apes? Did we really?
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution
And the app only reminds you to wash your hands for 20 seconds when it detects you are actually washing you hands. Perhaps you would prefer people to wash their hands for a second or 2 and maybe spread the virus?
"And the app only reminds you to wash your hands for 20 seconds when it detects you are actually washing you hands."
If that is the sort of thing you need to be reminded of, when you are actually doing the thing you are being reminded about - then you do truly need all the help you can get.
I don't have a problem with the time as such, it's the "well done" shite in all its forms that comes afterwards.
I'm not an American, I don't need compliments from an appliance. That comes from the same source as f*ckwit designers putting beepers in washing machines and microwaves that then continue to bleep every minute until you switch them off. For a microwave, OK, maybe the fist two minutes as a warning that things might be hot (although that too is 'duh' level stupid) but then continue to beep?
Anyone who comes up with ideas like that ought to be shipped to a desert island with only a spork for company.
"[...] maybe the fist two minutes as a warning that things might be hot [...]"
It's the opposite. If you don't register the "finished" beeps when multi-tasking - then whatever is in the microwave can cool to the point of needing reheating. Another reminder at least once soon after will be useful.
It's like the doorbell - the first ring that interrupts your concentration is a "was that the bell?" moment. A repeat assures you it is. The human alarm cognition seems to be geared to needing a repeat to grab your undivided attention.
This announcement follows on the same day that Warren Buffett names Greg Abel as his replacement as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Guess that would leave him more time to disperse both his fortune and also that which he has been entrusted with, including that of Bill and Melinda Gates...
Can we just drop the 'philanthropist' from all of journalism, please? Not just for Bill Gates, for all of them? Who decides who is a 'friend of humans'? The rich guy? Are others not 'friends of humans'? It's become a self-appraisal-mechanism of the ultra-rich who can afford to pay PR-companies to soup up their image. And, yes, this also applies to the other great self-appointed philanthropist of our time, George Soros. Guardian readers may shudder at even the thought.
I think committing to, and following through with, giving away most of their (not inconsiderable) financial wealth is as close as we are likely to see to philanthropy is the modern greed and celebrity culture we inhabit.
Of course it’s relatively easy to give away the vast majority when even the small minority that is left is a fortune that would be hard for anyone to spend faster than it accrued interest.
I'd be the last one to thank Gates for the atrocities he's perpetrated on the world of computing but absolute fair play to him for the work he's done since he left Microshaft. I don't know what you've got against the word "philanthropist" (apart from it being hard to spell) but it seems to me to be a pretty good term for someone with millions in the bank who is trying to spend it to improve the lot of their fellows rather than just spaffing it on yachts and Bolivian marching powder.
Society isn't improved by transferring money by itself. It can be improved by things working more/more efficiently, and getting more done. It's more of a vote on what you want more of.
Giving away money to ___ is paying for there to be more ___ than not ___ things. [Insert a group* (of people, etc...) to fill in the ___.] Is more ___ in society what you want? Note: Leaving money in bank is paying for more bank.
Actually working and being productive is what improves society.
*examples: Blacks, Whites, Asians, Disabled, Sick, Healthy, Poor, Wealthy, Robotic, etc...
:( I can think of interpretations of this that I didn't mean, not sure how to say it better right now.
Giving away money to research and treatment for polio is paying for there to be less polio. If you've ever known anyone who had polio (I am just old enough to remember people who had had it, in the UK, my mother remembers people actually getting it) you will certainly agree that 'less polio' improves society.
He's not "trying to improve the world". The foundation (a) does not draw from their own wealth but rather from the proceeds of an endowment they settled on it years ago, it's a major investment fund that contributes to a lot of the problems it claims to fix by participating in the very financial processes that cause poverty in the global south, and (b) is, in reality, the method by which he influences world politics. It's very much his way or the highway. As an example, trying to eliminate diseases like malaria involves, by definition, putting resources into wholly extinguishing it in areas where it's already scarce, which is the least efficient way to actually save lives - but if you are a poor African nation either you send your money in that.very inefficient way and help Gates with his ego-driven goal of ending malaria, or you don't get access to some of the wealth that he made selling software that ran on computers whose owners could only afford them because the minerals were all-but-stolen from poor African countries.
