[ale] Bill Gates interview NYT

[Jim Kinney]

The Windup Girl won a Hugo. It was about the takeover of essentially all
food production by huge corps making patented crops.

Nice questions. Old Bill needs to squirm.

-- 
James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain


*http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
<http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>*

On Tue, May 20, 2025, 2:53 PM lollipopman691 via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> I am sending this to the New York Times re the latest Sunday Magazine,
> which features a softball interview with mr. Bill Gates..
>
>
> David Wallace Wells
> New York Times Magazine
> letters at nytimes.com
>
> Your interview with Bill Gates in this week's New York Times magazine
> was filled with softball questions. It avoided the real difficulties
> with Mr. Gates's contributions both to software and to charity.  I am
> quite sure you're familiar with Mr. Gates' famous letter to hobbyists (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ). Here are
> some questions I would've been more interested in having answered.
>
>    * Who gets to make vaccines for the third world?  You are on    record
> saying that COVID vaccines should remain proprietary, with royalties going
> to the biggest drug companies in the world. How do you feel now about
> malaria drugs, or filariasis drugs?
>
>    * Unlike hybrid plants, GMO seeds can be made to breed true. Should
> third-world farmers pay royalties to the first-world companies who develop
> those seeds after the first crop is in?  Are
> those companies within their rights to engineer genetic traps into GMO
> seeds which will prevent farmers from planting seeds saved from their own
> crops? Are they within their rights to engineer seeds which require
> tailored chemicals available only from them to germinate or to grow?
>
>    * When local-language artificial intelligence tools lie to
> ("hallucinate") farmers or businessmen about best practices and those
> people lose their livelihoods or savings, who pays? Does anyone?
>
> Sadly, none of these questions made it into the interview.
>
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