In a 2015 TED talk, Gates hit the nail on the head, but his warning wasn’t heeded:
Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe is a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
We’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents.
But we’ve invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic.
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Here are some transcript snippets from the talk …
Both threw much money at education with disappointing results.
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Two related reports hit over the weekend.
The first announced that the Gates Foundation would spend more than $1.7 billion over the next five years to pay for new initiatives in K-12 public education. The plan is a “redirection” of prior initiatives. More on that later.
As the Washington Post observed, Gates’ prior mega-contributions to improve K-12 education “didn’t go so well, but the man, if anything, is persistent.”
The second story dealt with Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to improving Newark NJ’s schools. A report was released indicating disappointing results. More on that later, too.
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I commend both Gates and Zuckerberg for throwing a massive amount of money at improving education. Their intentions seem good and the amounts of money are, as we say in academia, statistically significant.
That said, what’s going on?
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