He's also much admired for spending on education but there's been at least one instance of him saying he knows how to educate better than the experts, so this poor nation has to implement his educational plan if they want to get the money, then several years later, much money spent by the country he was helping (remember, he's not just telling them how to spend the grant, which would be bad enough, but also how they need to spend their own money if they want the grant) and millions of children "educated", the whole thing was quietly abandoned when it was discovered that no, coding a few pieces of software 40 years ago then abusing various financial regulations to amass so much wealth that you personally could end world hunger and it wouldn't affect your standard of living at all does not in fact equip you to know better than the experts how to educate a nation's children.
And sure, maybe it's better than if he kept it all. If someone only killed one person it'd be better than if they killed ten. This is not how he "helps the world". It's how he uses a small fraction of his wealth that has been set aside in an investment fund for years now (afaik he hasn't settled any further endowments on the foundation since establishing it) to exercise global influence and launder his reputation. The simple fact of one person having tens or hundreds of billions of dollars is wholly indefensible, especially in a world with looming climate disaster and widespread poverty, and doubly so when the wealth of these goons comes from the brutal extractive economic relationships that Gates and people like him have fostered with the global south and that are largely responsible for the problems he claims to be fixing.
It's all even more morally bankrupt than the already extremely shady and disturbing nature of his rise to prominence. There's a couple of rather good episodes of the citations needed podcast that is fully researched and goes into the disturbing nature of billionaire philanthropy and the way it's one big sham that both benefits the philanthropists, reinforces the systems that enrich them and extract wealth from the global south, and is a way for the ultra wealthy to exercise political control.
Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire: Bill Gates and Western Media https://player.fm/1sMMSS
Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire, Part II - Bill Gates in Africa https://player.fm/1sSLJe
Well, first of all stop with the linguistic fundamentalism already. Words mean what people collectively decide they mean, not what they once meant in some other language. Wikipedia has 'Philanthropy consists of "private initiatives, for the public good, focusing on quality of life". [...] A person who practices philanthropy is a philanthropist.', and I think that's a fine definition of the term.
So, are Bill & Melinda Gates philanthropists? Although, as someone else pointed out simply giving away money isn't sufficient to do good, it is necessary. If, say, you want to deal with uncontrolled population increase you really do need to spend a lot of money on both contraception and education (or you could start a cult which preaches that sex is bad, which also costs a huge amount of money and we also tried this for a little while and it doesn't work). Or you could spend it on sofas, in which case you'd not be a philanthropist at all.
So, well, are they giving away a lot of money in absolute terms? Yes. Are they giving away a higher proportion of their wealth than most people? Yes. Is that money being used effectively? Well, I'll take almost eliminating polio, working hard on malaria and all the other stuff the foundation does, so yes again.
Does that make them philanthropists? Yes, it does. Does it make you, or I, not philanthropists? No. We just don't get articles written about us.
"Are they giving away a higher proportion of their wealth than most people? Yes"
That's not necessarily a good measure (though it is an easy one). You could easily say that they are not sacrificing anything to give that money away, there is simply no way to spend it fast enough.
Not to ignore the spectacular amount of good they are doing for the world (see my previous post), but it's far easier to give 50% of a million pound annual income than it is to give 50% of a ten thousand pound annual income, simply because you need to eat, and that costs some finite amount of money, and there are limits to how high that amount can reasonably be, but there is relatively little wriggle room when you are already eating economically.
That sounds more like the amount spent by the foundation, which isn't just a bank account he transfers money into - it's an investment fund.
So first it invests in the stock market, which given the state of the world economy is driven by extractive relations with the poor countries and populations he claims to be helping, then it spends the proceeds of that investment on laundering Bill's reputation and bullying those poor people into spending their money the way he says is best. I believe the actual endowment was on the order of hundreds of millions, at a time when he was worth tens of billions.
