Current Jeff Bezos, $140 billion Bill Gates, $90 billion Warren Buffett, $84 billion Bernard Arnault, $72 billion Mark Zuckerberg, $71 billion Future Bill Gates, $90 billion Warren Buffett, $84 billion Bernard Arnault, $72 billion Mark Zuckerberg, $71 billion Jeff Bezos, $70 billion MacKenzie Bezos, $70 billion Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Bill Gates
“I Need to Pay Higher Taxes,” Says Bill Gates
If Bill Gates really believed that, he could decide how much he “should” pay, subtract what he’s required to pay, and send Uncle Sam a check for the difference. Which he doesn’t do. Gates was talking about taxes in the context of the recent tax bill not being progressive enough for his liking. “People who are wealthier tended to get dramatically more benefits than the middle class or those who are poor,” he said. Bill Gates is as smart as anyone I can think of, so I think his remarks are disingenuous rather than uninformed. People who are “wealthier” (“people with higher incomes” would be more accurate) benefit more from income tax cuts because they pay dramatically more in taxes to begin with (see chart). For example, the top 1 percent of earners pay almost as much into the federal income tax pool (38 percent) as the bottom 95 percent… Read more →
Every Form of Harassment is Okay — Except One
How did we decide that sexual harassment is the one category of workplace abuse, incidences of which require national outrage and loss of employment? Ideally, we would all have the prudence and restraint not to make sexual advances toward people over whose career we hold sway, but it happens. And yet we’ve all been harassed and ill-used in the workplace in other ways by someone more powerful, someone who negatively impacted our career by embarrassing us, intimidating us, undermining us, lying to us, lying about us, stealing the credit for our work . . . it goes on and on. Rarely do negative consequences accrue to the harasser. Steve Jobs, for example, was known for being abrasive, dismissive, shouting down colleagues, blaming others when things didn’t work out and occasionally wrapping himself in glory that rightly belonged elsewhere. Did this torpedo his career? Hardly. He’s an American icon. (In other… Read more →
Baldness vs. Malaria
Why is there so much more research done on baldness than on malaria? Because rich people go bald, and they don’t die of malaria. — Bill Gates Read more →
Common Core Testing
A colleague posted this on the office discussion board: OK. So a good friend of mine teaches Math in our Middle School and we’re constantly talking about the various standardized tests that we subject our kids too (he currently has my 7th grade daughter for Intermediate Algebra). The students are taking ForeSight tests this week. Sort of a practice for the PSSA tests later in the year. This morning he texted me a math problem from the 7th grade ForeSight test and asked if I could solve it. So I solved it using simple amortization, but none of the possible answers match (or are close to) my solution. So I went online to solve it and got the same solution that I got by hand. Anyone care to take a crack at this problem – a typical example of a 7th grade standardized test math question? PS. My teacher friend… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
If you don’t know me and I don’t know you, don’t call me up and shout, “Hey Paul! It’s Zach Flack with Equity Staffing!” as though I might have been sitting by the phone thinking “Wouldn’t it be a little slice of heaven if I got a call from Zach Flack over at Equity Staffing?” If I don’t know you, but I might recognize your name, then possibly some heightened level of emotion is warranted, e.g., “Hey Paul! It’s Bill Gates with Microsoft!” or “Hey Paul! It’s Pope Francis at the Vatican!” Otherwise, tone it down and stop annoying people. Read more →
Bill Gates: Playing Bridge and Doing the Dishes
From a Bill Gates AMA on Reddit: Read more →
He Said, She Said
I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers, but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful. — Chris Anderson Kudos to @TEDChris for making TED an unsafe haven for all! You’re a barnacle of mediocrity on Bill Gates’ asshole. — Sarah Silverman Read more →
Twitter: 2009-11-12
RT @mashable Bill Gates’ Plan for Fixing the World http://bit.ly/4ABw03 # RT @SarahKSilverman: Sometimes when I'm by myself I say out loud, "BarTHelona" & giggle at that lispy accent they have. ah shit, I have fun. # RT @capricecrane: They say a lie gets around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Why the truth is pantsless, no one ever says. # User Story Mapping: modeling user stories for effective understanding of your system and planning incremental releases: http://bit.ly/1LQ17h # If my office gets one degree colder I'm going home… # Read more →
The Stupidest Thing
[Bill] Gates quickly became legendary for telling people that their idea was the stupidest he’d ever heard — so much so that [VP Paul] Maritz would assure them not to worry, “because they weren’t going to hold the record for long.” In an interview last week, Gates feigned disagreement when it was pointed out that he would often spice up the phrase with an expletive. “No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “Literally, I do say, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Some people think I add some other word in there, but I don’t — usually.” — seattlepi.com Read more →
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of
Serial Entrepreneur — I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” What the heck is the difference between an entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur? I suppose Bill Gates is an entrepreneur and e.e. cummings’ Uncle Sol was a serial entrepreneur — farmer, chicken farmer, skunk farmer, worm farmer. Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.” News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet. Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.” Read more →
Online Map Shootout
The competitors: Windows Live Search, Yahoo! and Google. I was looking at some really nice maps of Washington, DC, last night on Live Search. I’m not totally up to speed on the latest advances in mapping technology, so I wondered if Live Search had totally leapfrogged the competition with this stuff, or if I could do the same thing on the other map sites. Here’s what I found: This is the best view I could get of the Jefferson Memorial on Yahoo! Google is able to zoom in quite a bit closer. But Live Search can do this! Thank you, Bill Gates! The killer feature (obviously) is that Live Search gives you an oblique view into the scene, instead of just a flat, looking-straight-down view. Plus the image resolution is a lot better. Final Ranking: Live Search Google Yahoo! Read more →
What Has Steve Jobs Done With His Money?
Bill Gates and the Microsoft crowd have been very prominent in charitable circles, saving Africans from disease, etc. By contrast, a Google search for “Steve Jobs charity” or “Steve Jobs donation” turns up nothing except an article on how Apple bought him a $90 million Gulfstream bizjet. So… if Steve Jobs doesn’t give money to charity and doesn’t pay for his own jet, is he doing something interesting with his $billions? — Philip Greenspun Read more →
Into the Digital Abyss
The Globe and Mail reports that a “small but determined group of computer geeks [is] trying to translate open-source software into African languages, in an effort to reach the continent most isolated by the digital divide.” Read more →
Like Father, Like Son?
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So [Bill] Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation’s industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad. — The New York Times, “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” My brother is a doctor. He doesn’t encourage his kids to go into medicine though, because he’s incredibly frustrated by the fact that you go to school for 20 years to learn something, only to have clerks from insurance companies decide if a procedure you’ve recommended is or is not “medically necessary.” I’ve worked in computing for 20 years. I don’t push my kid to get into it because during that time, it’s become less and less… Read more →