The Coronavirus Thread

This level of wealth is staggering. $43 million is 0.044% of his 2019 $96 billion net worth. Put another way, he can buy 2,232 mansions that cost $43 million each.

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems as though they've gone out of their way to be transparent. I learned all this in like ten minutes:

There are two entities: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The trust holds and manages the contributions that make up its endowment; proceeds from the trust's investments are transferred to the foundation for disbursement to the various grantees.

The trust is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett; it does not accept outside contributions.

The foundation does get a little bit of outside money. The overwhelming majority of its money comes from the trust, but there are around a dozen other family trusts that contribute a small amount (between $10,000 and $2,000,000 per year). All are listed in the foundation's tax returns.

The trust's investments are detailed in its 990-PF. For 2018, the ten-page list of investments starts on page 40: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/-/m...-BMGFT-Form-990-PF-For-Public-Disclosure.ashx

 

Cartoon with a little bit of inappropriate humor.

 

This is a little misleading. The USC california study that found the "1 in 20" statistic made great efforts to select people as randomly as possible to avoid selection biases and make sure their results were as generalizable as possible.

The new york study did not select randomly, however, but was a survey of grocery store shoppers, which probably would be representative of the population at large. I would take the study's results with a grain of salt and avoid generalizing statistics for new yorkers as a whole.

A quote from the article:

 

I even know the name of the official in the yellow suit

 

Probably can, yes. But in this case they again seem to be very transparent. They describe in their annual report where the money's going: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Media/Annual-Reports/Annual-Report-2018

And for more detail, they've also made public the database of their individual grants: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database

 

There's quite a bit of these types of "shenanigans" that arise out of a need to report certain public data to the IRS. So, shielding certain generous private business contributions from public disclosure becomes a full time job for CPAs and tax lawyers with little or no input from folks like Bill Gates. When someone like Charles Koch wants to fund something over at the Gates farm without the public/shareholders knowing, these organizational structures arise to satisfy public disclosure issues.

 

Same of these fake news are incredibly stupid like curing the virus with bleach and vodka.

 

The money just hit my account!! Finally!! Wooohooo!!

 

Even in such a heavy topic, a little humor will not hurt...

 

And why is that? We have heard the same about the Stanford study. It was just one. Now, the new results of antibody testing come every day.
The study in Germany as reported by CNBC showed that 15% of people in one heavily infected city had antibodies to CV, pretty close to NY. Interview on CNBC with the German prof from the University of Bonn who led the study:

And there is a bit about Bill Gates as well.

So both German and NY testing puts the mortality rate of CV in the same category as common flu. And there is something in this message that lots of politicians and people in the media are simply refusing to acknowledge. Why?

And how does it happen that every study, and at this point it is many, that confirms that the level of infections is by the order of magnitude higher than confirmed cases, and therefore the mortality rate is by the order of magnitude lower, is immediately scrutinized and downplayed? But bullshit estimates of death ratio based on confirmed cases are repeated 100 times every day.
The most important question is: why is so much energy invested in prolonging the shutdown and destroying lives of millions of people, and so little in finding a sensible, maybe dangerous but necessary, solution that would allow those millions of people to work again?
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Poor man. How about we all send him a nice little paper-clip picture, with the message, "It looks as if you are trying to give your wealth away, would you like help with that?"

 

My wife is a teacher and has already received her stim check. She hasn't lost a single dollar through the whole thing. My business is down 50% and I have no check, so go figure. A $1200 check wouldn't put a dent in the money that I've lost.

I have a golf buddy who is retired and quite comfortable financially. He got a check this week. In no way did he NEED free money. When I asked him what he planned to do with the money, he said he was buying some news rims for his Lexus...Porker.

 

I'm not going to make it any worse, but I want to say that microwave radiation is not useful at all.

There is such a thing as"radar trauma". A person caught in the radar beam may have internal burns. Most often, there are organs with a large amount of water, such as the bladder and brain.
Of course, the radiation power of communication transmitters is several orders of magnitude less than the power of radar transmitters, but no one rules out a cumulative effect. On the transmitter of the tropospheric communication station, where I worked for a very long time, even the main generator of the transmitter (about 5 W) of power had a serious biological protection, and if the protection was damaged, the station automatically turned off.

 

I'm hearing this alot... People in the same household, one getting a check the other nothing.