Even if he had given away 45b directly, it still wouldn't in the least affect his standard of living. He hasn't earned that money, no one can, it's a ridiculous amount to be owned by one family and it's absolutely crazy that we collectively allow certain individuals to enjoy so much wealth that they could end world hunger forever without even noticing a change in their personal standard of living rather than taking that excess - you know, leaving them with that level of money beyond which their lifestyle is utterly unaffected - and say, ending world hunger. Or trying to save the literal billions of people who are currently endangered by climate change.
But no, all that wealth is theirs because they were the bastards who were greedy and rapacious and unscrupulous enough to exploit, extract, cheat and murder-by-degrees their way to tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth. It's fucking revolting, it's backed up by nothing more or less than everyone agreeing that they can have all that simply because they say it's theirs, and it's going to kill billions. The fact that they are willing to condescend to spend a small fraction of their wealth to make themselves look good and treat the poorer parts of the world like their own personal plaything isn't actually especially admirable. All this extreme wealth in the hands of a few billionaires is the very reason for much of the poverty they claim to fight, anyway.
The Gates' have given about $36 billion into the endowment. Which is a very significant fraction of their personal wealth. Warren Buffet has also contributed about $30 billion to it.
The foundation has spent about $55 billion on it's various projects, and has about $40 billion in assets.
We can debate whether people owning tens of billions of dollars is a good thing or not (I tend to think the existence of billionaires suggests your economy doesn't work right, for much the same reason large pools of stagnant water collecting in our house means that your plumbing isn't working right), but regardless of what it says about society as a whole, there's little doubt that the Gates have given a lot of money to it, and that it has done a great deal of good in combatting several extremely awful diseases.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded"
Well seems Melinda can finally get sole custody of Bob..Bill gets Clippy, Bill also has indicated he doesn't want visitation rights for Bob.
BvB
ps: Rumor has it there is a land fill in Hanford WA, that contains all the unsold copies of Bob. EPA spokesman predict they will remain radioactive for the next million years or so..
I divorced 25 years ago and the fall out is still badly affecting us, especially the kids.
Although I did not like how he went about business I will remain tight lipped and not make flippant comments about their divorce - they are entitled to a private life.
All that I will say is to wish them the best, hoping for as little emotional bruising as possible.
I would not wish divorce on my worst enemy.
I've been through a few breakups and you sir are Correct.
It's Rough.
Separating, bazillions or not in play it's personalities.
I live in Redmond. I can walk to Xadadu2 [Bellevue not Redmond] for kicks before the sun goes down.
I'm actually stunned.
Breakups suck and I... Wish both of them Well.
People grow and move.... Ideally Forward.
Bill and I have been a few rounds in business, internet, etc. Came to my desk at WiReD to apologize (with a security team to keep me from beating him with a 2x4)
Dunno what his home situation is. It's really none of our business.
I walk by the Foundation at least once a month. I take the bus to Seattle and pass their home.
People are folk and like the test of us have Issues.
I was in LA when Arnie got busted for screwing the maid.
*Sigh*
People are people and we fuck up and are stupid.
This seems a pleasant disconnect.
No scandal! That's new.
Yep. Been there, done that. Long drawn out divorce due to limited finances - just left things in abeyance and half finished for far too long, but it worked out OK in the end. We can still talk without tearing holes, not that that was my style anyway which is in part why the marriage broke down. Tried to minimise the amount of asset lost in the "friction" of fitting sandpaper lawyers to the process. Still lost in excess of £5k from the kitty on legal expenses. Didn't cost that much to get married in the first place!
Well you know, they're not all bad. I also went through a divorce: I didn't want to do it, I didn't instigate it and it pretty-much destroyed me at the time. But since then, my world has improved immeasurably and I honestly think it was one of the most positive changes in my whole life. You just gotta get the f*ck on with doing your thing.
That Windows OS is NOT a piece of crap software --- LINUX is a piece of obtuse unusable CRAP-load of coding bilge! And I've got over a 100+ OS'es to play around here with and I like Windows 10 Enterprise and NextStep the best in terms of speed and ability to get things done!
For command line work, VAX VMS just kills everything else even today in 2021!
For the Esoteric stuff I still even like GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) on the old ATARI ST machines! AWESOME OS and Also IBM's WARP4 (I still run that one at home for my fancy older gear!)
---
Anyways, in terms of Bill and Melinda Gates relationship, ANYBODY who has a few billion dollars will be pulled, left, right and centre from all parts of the world and by MANY corporate agencies and media enterprises which will strain and damage almost EVERY marriage!
The ONLY reason guys get married anyways is to get some kids on a legitimate basis.
Once the hot and sexy robots that look like "Number Six" (aka Tricia Helfer actress playing female human-looking CYLON robot on Battlestar Galactica Reimagined), humanity is TOAST cuz many if not most nerdy and beta guys will go for the hot sexbots. Mating with a hottie and REALISTIC looking/acting bot will be every wet dream of the average nerd and beta guy. Even a built-in artificial womb is not out of the question for the "Hot Bots". I give humanity another 20 years before A.I. and realistic human-looking and passable feeling robotics becomes easy enough to build that a $10,000 USD price point is probably where the market will explode!
I have to say this, but when that happens, many if not MOST women will be relegated to buying their own male sexbots or just have to make do without human males as sex and/or life partners!
CHEAP and Super-Sexy A.I. robots are humanity's DOOOOOOOOM !!!!!!!
v
"The ONLY reason guys get married anyways is to get some kids on a legitimate basis."
I wouldn't presume to know how all men work if I were you. If humankind were so simple that they could be described in a sentence or two, life would be a hell of a lot easier.
To counter your specific point, I know of many men who are married and yet have no children (by their own choice). I also know of many people who have had children without being married (some in stable relationships, some not).
The guy is just a founder of a company who sells a piece of crap os and some other software.
If Windows is 'a piece of crap os' what do you call a 'competing' os that has failed to usurp it in its primary market place?
"In the area of desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft Windows is the most commonly installed OS, at approximately between 77% and 87.8% globally. Apple's macOS accounts for approximately 9.6–13%, Google's Chrome OS is up to 6% (in the US) and other Linux distributions are at around 2%"
A 'piece of crap' has nearly 90% of the market, Linux has 8%. The job of an OS is to provide services and it's clear that Windows is providing services to far, far, far more people than Linux. Measure by what it achieves not what your friends in the ivory tower think.
Even in the server market Windows still has a very healthy share and is continuing to give Linux a run for its money despite Linux being (sort of) free and Windows very much not.
It's only really the mobile market where Windows could be said to have failed.
There are many, many things wrong with Windows. It gets up my nose every day (that and Visual Studio) and Linux is technically superior. But calling Windows 'a piece of crap' is silly and demonstrably wrong. Operating systems and software exist to do a job and it's obvious that Windows and its software stack has been doing the job well enough to remain a dominant force.
"A 'piece of crap' has nearly 90% of the market, Linux has 8%."
Which is not surprising after decades of strong-arming manufacturers to pre-load it onto just about every PC on the planet except for Macs. Even a laptop bought without Windows comes with an un-activated copy of Windows on it.
By your argument a diet of burgers and Coke must be one of the best humanity could subsist on.
Don't confuse heavy marketing with excellence of product.
Well, some of the behaviors of Microsoft are significant reasons why Windows is the dominant desktop OS.
Quite often, it is not the OS itself that is the reason for desktop deployment, but the required applications that run on the OS.
Microsoft have made it difficult or impossible for Linux on the desktop to take off by having a stranglehold on Office Application, email servers (not clients), and some other highly influential applications.
You may counter that Office365 is a way that Microsoft is relaxing their control, but the recent shift in default fonts is likely to extend their dominance of making Windows the best choice of desktop OS, by making documents appear different when written/viewed on other OSes. And I think that the recent move to include the ability of Windows to run Linux binaries is a cynical move to undermine Linux both in server and on the desktop.
I have been using Linux as my daily OS of choice for over 10 years now, relegating Windows to being fired up when there is no other way of doing things (for example, updating the firmware on some devices is a Windows only operation, or interacting with some of my work clients systems), but I can use web based mail clients, and I don't exchange that many complex documents with other people. It is possible, but somethines Windows just cannot be avoided.
You're quoting the stats in the same way people quote benchmarks. While the numbers are probably correct most people stopped thinking about laptop's and desktops a decade ago.
A significant amount of what businesses do these days are done on phones, tablets and servers. The phone and tablets are iOS and Android. If yo ulook at the server side of things most places quote 85-93% are Linux.
If you switch to education you can add chromebooks to the mix with 50-60% of the market.
Yes Windows is is most corporate locations but that is primarily driven by Word, Excel and Outlook which have to run on Windows. Yes there are OSX ports, but they are often at feature parity with the previous version.
It matters a great deal to millions of people in the third world.
The B & M G foundation has been extraordinarily effective compared with government aid programs and most NGOs.
Eradicating polio and hopefully doing the same for malaria save thousands of lives and gives millions of people a chance to escape poverty and lead healthy productive lives.
The OS just gets crappier -- but hey people still buy it.
At the February 2016 rollout for SpaceShipTwo in Mojave, a reporter asked Branson about Virgin Galactic’s longer-term ambitions. Branson said that flying people to space was “pretty cool”, but, “Once you’ve got people into space, why shouldn’t we have point-to-point travel at tremendous speeds? And why shouldn’t we go on creating an orbital vehicle? We will start to do that. I just had a meeting with a senator, talking about asteroids. And they asked, ‘Can Virgin Galactic come up with ideas to try to remove giant asteroids coming toward the Earth?’ We’ll have a look at that. And, ‘Could Virgin Galactic help sort out the debris in space?’ We’ll have a look at that, too. And once all that’s sorted we’d like to join the race for deep-space exploration.”
27 years is an astonishing run. I go into that excruciating mindlessly-congratulatory mode when I come across those who've spent the greater part with the same partner, though its not quite as insipid as celebrating people for still being alive or 'royal'. Subconsciously I'm sure its because I couldn't do it.
I - and the kind I (and they) fall for - want the affair, not the marriage. The whole point, of the whole thing, is raising kids; and that is typically how long marriages last - to which one might add that evolutionarily-speaking the kids are 'raised' when they're old enough raise their own. There's a silly little phase that shows us we really are organic machines directed by hormones to the extent of being unable to live without someone a few years on we'll wonder what we saw in - though the fucking was good! - then the cohabiting stage that, never having succeeded at, would be a bit rich for me to prognosticate on. But its probably about the ability to compromise. Just as there are some women who don't bond with their offspring, there are we dysfunctional types who can't seem to compromise enough to complete the process that's the only thing we're here for.
Maybe its laudable to have made at least one other person happy - to not be entirely selfish; to do 'good'. And a woman doesn't have to have children: there's no shortage of cats in need of sublimation!
Anyway it seems 'love' lasts about the no. of years required to raise the kids to nest-leaving time, and beyond that couples stay together because they're used to each other; which might be construed as having been worn down to timidity/ being in a rut, and actually its an act of wisdom to amicably separate, to 'move on' without the justification of manufactured hate. I would fall in love with someone who could do that, to be that centered.
And perhaps the greatest good is equitable redistribution of wealth; which requires that first you get it. I'm typing this in Windows 8.1, which with Classic Shell, Ribbon Disabler, and a reg file to remove the NameSpace entries handy, is an acceptable Windows 7 replacement, and is gratifyingly solid enough that I can do such a long post without half-expecting it to crash and lose it. How Bill Gates' Microsoft got here is questionable only in the sense that American business is questionable, in a nation that has always looked like the more successful legitimization of Organized Crime (having dethroned the British Empire) - although China may be taking the No.1 spot now. I have wished for him to speak out against Windows 10 and supposed that his silence implied being content with the money still rolling in; but even the el Reg commentariat has Windows 10 apologists, so maybe even that serves the wealth redistribution greater good?
