Our priorities are also tilted by ecological phantoms. The West got rid of malaria with DDT and then a book was written that killed more people than the Holocaust. DDT is cheap and you can use it a few times and get rid of malaria. There´s no need for research, there´s a need for perspective. We used DDT; we didn´t kill off any bird species; we stopped using DDT and we still don´t have a problem. They could easily do this in Asia and Africa and leave male baldness to the marketplace. Bill really ought to advocate DDT instead of expensive research that seeks to substitute for the DDT miracle.

Another billionaire bashing capitalism.

*yawn*

i have got an idea, quit buying his micosft product and use the equivalent free stuff from google instead. then take that money a give it to charity.

gates is a mook. this is the same guy who squashed Netscape to get a monopoly in the internet browser market. he is arrogant for just being a software guy

I´m so tired of all these holier than thou folks. They think they can solve every problem by throwing money at it. God forbid they get their hands dirty.

That he supports Obama makes one wonder how he was bright enough to get so very rich.

So many diseases for so many decades have been researched. I´ve donated to some over the years but am starting to wonder if a real cure will be found or endlessly ´researched´.

Darwin (once again) speaks from the grave.

Unless we had a class of people who were really smart and could make all the hard decisions for us.....ya, let´s do that.

.....spit.

Government funding research brings us anthropological global warming scams...´nuff said.

#1: nailed it.

Sure glad I don´t use a windows machine.

Well, he´s mostly wrong about capitalism but a little bit right, and he´s right in that these diseases are a great target for his wealth, and I can´t knock that. There´s a "tragedy of the commons" that happens in capitalism, and would not happen in a "perfect world". The problem is we *do* have capitalism, and nobody is going to have a "perfect world", so the *real* alternatives to capitalism are all worse. Capitalism does tend to the short-term in the short-term, and we hope that this is beneficial in the long-term. For those who want to shoot right for the long-term, I give you - Solyndra!

Capitalism has already solved malaria once. Liberalism means we have to solve it yet again.

Funny, I don´t recall ever getting a free public copy of any Windows operating system or Office Suite. How can you take any person seriously after they made billions, who enjoys the fine luxuries we will never have and now thinks socialism will be better for us. When he and others like him give it all away to live like the 99%... Then we will start to hear you.

Ho hum...another day. ´He didn´t build that! Someone else built it. And to quote the ´wise latina´ don´t we throw enough money in the pot? Should we pitch in more?....(just paraphrasing here.)

Capitalism and the profit motive bring many excellent drugs.

Otherwise there is government funding and private funding.

If there is not a profit motive for a certain cure, then, yes, capitalism isn´t your avenue. So what. Capitalism can be defined by the profit motive. A tautology of sorts.

Easy for him to say when that ridiculous company of his puts out sub-standard products and charges the customers as though there is no tomorrow.

What a ridiculous statement for Bill Gates to make. Gates really needs to do a tad more research himself on the subject before he starts down THAT lefty road!

Perhaps he could begin by meeting Dr. Ben Carson and having a realistic conversation with this experienced, authentic medical & research expert and accomplished surgeon about the true merits of capitalism with regard to medical research and , indeed, the the entire health care system in Ameica.

Actually that´s just an ignorant statement. Both have the potential to make money and, in fact, #1 was correct, a resolution for the malaria-problem was found long ago but, as usual, liberals fouled that up. Why would anyone devote more research to find a cure for a problem like this when it´s clear the world really doesn´t care about it? If it did, we´d legalize DDT again and use it to deal with the mosquito, which would prevent malaria.

Pretentious horse´s hind end.

The political activist´s statement that comes to mind, ...´´It´s not WHAT you know, but what THINK you know,´´ does seem to be an important tool of the lfty/libs´ modus opperandi. How else to explain their outrageous comments?

CORRECTION: ´´...but what *THEY* THINK you know.´´

Dem pols employ this verbal trickery effectively in order to sound like an authorty when they know nothing about the subject.

Did he bring his jar of mosquitos to the podium and release them?

In Bill´s case he really didn´t build that, he stole it from Apple, made a few cosmetic changes and called it Windows - and he got away with it. His genius was his ability to sell crap to everyone and make them think they got something really great. I give Bill credit, but not for being a software genius.

Bill shows that just because you have a lot of money doesn´t mean you are smart.

Enlightening point...Bill Gates is a secular humanist.

This is coming from the guy who made millions from US customers but gives charity money outside of the US.

#1 My mother oiled the bed springs with DDT during spring cleaning to make sure we didn´t have bed bugs. She lived into her 90´s. It was cheap and effective.

#1 makes the enduring point. Gates´s tens of billions of dollars in tax sheltered earmarked charity money is, sorry to say, going to be mostly wasted (as are most foundation expenditures) because he and his buddy Warren Buffett, although among the greatest earners in history, are notoriously naïve on subjects outside their areas of expertise.

History will record that after DDT almost eradicated malaria by the early 1970s, Luddite environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote the book (Silent Spring, 1962) that started the movement that led to the banning of DDT in 1972 by Nixon´s fledgling EPA, and as a result some 110,000,000 human beings have died needlessly. The total count of malaria cases is about sixteen billion in the past forty years. Big Green´s death toll on malaria alone--never mind their genocidal efforts to keep cheap and affordable electricity from spreading to desperately poor countries--since 1972 is greater than all the battlfield deaths in the Twentieth Century, combined. If you think about it, that´s quite an accomplishment.

