Bill Gates. Not a monster

A couple of decades ago, when all I knew about him was that he was founder of Microsoft and the man primarily responsible for the development of one of the most despised yet widely used pieces of software on Earth(yes Windows), I had the opinion that Bill Gates was nothing but a money grubbing power hungry douche bag.

He often looked foolish when product demos would fail spectacularly or he would say things that just did not make any sense to a person grounded in reality. So after awhile, I added idiot to the list of adjectives that I would use to describe Mr Gates. He may have been one of the richest people in the world but who cares about that?

In my opinion, if you aren't making the world a better place to be you are taking up valuable space that could be put to better use. Now in all fairness, my connection to current events is often...limited? special? non-existent? So, much of what I had heard about Bill Gates was just that, hearsay. A friend or family member would describe something they had heard or seen that he said or did and would provide commentary and I would form an opinion based on their third hand information.

At one point someone mentioned to me that he was donating a portion of his wealth to charity. When I heard that I thought, no big deal lots of wealthy people give money away. They don't really care about making a difference. They just want a tax break. Then I found out that Bill Gates has given over a third of his wealth away, more than 28 billion dollars. That caused me to change my thinking and to re-evaluate this person.

A greedy, power hungry jerk does not just give up that kind of cash. The mindset of a control freak is that more and more is always needed. And thinking about others and their welfare is just not in the cards. After doing some research of my own and not relying on other people's impressions of him It seems that many of the things that I thought about him were simply untrue.

One of the primary reasons that he stepped down from Microsoft was to be able to spend more time focused on the charity that he and his wife Melinda set up. I have been following him off and on through linkedin for awhile now. He recently posted a short bit describing a much longer piece that he and Melinda did debunking three of the major myths about foreign aid. He goes into detail about just how off the mark most people's thoughts about foreign aid really are. I have to admit before reading it, I was just as guilty of believing those myths.

Up until this point I have been taking the word of people who really had no better idea of how large scale charity contributions work than I do. But this is something that he has been doing for years now in a big way and directly hands on. He has been to many of the small villages and town that his foundation provides the aid to. He has worked directly with the recipients of that aid and is in a position to know where the money does and does not go.

It is really great stuff. I implore you to read it. The facts he presents are seriously powerful. He talks about the end of third world countries forever, not by destruction but through growth. It's really awesome.

http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/?cid=bg_li_ll0_012111#section=home

Mind blowing statistic

Holy f*****g s**t !!! Pardon my french, but I just read a statistic, in an article online, that pretty much blew my mind. I mean at first I thought something was wrong with my eyesight and that I had perhaps misread the statistic. After a second and then a third much slower reading I realized that I had not made a mistake.

But I still did not believe my eyes. So I did some cross referencing and fact checking. And as it turns out the thing in question is actually true
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Now to back up and present some setup. In the music industry it is uncommon but not unheard of for an artist to sell a million records. When this happens they say the artist has "gone platinum" .  A great many musicians, given a few years have gone double or even triple platinum. A select few have even sold as many as a hundred million records during a lifetime of outstanding achievement, constantly touring and recording.

At an average cost to the consumer of $10 per album, after selling 100 million albums a recording artist can be said to have made a billion dollars selling records. Accomplishing this generally requires an entire generation, decades of work.

One might say, but what about movies, they often make hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time don't they? Well like musicians, the good ones do, but again it often takes a long time to rack up a billion dollars in movie sales. Many movies never make this much money. There are of course a couple of notable exceptions. Avatar made a billion dollars in 17 days. Avengers did it in 19.

What about video games? I am sure you are thinking, yeah right that crap my kid/brother/boyfriend plays can't make that much money can it? Believe it or not,  it's not that uncommon for a popular game to sell say two or three million copies when it first releases and  ten million copies total during its "lifetime".  At say fifty bucks a pop that's like 500 million dollars.  But still that might take as much as five or ten years to happen.

The newest offering from Rockstar Games is Grand Theft Auto V. In it's first three days it made one billion dollars in sales. No, that is not a misprint or a typo. Billion with a b. That means roughly twenty million copies sold within 72 hours of its release.

There are twenty million people in Australia. Now imagine every single man woman and child going out to the store and picking up a copy of the same game within three days of one another.

There are a little over 6 billion people on the planet. That means that one third of one percent or around one in every three hundred people on planet Earth bought a copy of GTA V within 72 hours of its release.

By the time the holiday season is over in a few months, it will surely have made even more money. The game reportedly is going to have online play and the option for tons of micro-transactions to let one use real money to buy everything from cosmetic gear to weapons, cars and other accessories.

A few online first person shooters already make hundreds of millions of dollars a year this way. As long as they are reasonable about pricing and are not obviously being too greedy, there is no reason to believe GTA V will not do the same.

Music and movies used to be where it was at as far as entertainment. But it seems neither one can really hold a candle to video games anymore.