Well, real life is shades of grey. But if splitting up after 27 years is traumatic it's because change is, but done right its refreshing, and these two obvious humanitarians look like they're doing it right. Something else I've no experience of is being a billionaire, but I'm sure its a great teacher if you're willing to learn.
Also its a refreshing way to join the 27 club.
Let's boil it down:
1. He's like a cat-encumbered, recycled-fabric-wrapped old woman on the brink of dotage, which sounds like dot Net's aftermath.
2. She's maxed out on marry-ugly-but-rich, having gotten fat, bitchier, and, after Mrs. Bezos's bailing, prone to impatient watch-gazing.
3. Their litter didn't produce any tycoons, Einsteins, or contagious family warmth.
4. Apparently out of a sense of duty (read: avoiding minors/money legal entanglements), the marriage was prolonged just long enough to see the offspring to the threshold of adulthood.
Finally, let's make the connection so far unstated, by asking: Why is Calibri coincidentally being replaced just now?
"The Enquirer" math:
1. "Calibri" was imposed in 2007, as a sudden, unnecessary, crap replacement for Times New Roman.
2. Why that odd name? "Calibri" = "Cr" + "alibi"...a shortening of "crap alibi." Bill's penance and reminder of an indiscretion.
3. Now that the duo is splitting, "Calibri" is just as quickly going away.
You're welcome.
"Let's boil it down"
That's not boiling it down, that's burning it to the bottom of the pan, scraping it up, throwing in a bunch of irrelevant and ageing ingredients from the fridge to try and cover the mess you made, burning it again, then throwing it inaccurately into a bowl and shoving it out the serving hatch.
I dislike the description of the split of the Bezos family wealth as a 'settlement'.
They married. They agreed to share everything. When they divorced, they agreed to split what they'd previous shared. Technically his share of that split was a higher 'settlement' than hers, so describing hers as a record is wrong even if you don't look at anybody else's divorce.
Whatever the split agreed by the Gates (or their appointed legal representatives) it won't be a settlement. It'll be a split of family assets.
As for amicable, it's very possible that they've been planning this for a few years and waiting for their youngest to reach adulthood before disrupting the family. That may mean it is indeed amicable, or conversely it may mean that one of them has been waiting to avoid child support costs before ditching the other.
We'll probably never know. I'm fine with that.
I don't know about Washington State, US; but in England we had this thing called the Married Women's Property Act in 1882 which recognised that married women could own property in their own right separately from the marital assets. That law didn't apply in Scotland, because they already recognised this concept. So certainly in England, if you have a situation where money or other assets that were formerly in the name of the ex-husband go to the ex-wife, it is a settlement and not a split. It can go the other way as well of course, but that is far less common.
Some geek has made billions legally , married an intelligent and beautiful woman then raised kids with a sense of humour ('Sadly it did NOT implant my genius father into my brain.'). Then they together donated massive amounts of money and skill (otherwise like with our foreign aid the princes would just buy nicer cars while their people starve) to solving the worlds problems. That needs respect.
Solving Polio, Malaria, Sanitation , birth control, education, environmental issues what's not to like?
Good luck Mr & soon to be ex Mrs Gates hope it goes well!
All I can see is jealousy.
I started with DOS3 and windows 3.0 competing with Novell, SCO, AIX , OS2 , CPM etc. back in the early 90s Strangely windows won, Microsoft did bundle windows with many OEM PCs then, their competitors could have done it but preferred to charge a weeks wages per install instead .
Why did windows win? Because not only was it easier to use it also was much cheaper with NT3.51 you could have a server and workstation in one for the same cost as just a Novell license.
Think of it this way if Microsoft hadn't won and we had gone with UNIX every part of the O/S would be an extra and starting prices would be £1000 per desktop.
I remember Wordperfect and lotus 123 being market leaders Microsoft out developed them, Lotus Notes was crushed by a far easier but less technically advanced (at the time) Exchange.
FreeBSD would still have happened. The GNU Project and Linux would still have happened. And without Microsoft, one or both of them would be far more popular than they are at the moment. Windows is certainly not the market leader in the server space these days, though maybe it is in some specific server areas such as email.
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