Junk Science´s Malaria Clock keeps a running total of the misery caused by the Green movement (link below). Read it and weep.

http://junksciencearchive.com/malaria_clock.html

Easy for Bill Gates to say. He has his billions. He made his billions on the backs of others. He truly is the 1 percent we should all hate.

Funny, he didn´t talk that way when employing quasi-legal actions to destroy his competion. Another liberal hypocrite billionaire.

What is Gates doing these days other than offering up ill-considered pronouncements?

Earth to Bill: If YOU think it is important, then spend YOUR money on it. Otherwise, SHUT UP.

I will spend MY money on problems that I think are important, without regard to your opinion, whatsoever.

If you disagree, my response is SO WHAT? Thank God, that you do NOT run the world, even though you think you should, you arrogant ass. Because you were able to make a bunch of money does not actually mean you are smarter than us.

Ah yes, the beauty of centralized planning: When people see a line formed on the sidewalk and get into it. Maybe it will be shoes, maybe milk, maybe meat. Who cares? The planners have botched the production of all three.

Screwd by the EPA and now they are looking for solutions. The DDT scare was declared a scam years ago, Why haven´t they been using it to save lives in Africa instead of buying nets. There is no cure for stupid.

Yes #24, he is also an avowed athiest, a condition that I equate with willful ignorance. I can accept an agnostic because nobody really know for sure. But at least agnostics admit that there is a possibility of a higher power and there may be more than what we see and feel. But to outright deny any possibilty of something you really don´t know is wilfull ignorance. It is to say that it is impossible even though there is no way to prove it. They might as well insist that gravity doesn´t exist.

AND ..he has an ugly house!!!!!!!!

He only does because his wife tells him he ought to do it.

Why does the media and some of the public assume that if someone has expertise in one field, that he has suddenly become an oracle of divine wisdom on other subjects. Just look at Obama:
a bitter Marxist Community Organizer and master politician who suddenly decides that he can run every aspect of Americans´ lives. Yep, just inflate those tires to their proper pressure and your problems will be over!

Hey Bill! Killing mosquitoes with DDT does the job! You must live under a rock!

Shut up Bill!!!

another rich socialist-in-words-only talking the talk but not walking the walk.

bill, give your entire fortune and live in a slum, then we´ll talk. until then, you are just trying to protect your immense wealth.

nothing is more pathetic than that.

He doesn´t spend his money. He has a charity setup as a tax haven. His net worth does not really go down.

There is more blood -- most of it that of African children -- on Rachel [unprintable epithet] Carson´s hands than there is on Josef Stalin´s.

With regard to attracting more kids to STEM majors, I would submit that the very technology that Gates has used to make his billions has done more to dumb down this country than anything else. So kids take majors like gender studies rather than engineering. All they become are good drone pilots. My wife and I never had a video game system in the house until our kids were in college. Then we bought a wii for exercise Our eldest daughter is graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering this spring. Parents - never fall into the temptation of buying a video game babysitter. Your kids will thank you later. It is called deferred gratification.

Heard Bill has Aspergers...now I believe it.

The only people who hate capitalism is the billionaires who made their $$$$ from capitalism....

So if Gates doesn´t like it, why doesn´t he donate some of his billions to malaria research? Hypocrit.

Nothing I could add. Great posts, all.

I suggest the millions he gave to the phony global warming hype should have gone to malaria research..

It´s made him a billionaire. If he chooses to donate to malaria research (or convince the freaking governments to start using DDT again!) then nothing is stopping him.

Without capitalism and a market driven economy, that choice is no longer available.

If you go to the www.grants.gov website and run searches for "baldness" and "hair loss" you may get results, but an examination of the grants includes none relating to baldness research, either for men or women. On the other hand, if you do a search for "malaria" you get results in the open grant opportunities database for over $200 million in taxpayer-funded grants. All of it goes to activities in other countries. If Bill is whining about how private companies spend their research dollars, he is overreaching. What other companies do with their research dollars is not his business.

It´s called liberty, free choice, free market, laissez-faire, among other things. It´s the way the world seems to work best. The Soviets tried another way - the central command economy, government by experts, committees and bureaucrats, top down priorities, quotas, 5 year plans, government goals etc. etc. etc. That sounded good on paper to a lot of people like Bill Gates. In practice, however, it did not work as advertised.

Far from being respected and listened to as oracles on matters of wide social, political and economic important, abnormal specimens like Gates, Bloomberg, Soros, Buffett and any number of other mega-rich plutocrats really should be regarded as impaired, unbalanced, out of touch idiot-savants possessed of highly specialized remarkable abilities in a single area. Like the blind creatures crawling across the ocean floor at immense depths, they are superbly adapted for a single function, that of making money in a free economy. Their opinions on anything and everything else ought to be regarded as worse than worthless. They are, or ought to be, the last people in the world anyone should consult for advice about matters beyond their extremely constricted ken.

The Gates Foundation claims to have given $3.4 billion to research on malaria. Since that´s money Gates made from capitalism, I´d say capitalism is working pretty well.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Malaria

Yup, now that he´s got his..... HYPOCRITE!

Socialism means gay marriage gets more attention than jobs. Bill Gates should have stayed with microsoft. I have no interest in Bill Gates telling the world how it should be ran.

Unfortunately, because of overuse of DDT, mosquitoes developed resistance. But it is being used effectively to fight malaria, mostly in South Africa.

WELL Billy, pay for it out of your own huge pockets if you think it´s a worthy endeavor...don´t just whine about it.

By the way, when is your company ever going to come out with a bug free product?

Do you have to be ugly to be a computer geek?