Bill Gates creating new company

[OhioChick]

So much for retirement. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is reportedly creating a new company to coordinate business for the software giant and his philanthropic Gates Foundation.

The mysteriously dubbed bgC3 LLC, first reported yesterday by the blog TechFlash, will apparently be a think tank for science and tech innovations. The "C" in the name stands for "catalyst," not "company," an unidentified source told TechFlash.

Gates, who stepped down from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in June, has a high-tech shop outside Seattle for bgC3, outfitted with his company's Surface touch-table computer. But TechFlash speculates bgC3 won't be a new, giant enterprise: A letter a Gates rep wrote to a city official in Kirkland, Wash., where the office is housed, said occupancy would be limited to 40 to 60 people — far fewer than the thousands of worker bees on the sprawling Microsoft campus in nearby Redmond.

The Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog takes a more cynical view of bgC3, describing it as "neutral ground" where Gates can discuss Microsoft or the foundation (he can't conduct business for one at the other's office) and as "a legal entity" where he can pay the handlers who "coordinate and protect life."

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=bill-gates-creating-new-company-2008-10-23

[Azlady]

1. That must be why Bill is always in front of Congress begging for more H-1B's

:mad: :mad:

[Chisox08]

2. There needs to be a freeze on H-1B's

If he can't ship the jobs over to India he is shipping the employees here and leaving quailified American workers behind. Nothing new.

[OhioChick]

3. Agreed. n/t

[Recursion]

4. You know, I hate his software, but I like his foundation

And it bugs me that he managed to give himself the reputation of a programmer (he's not, and never was at any point in Microsoft's time), but it's hard to argue with a guy who wants his money to help other people.

[OhioChick]

5. Guess you haven't heard about that saintly Gates Foundation..

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

Ebocha, Nigeria — Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.

An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Justice squirmed in his mother's arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means "city of lights."

The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.


In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.

"We're all smokers here," Okey said, "but not with cigarettes."

The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it. They deny the flaring causes sickness. Under pressure from activists, however, Nigeria's high court set a deadline to end flaring by May 2007. The gases would be injected back underground, or trucked and piped out for sale. But authorities expect the flares to burn for years beyond the deadline.

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.

Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. Oil bore holes fill with stagnant water, which is ideal for mosquitoes that spread malaria, one of the diseases the foundation is fighting.

Investigators for Dr. Nonyenim Solomon Enyidah, health commissioner for Rivers State, where Ebocha is located, cite an oil spill clogging rivers as a cause of cholera, another scourge the foundation is battling. The rivers, Enyidah said, "became breeding grounds for all kinds of waterborne diseases."

The bright, sooty gas flares — which contain toxic byproducts such as benzene, mercury and chromium — lower immunity, Enyidah said, and make children such as Justice Eta more susceptible to polio and measles — the diseases that the Gates Foundation has helped to inoculate him against.

Much More: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story

[Recursion]

6. Wow, you don't buy gasoline?

I didn't know you didn't support any oil companies. That must be difficult in this day and age.