@cstross I wouldn't put anything past Epstein, but Gates has given enough evidence of somewhat-benevolent intentions that I'd at least _consider_ the possibility that he just picked a very bad way of saying "how do we get rid of _poverty_?".

I too would like a world in which there are no poor people, provided we can get there by making the currently-poor people not-poor and stopping new people becoming poor, rather than killing existing poor people and preventing anyone being born who might turn out poor.

(Of course there might be elements of both. It could be that Gates genuinely wants to eliminate poverty but some bit of his brain wants to do it because poor people are an untidy nuisance rather than to benefit those people, and sometimes that leaks out into his words, and all that could be true even if he wouldn't ever actually go for mass murder as the, er, final solution to the problem of poverty.)

Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

@gjm @cstross

Gates is personally, actively evil on a scale seldom seen. He's responsible of millions of deaths during the pandemic, and the sequestering of lots of pharmaceutical advances that used to be freely discussed between research laboratories.

Willing to kill every poor person aligns perfectly with his history.

@gjm @cstross

found it: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

@gjm @cstross

more recent ref: "In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs."

@gjm @cstross

... "And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates personally intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine"