This reminds me of software developer who favor deep, technical, architectural work instead of attractive, "sounds cool on paper" sort of work.
To an outsider, the animations look cool but the engine that drives the animation is cooler to software engineers.
Point being, this is not something a normal philanthropist would imagine being cool and awesome. This takes someone who actually cares about shit (in this case literally) to invest time and money into it.
One thing I always thought fascinating about Gates was his candid relationship with feces.
mindfuplay’s comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0].
But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]:
>If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
>Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.
He also mentions he wrote about toilets before in a 2012 article titled “Reflections on the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.”[2]
Digging deeper into that article brought me to a PDF from the Gates Foundation outlining grants from their 2011 program: “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” [3]
Bill Gates is an amazing example of a driven, ambitious (and when called for by his ambition, ruthless) person and how those traits can lead to startlingly different perceptions of him based on what they are applied to.
Bill Gates the businessman was ruthless in his pursuit of dominating the markets he was in, and was largely successful, to many people's dismay.
Bill Gates the philanthropist is doggedly persistent in identifying and working towards fixing some of the major problems human-kind faces, and he's an actual hero to millions (me included, at this point).
The same person, with the same attitude and drive, just applied to a different goal. I think that's amazing.
Which is somewhat interesting, because a common criticism of the Gates Foundation I encounter in the field is that they are a little enamored with gadgets and "sexy" targets.
There are also companies designing "smart toilets" to understand the gut microbiome and changes in it for the user, e.g. https://www.ted.com/speakers/jun_wang
As an African, I can't help but think that all this charity to Africa might be contributing to us lagging behind in the world. With charities helping out so much, will the local government ever get their act together and provide these functions of public sanitation like they are supposed to? Or will they keep stealing public health funds in the knowledge that charity will always swoop down to save the day?
Charities work with the premise of preventing suffering, but most developed countries can point to a "great suffering" that made them quickly turn their shit around, akin to an addict hitting rock bottom. I would liken charity in Africa to the enabler who always features in morbidly obese people's lives, constantly bringing the person food out of a misplaced sense of love, where perhaps the truly loving thing to do would be to let the person hit rock bottom and change themselves.
We don't know if these systems will get better without external interference either. Another post on this page talks about fixing systematic corruption within African countries as being more helpful, but that's a hard problem also.
One solution I could think of is a foreign investor investing a lot of money into the campaign of a candidate who isn't corrupt. The caveat of that solution is the perspective that it would be foreign intervention in the political matters of a separate sovereign entity, thus generating discourse among natives.
Another solution is to raise money to raise political awareness, and use that money for programs that get natives to understand the differing positions of candidates (and towards the infrastructure for voting itself).
BUT it's a lot easier to focus on the immediate relief of general ailments such as life threatening diseases, and proper utilities to make the lives of the general public easier. This way natives of poorer countries won't have to worry about things we take for granted in the west, and can spend their time focusing on the systematic issues that caused those time consuming problems in the first place.
My line of thought in a way aligns with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Before one can begin worrying about psychological needs, one must have their basic needs met.
Many politicians the world around would characterize government handouts the same way, government enabling morbid obesity. And yet, is there some fundamental objection you have to educating women or providing mosquito nets? Dying to malaria does not seem a good rock-bottom to let people hit, if we can provide them cheap nets.
> most developed countries can point to a "great suffering" that made them quickly turn their shit around, akin to an addict hitting rock bottom.
It's an interesting ethical question on paper, but I bet it's one you wouldn't bother to ask if it were you dying from cholera, "for the greater good". In any case, only the living can hit rock bottom, so I salute the humanitarian effort going into saving lives.
There is something to this. Was it Ethiopia that (at some point) instituted a no-NGOs-on-mondays type policy, after realising that all their ministers seemed to do was have meetings with the many aid organisations? (No link, sorry.) From memory such organisations contributed something like half the government budget, but all with their own concerns & priorities & need for visible success back home.
More generally, I think it's a pattern that governments which have to collect taxes from the masses need their consent, and thus tend to behave better, than governments which do not. Whether the non-tax income is from oil money or foreign aid, it probably has some similar effects.
"Charities work with the premise of preventing suffering, but most developed countries can point to a "great suffering" that made them quickly turn their shit around, akin to an addict hitting rock bottom. I would liken charity in Africa to the enabler who always features in morbidly obese people's lives, constantly bringing the person food out of a misplaced sense of love, where perhaps the truly loving thing to do would be to let the person hit rock bottom and change themselves."
Coming back from rock bottom isn't something I would read into the history of developed countries. And I don't know what rock bottom is, it seems like things can get unacceptably bad, and stay that way. Is famine rock bottom? Genocide? Child armies? The hole is too deep, you don't want to go there.
A cycle of incremental improvement from within seems like a better bet. But some of the critique remains: external support does not build up self-directed incremental improvement.
Where in Africa are things going well? Where have people found and created their own prosperity? Their own stable, peaceful civic structures? I entirely believe these places exist! But I have no idea where, because all the discussion is about what's going wrong, and the focus is on where things are the worst. But the answers aren't there. And I think you are right, charity can feed the dysfunction.
I admire Gates a lot, but for him and way too many technophiles the answer is somehow always tech.
Africa does not have a toilet problem. Or a tech problem. Or even a resources problem. They have a lack of intelligent social organization problem; i.e. dysfunctional or non-existent institutions, laws and organizational structures, as well as myriad forms of corruption from top to bottom that make it impossible to create the systems that would otherwise keep them healthy, sanitary, safe, well-fed yada yada.
Maybe he could publicly ask, how every year, the Minister of Finance in Nigeria publishes a note indicating there is somehow billions of dollars missing from the coffers, that didn't make it over from the Ministry of Petro Resources, i.e Oil [1]? Or the like. Tackling the more obvious, glaring wide-open 'in our faces but we ignore anyhow' forms of corruption might be a good start, and would ultimately yield a lot more than functional toilets.
That's super callous and cynical. "Some African governments are corrupt so don't do anything." Deaths from malaria in Africa fell from 800,000 per year in 2000 to 400,000 per year today because of the introduction of affordable mosquito nets. That fact alone refutes your entire arguement.
He/we can't even solve the corruption/political issues in our own country, yet you suggest that he solve all of the corruption/political issues in all of the countries with public health issues.
Much more direct to affect change via the private business route. It makes sense his foundation has stayed apolitical.
It's indeed true that the problem is not caused by a lack of technology. Some places became much more sanitary, safe, well-fed on a much lower technological level.
But a more positive take would be that perhaps better tech offers a way to improve people's lives despite other disfunction.
London had pretty amazing communications 150 years ago, letters delivered 4-5 times a day to any of a million people. This machine took an enormous amount of human capital to run — thousands of literate & honest postmen, for a start. Today we can deliver a better outcome with much less input — just a few guys who know how to set up a cellphone base station. This doesn’t fix the dysfunction, but does offer many benefits.
While I agree with you, and have actually thought about this same problem a ton, this seems dangerous to try and change as an individual rather than a fellow government.
Additionally, removing corrupt officials will just create a power vacuum, and oftentimes officials will become corrupt over the course of their term. I forget the political science terminology, but there's this issue where someone will only be able to take over in a dictatorship if they have the backing of many others, who, unsurprisingly, want more out of them than they get from the current official. So the end result is that nearly always, the new official will be more corrupt, particularly in destitute autocracies and oligarchies where the general public's opinions are either irrelevant or uninformed.
So while, yes, the corruption will throw wrenches into all our efforts, is there a solution to it? Or do we just have to throw enough resources to account for the corruption, and hope that an educated society with better infrastructure can start fighting the corruption problem themselves?
The toilet he want to create are waterless its very important also to the africans but not at least for the large but often expensive cities that are going to grow over the next decades.
He is on of the few that actually do look for problems around him and solve them.
One of the things Gates' money pays for is Guinea Worm Eradication.
Guinea Worm is literally a parasitic worm. The eradication programme isn't about injecting people with a vaccination, building modern water treatment plants or deploying sophisticated drone technology, it's stuff like:
- Here are some free water filters. Filter the water from that murky pond before you drink it.
- When you have a worm, don't go in the water. Yes it feels cooler, that's because the worm wants you to go to the water, go to a free treatment clinic instead.
- If your neighbour has a worm, go to the clinic, tell them who the neighbour is, you both get cash money and the clinic will treat the worm. Hooray.
The biggest obstacles to Guinea Worm Eradication are not about Africa's lack of technology or its corruption.
The big obstacles are "insecurity" (ie civil wars or just violent criminals who control outlying areas) and "inaccessibility".
Inaccessibility is hard to comprehend for most of us, we're not used to truly being far from civilisation. People who live two days walk from anything resembling a road may have only heard rumours of the existence of the Guinea Worm clinics - for them a parasitic worm chewing its way out of your leg is just a routine hazard of normal rural living.
But yeah, Gates is already investing in the very lowest technology fixes, he isn't some tech nutjob who thinks we're going to solve desperate poverty with a Docker image.
As an African I am with you on Africa's true problems. From the article though it seems Gates isn't just looking for a solution for Africa. He is looking at his from a humanity perspective. We aren't getting the most from our sewage. There are some low tech toilet designs that work relatively well in Africa. The Blair Toilet[0] being one.
He could well as, but I expect nobody would be much surprised over the answer: as you say, the problem of corruption is well known and merely exposing it again won't do much.
Tough if he secretly bought out a few accounting agencies and published all documents of the illicit money transfers going on that could probably have an effect as it makes the laundering harder.
hastily searches brain for a contrived intuition pump
In "Star Trek: The Next Generation", Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge does not have a tech problem. He has a lack-of-properly-functioning-eyes problem.
It's been solved with technology, though.
In this case, maybe technology will enable people to create a sanitary environment even in the face of impediments from the state.
Sure, there's corruption in developing countries. You think Gates doesn't know that? The option in face of that is to do jack shit or make tech that can help.
Africa (and the world at large) has lots of problems. Some are technical and some are political. Just focusing on one issue means missing out on opportunities to improve people's lives in other ways.
There are already a lot of organizations working on governance -- maybe it's best if tech people focus on tech problems and let the governance people work on governance problems?
It many not be cool and glamorous but dealing with human waste in a hygienic way has been one of the biggest benefits to society that not many people think about. Better toilets means better overall hygiene which means less people sick which means a stronger more reliable workforce and less money wasted on easy to prevent illnesses.
For all of the negative things Bill Gates did when at Microsoft I am glad to see most of the money he made from those actions are being used for such positive things now rather than just going back into SV startups and the like.
Okay, I'll bite. I was at a urinal today that had a mesh screen of a style I'd never noticed, and I thought: Some guy with a degree in engineering/fluid dynamics has this on his resume.
But when you consider there are what, 3.5 billion or so males on the planet, the benefits of urinal hygiene add up pretty quickly.
I've always wondered why we never really saw toilets in Star Trek. They never really could re-imagine them back then (or now).
I have several fully automatic Totos (which have to abide by California/US water usage rules).. and while the bidets, seat heating, and automisting (it sprays water every 15-30 seconds to try to keep the bowl clean) features are nice the water limits and bowl design make it a pain to clean and maintain if you get what I mean. It's also basically useless if theres no electricity, I believe you can manually flush once if the power goes out with a pull-cord. For western/developed countries I think there is still a big market for a better toilet.
In developing countries obviously infrastructure is an issue, but for sewage would a composting toilet not be a viable option? Maybe solar powered for some higher power exhaust and ventilation along with water treatment/sanitation. It's kind of the low tech version of how Star Trek would turn matter into energy.
TOTO has been researching and improving toilets for many years. I've been to their Toilet museum in Kitakyushu, Japan and it's just amazing the research they put into it, specially in water savings measures. What's missing for them, it's to make them more affordable to everyone.
Shit article. Basically it says, Gates has poured money into sanitation, and went to an expo.
No info about the technology, but there is mention of 5cents a day running cost. That's cheaper than my existing provider, so count me in.
Closing quotes were good.
“I never imagined that I’d know so much about poop,” Gates said in remarks prepared for the Beijing event. “And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table.”
Toilets are a great example of how technological progress isn't just endless improvement. Sometimes we hit complete dead ends even on the simplest problems.
I read the headline and thought, "That's weird, Gates isn't really interested in things that just save money these days." And sure enough, from the article:
> "...may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases..."
So I guess that's Bloomberg for you. 233 billion dollars is a way more interesting lede than a mere half a million lives.
I have to ask: the results of this research are amazing, but isn't this something that we should all realize is of material importance? Why did it take the funding of a benevolent economic dictator?
If you question my assertion of his economic role, this podcast [1] goes into the questionable aspects of the philanthropy of the Gates Foundation and some of the experiments being run in Africa without popular democratic input or consent.
>> contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells
Journalists can't grasp that saying a rotavirus is a cell is like stretching a wrench to be a SUV? What kind of twisted education system can get somebody to become so proficient with words and so noob in basic science?
Toilet Day was recognized by UN in 2013 and is celebrated on November 19th. I guess this report was issued in preparation.
UN still doesn’t recognize International Men’s Day, which is on Nov 19 too and celebrated since 2003 [1]. It’s a bit of a humiliation that they put Toilet Day instead.
Gates does wonderful things with his philanthropy. I notice that he doesn't invest in any social issues or in politics, even when the politics is directly related (e.g., does he lobby the politicians or try to move the public regarding education funding?). Why not? Is it a policy?
Prior generations of philanthropists invested heavily in peace and justice, for example, including the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Certainly our society today has major problems in those areas - arguably we have great success with tech, which he does invest in, and have been terrible and social and political issues. Also, those problems in some ways directly harm Gates' goals (for example, U.S. political and racial issues greatly affect U.S. education), in other ways they lead to policies, such as nationalist economics, that will reduce economic activity and thus investment in these issues, and in yet in other ways the problems impose costs on people that dwarf the benefits Gates' programs provide - the oppression of Western-backed dictators and the cost of potential warfare being among them.
I realize I've assumed it's a policy of Gates', but does anyone have real knowledge about why he avoids those issues?
I recommend The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. The definitive guide to humanure composting, and the best reference for general composting I've read.
The Gates Foundation focuses on real problems and how they can be implemented in the real world to actually solve things that work with the environment, economy and culture symbiotically as opposed to paying for porta-potties and drop shipping them. Knowing how to solve something is the point over blind action that has minimal chance of success. For me, this is the charity worth giving to if you must pick one.
Since I recently read The Expanse, I keep thinking, more than usual, about the basic life supporting technologies we'd need to be able to live anywhere else in the solar system.
In The Expanse all biological waste goes into the recycler, which, evidently, feeds a bioreactor to general clean water and new food.
It sounds like what Gates is keen to see deployed: Human waste > fertiliser > new food and hydrogen > fuel cell > energy & water.
We're still a long waste from having anything anywhere near a closed system. Baby steps.
Most people don’t think about all the factors of waste disposal. 200,000,000/100,000/7 = 285 educated peoples’ salary for 7 years. Now thow in expenses. Doesn’t seem excessive given the multitude of issues. What’s the full disposal story? Throw in expenses and my response is “... and?”
As a SF homeless guy who frequently tweets about my hardships with pooping/water/grossness, I welcome toilet innovation like this.
[+] [-] mindfulplay|7 years ago|reply
To an outsider, the animations look cool but the engine that drives the animation is cooler to software engineers.
Point being, this is not something a normal philanthropist would imagine being cool and awesome. This takes someone who actually cares about shit (in this case literally) to invest time and money into it.
[+] [-] docbrown|7 years ago|reply
mindfuplay’s comment reminded me of the famous glass of shit water Gates drank from his Omniprocessor project [0].
But within that 2015 article, Gates mentions a long term plan for seweage and shit[1]:
>If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.
>Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.
He also mentions he wrote about toilets before in a 2012 article titled “Reflections on the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.”[2]
Digging deeper into that article brought me to a PDF from the Gates Foundation outlining grants from their 2011 program: “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” [3]
————
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVzppWSIFU0
[1]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Omniprocessor-From-Po...
[2]:https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Reflections-on-the-Re...
[3]:https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/wsh-reinvent-the-...
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
Bill Gates the businessman was ruthless in his pursuit of dominating the markets he was in, and was largely successful, to many people's dismay.
Bill Gates the philanthropist is doggedly persistent in identifying and working towards fixing some of the major problems human-kind faces, and he's an actual hero to millions (me included, at this point).
The same person, with the same attitude and drive, just applied to a different goal. I think that's amazing.
[+] [-] Fomite|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achileas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] conner_bw|7 years ago|reply
And the mining capabilities of the graphics hardware is cooler to cryptocurrency investors.
Full circle?
[+] [-] majani|7 years ago|reply
Charities work with the premise of preventing suffering, but most developed countries can point to a "great suffering" that made them quickly turn their shit around, akin to an addict hitting rock bottom. I would liken charity in Africa to the enabler who always features in morbidly obese people's lives, constantly bringing the person food out of a misplaced sense of love, where perhaps the truly loving thing to do would be to let the person hit rock bottom and change themselves.
[+] [-] derangedHorse|7 years ago|reply
One solution I could think of is a foreign investor investing a lot of money into the campaign of a candidate who isn't corrupt. The caveat of that solution is the perspective that it would be foreign intervention in the political matters of a separate sovereign entity, thus generating discourse among natives.
Another solution is to raise money to raise political awareness, and use that money for programs that get natives to understand the differing positions of candidates (and towards the infrastructure for voting itself).
BUT it's a lot easier to focus on the immediate relief of general ailments such as life threatening diseases, and proper utilities to make the lives of the general public easier. This way natives of poorer countries won't have to worry about things we take for granted in the west, and can spend their time focusing on the systematic issues that caused those time consuming problems in the first place.
My line of thought in a way aligns with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Before one can begin worrying about psychological needs, one must have their basic needs met.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sangnoir|7 years ago|reply
It's an interesting ethical question on paper, but I bet it's one you wouldn't bother to ask if it were you dying from cholera, "for the greater good". In any case, only the living can hit rock bottom, so I salute the humanitarian effort going into saving lives.
[+] [-] iguy|7 years ago|reply
More generally, I think it's a pattern that governments which have to collect taxes from the masses need their consent, and thus tend to behave better, than governments which do not. Whether the non-tax income is from oil money or foreign aid, it probably has some similar effects.
[+] [-] srtjstjsj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianbicking|7 years ago|reply
Coming back from rock bottom isn't something I would read into the history of developed countries. And I don't know what rock bottom is, it seems like things can get unacceptably bad, and stay that way. Is famine rock bottom? Genocide? Child armies? The hole is too deep, you don't want to go there.
A cycle of incremental improvement from within seems like a better bet. But some of the critique remains: external support does not build up self-directed incremental improvement.
Where in Africa are things going well? Where have people found and created their own prosperity? Their own stable, peaceful civic structures? I entirely believe these places exist! But I have no idea where, because all the discussion is about what's going wrong, and the focus is on where things are the worst. But the answers aren't there. And I think you are right, charity can feed the dysfunction.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pokemongoaway|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] slim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
Africa does not have a toilet problem. Or a tech problem. Or even a resources problem. They have a lack of intelligent social organization problem; i.e. dysfunctional or non-existent institutions, laws and organizational structures, as well as myriad forms of corruption from top to bottom that make it impossible to create the systems that would otherwise keep them healthy, sanitary, safe, well-fed yada yada.
Maybe he could publicly ask, how every year, the Minister of Finance in Nigeria publishes a note indicating there is somehow billions of dollars missing from the coffers, that didn't make it over from the Ministry of Petro Resources, i.e Oil [1]? Or the like. Tackling the more obvious, glaring wide-open 'in our faces but we ignore anyhow' forms of corruption might be a good start, and would ultimately yield a lot more than functional toilets.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/ni...
[+] [-] OnlineCourage|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesec|7 years ago|reply
Much more direct to affect change via the private business route. It makes sense his foundation has stayed apolitical.
[+] [-] iguy|7 years ago|reply
But a more positive take would be that perhaps better tech offers a way to improve people's lives despite other disfunction.
London had pretty amazing communications 150 years ago, letters delivered 4-5 times a day to any of a million people. This machine took an enormous amount of human capital to run — thousands of literate & honest postmen, for a start. Today we can deliver a better outcome with much less input — just a few guys who know how to set up a cellphone base station. This doesn’t fix the dysfunction, but does offer many benefits.
[+] [-] alehul|7 years ago|reply
Additionally, removing corrupt officials will just create a power vacuum, and oftentimes officials will become corrupt over the course of their term. I forget the political science terminology, but there's this issue where someone will only be able to take over in a dictatorship if they have the backing of many others, who, unsurprisingly, want more out of them than they get from the current official. So the end result is that nearly always, the new official will be more corrupt, particularly in destitute autocracies and oligarchies where the general public's opinions are either irrelevant or uninformed.
So while, yes, the corruption will throw wrenches into all our efforts, is there a solution to it? Or do we just have to throw enough resources to account for the corruption, and hope that an educated society with better infrastructure can start fighting the corruption problem themselves?
[+] [-] ThomPete|7 years ago|reply
He is on of the few that actually do look for problems around him and solve them.
[+] [-] tialaramex|7 years ago|reply
Guinea Worm is literally a parasitic worm. The eradication programme isn't about injecting people with a vaccination, building modern water treatment plants or deploying sophisticated drone technology, it's stuff like:
- Here are some free water filters. Filter the water from that murky pond before you drink it.
- When you have a worm, don't go in the water. Yes it feels cooler, that's because the worm wants you to go to the water, go to a free treatment clinic instead.
- If your neighbour has a worm, go to the clinic, tell them who the neighbour is, you both get cash money and the clinic will treat the worm. Hooray.
The biggest obstacles to Guinea Worm Eradication are not about Africa's lack of technology or its corruption.
The big obstacles are "insecurity" (ie civil wars or just violent criminals who control outlying areas) and "inaccessibility".
Inaccessibility is hard to comprehend for most of us, we're not used to truly being far from civilisation. People who live two days walk from anything resembling a road may have only heard rumours of the existence of the Guinea Worm clinics - for them a parasitic worm chewing its way out of your leg is just a routine hazard of normal rural living.
But yeah, Gates is already investing in the very lowest technology fixes, he isn't some tech nutjob who thinks we're going to solve desperate poverty with a Docker image.
[+] [-] mmsimanga|7 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blair_toilet
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|7 years ago|reply
Tough if he secretly bought out a few accounting agencies and published all documents of the illicit money transfers going on that could probably have an effect as it makes the laundering harder.
[+] [-] mac01021|7 years ago|reply
In "Star Trek: The Next Generation", Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge does not have a tech problem. He has a lack-of-properly-functioning-eyes problem.
It's been solved with technology, though.
In this case, maybe technology will enable people to create a sanitary environment even in the face of impediments from the state.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
And you work with the political system you have not the one you would like.
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyeinthepyramid|7 years ago|reply
There are already a lot of organizations working on governance -- maybe it's best if tech people focus on tech problems and let the governance people work on governance problems?
[+] [-] goto11|7 years ago|reply
But these problems are much harder to solve than toilets and malaria nets, which is difficult enough as it is.
[+] [-] aglavine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sswaner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satysin|7 years ago|reply
For all of the negative things Bill Gates did when at Microsoft I am glad to see most of the money he made from those actions are being used for such positive things now rather than just going back into SV startups and the like.
[+] [-] Bulkington|7 years ago|reply
But when you consider there are what, 3.5 billion or so males on the planet, the benefits of urinal hygiene add up pretty quickly.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/urinal-splashback-...
[+] [-] manav|7 years ago|reply
I have several fully automatic Totos (which have to abide by California/US water usage rules).. and while the bidets, seat heating, and automisting (it sprays water every 15-30 seconds to try to keep the bowl clean) features are nice the water limits and bowl design make it a pain to clean and maintain if you get what I mean. It's also basically useless if theres no electricity, I believe you can manually flush once if the power goes out with a pull-cord. For western/developed countries I think there is still a big market for a better toilet.
In developing countries obviously infrastructure is an issue, but for sewage would a composting toilet not be a viable option? Maybe solar powered for some higher power exhaust and ventilation along with water treatment/sanitation. It's kind of the low tech version of how Star Trek would turn matter into energy.
[+] [-] zukunftsalick|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keypress|7 years ago|reply
No info about the technology, but there is mention of 5cents a day running cost. That's cheaper than my existing provider, so count me in.
Closing quotes were good.
“I never imagined that I’d know so much about poop,” Gates said in remarks prepared for the Beijing event. “And I definitely never thought that Melinda would have to tell me to stop talking about toilets and fecal sludge at the dinner table.”
Bypass the article.
[+] [-] Jedi72|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|7 years ago|reply
> "...may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases..."
So I guess that's Bloomberg for you. 233 billion dollars is a way more interesting lede than a mere half a million lives.
[+] [-] charlysl|7 years ago|reply
https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/10/01/5-things-mahatma-ga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swachh_Bharat_mission
[+] [-] phot0n|7 years ago|reply
If you question my assertion of his economic role, this podcast [1] goes into the questionable aspects of the philanthropy of the Gates Foundation and some of the experiments being run in Africa without popular democratic input or consent.
[1] https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-46-the-not-so-be...
[+] [-] dsign|7 years ago|reply
Journalists can't grasp that saying a rotavirus is a cell is like stretching a wrench to be a SUV? What kind of twisted education system can get somebody to become so proficient with words and so noob in basic science?
[+] [-] alexis_fr|7 years ago|reply
UN still doesn’t recognize International Men’s Day, which is on Nov 19 too and celebrated since 2003 [1]. It’s a bit of a humiliation that they put Toilet Day instead.
[1] http://internationalmensday.com
[+] [-] seibelj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
Prior generations of philanthropists invested heavily in peace and justice, for example, including the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Certainly our society today has major problems in those areas - arguably we have great success with tech, which he does invest in, and have been terrible and social and political issues. Also, those problems in some ways directly harm Gates' goals (for example, U.S. political and racial issues greatly affect U.S. education), in other ways they lead to policies, such as nationalist economics, that will reduce economic activity and thus investment in these issues, and in yet in other ways the problems impose costs on people that dwarf the benefits Gates' programs provide - the oppression of Western-backed dictators and the cost of potential warfare being among them.
I realize I've assumed it's a policy of Gates', but does anyone have real knowledge about why he avoids those issues?
[+] [-] black6|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|7 years ago|reply
In The Expanse all biological waste goes into the recycler, which, evidently, feeds a bioreactor to general clean water and new food.
It sounds like what Gates is keen to see deployed: Human waste > fertiliser > new food and hydrogen > fuel cell > energy & water.
We're still a long waste from having anything anywhere near a closed system. Baby steps.
[+] [-] harlanji|7 years ago|reply
As a SF homeless guy who frequently tweets about my hardships with pooping/water/grossness, I welcome toilet innovation like this.