Source Code by Bill Gates – Book

From a Google Image Search – Gates Notes

Bill Gates’ memoir of his early years, Source Code, is readable and interesting. For all you nerds who are kicking yourself in the slats (a saying from my dad) for not tinkering in your garage or your basement until you came up with a multimillion-dollar product, that is not the path that took Bill Gates to his enormous fortune. While it is true that Gates did not finish college, he was lucky to have parents who, although they at first tried to rein him in and polish him up, eventually learned that he needed space, not supervision and they were able to adjust their parenting tactics. They sent their son to a school that catered to high IQ kids.

Until the point that Gates was enrolled in Lakeside Academy, he never felt that he belonged, and other children did not accept him. He had learned to be the class clown which won him some popularity, but did not challenge his true talents. Who knows, perhaps if he had continued in public school, he would have been a stand-up comic rather than a computer geek. Lakeside had access to a very early computer, which had to be connected to a main frame computer outside of the school grounds. Companies often agreed to put these monsters in schools where professors, teachers, and students could take advantage of them. An added advantage of this arrangement was the innovations that come out of young minds.

This first computer, a PDP-10 was great for writing reports, but it didn’t do anything fun. Memory which consisted of paper cards or tapes and was kludgy, messy, and offered little security. Gates set out with some friends to write BASIC programs that tweaked this behemoth. There was no such thing as a personal computer.

Bill Gates and friends read about a set you could buy to build your own computer, from a company called Altair. The computer had no keyboard, no monitor, and very little memory. But lots of nerdy folks wanted to build one. Bill Gates, et al, wrote code to beef up the little Altair computer so it could actually be used for tasks and rudimentary games. As more and more companies saw that computers were going to be good for both work and play, that they would make money, other companies produced personal computers. Gates worked with a company called MITS and wrote a BASIC code that was making that company more profitable (for a while). MITS entangled the Gates group of guys into signing away their rights to their “source code”. Before his crew could sell any more code as software, they had to go to court to win back the rights to their own source code. Fortunately Bill’s dad was a lawyer.

Eventually Gates and his friend Paul Allen formed the company Microsoft. Bill did not do most of the coding, although for a while these friends and others who drifted in and out of the group spent time coding nonstop for many days and nights, sleeping on floors in computer rooms, to meet deadlines for coding products. Gates, in later days, worked the business side of Micro-soft which became Microsoft.

Bill Gates’ parents were not wealthy, but they were not poor either. His dad was a lawyer, and his mother eventually headed the United Way in Seattle, Washington. Gates was a reader. He also joined the Boy Scouts and became a hiker, a climber of smaller mountains, and he grew to love the outdoors. His family rented a cabin at place called Cheerio and eventually built a summer home there, shared by his whole family. He was fortunate that his parents came to understand his learning style and sent him to a progressive school.

Although he did drop out of Harvard before his junior year, he had so many chances to work on rare computer systems, to learn coding, and to do so in an age when computer nerds wanted to get computers to do more (especially in gaming). Gates has two sisters, Kristi and Libby. They were a close and supportive family. Some computer developers may have had to tinker in the garage or the basement, but this is not true for Bill Gates. Quite a while ago I read a biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Although Buffet was not a computer guy, his early life is very similar to Bill Gates’ early years. Alas, neither book offers a clear path to financial greatness unless you are cut from the same cloth as these guys. Gates is working on another memoir which begins where this one leaves off.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates – Book

Whenever Bill Gates’ name comes up in conversations on social media these days it calls forth mostly haters who probably only know whatever social media tells us about him. We know he’s a billionaire. We know he co-founded Microsoft. We know his wife Melinda left him because of some behavior she could not tolerate. We know that when she left it was revealed that Bill Gates had been to Jeffrey Epstein’s island where Epstein allegedly trafficked underaged girls to rich and famous men. We do not know if Gates did anything disgusting but Melinda Gates sure sounded disgusted when she made her public announcement about the divorce.

Should we all shun Bill Gates because he might have gone beyond the pale? Perhaps once again we should take our cues from Melinda who is staying active in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, whatever his sins, still possesses one of the most rational minds of our era and his logical solutions to modern problems seem unclouded by a political agenda, very rare in an era of divided and passionate politics.

When Bill Gates wrote about climate change in his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, he used terms like “net zero” and “carbon neutral” to lower the heat on discussions of environmentalists and to erase blame. This objective approach allowed him to discuss lowering carbon emissions as a universal problem that we all have a stake in.

In How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, Bill Gates once again avoids politics and recriminations, although he does try to draw logical conclusions from contrasting public health choices. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved with public health in developing nations for years and has worked to control diseases like polio, AIDs. Ebola, and malaria by funding vaccination teams in remote areas. Polio has been almost completely eradicated worldwide in locations where vaccines have been allowed which seems to be everywhere except a small area in Pakistan.

Gates’ combination of logical thinking, access to experts, his long involvement with research and treatment of diseases, and his name recognition may help us take public health measures out of control of politics and allow us to use reasoned, unemotional steps to address future pandemics more efficiently. It could take America decades to heal our political divisions especially with so many conscious efforts being made to widen gaps between political parties.

Gates tells what worked and what didn’t for an airborne infection. He’s not saying anything new, just summarizing what worked with COVID and what turned out to be not as important. Masks worked, social distancing worked best with masks, worrying about germs on surfaces or on our hands and face were not as important in controlling this airborne virus. Gates advocates a global body to keep track of outbreaks and a GERM team – Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team, which already seems problematic in today’s political environment since it contains the word “global.” Gates likes contact tracing but admits that it is also a problem given American politics, and he admits that this worked better in authoritarian societies. Even then it was still not perfect and there were definitely some human right’s issues.

Should we throw out the wisdom of Bill Gates because he is possibly flawed in ways that may be morally unacceptable? I see nothing earthshattering in Gates’ well-informed and realistic suggestions except that people may not be so willing to accept wisdom from a man they perceive as “damaged.” We cannot expect Melinda to air her objections to Bill in public, but we may be thinking the worst when the actual situation is quite different.

There is another problem with offering such rational solutions to us at a moment when we seem anything but rational. Looking at what we have managed to do to stop climate change we see that we seem to be moving backwards due to the war in Ukraine and its effect on gas and oil supplies from Russia, broken supply chains, an oil industry that underproduced in the pandemic and now claims that it can’t get up to speed as fast as we would like, and because of inflation. Currently we are talking about producing more oil and gas, opening old wells, and drilling new ones. The oil and gas industry argues that we do not have enough alternative energies to end our dependence on fossil fuels and clearly that is true at this moment. It is possible that fossil fuel companies are doing things, or not doing things, to make that so. The same may be true for pandemics. If we tried to take Bill Gates’ advice and use his well-reasoned approach to staying ahead of future pandemics the public health culture wars would make it impossible to apply public health initiatives throughout America, let alone throughout the world. In either the case of climate change or pandemics we may have to look for approaches that are not quite so reasonable, that in fact are greater challenges to individual freedom than telling people to wear a mask, or to stay home..

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates – Book

From a Google Image Search – Gates Notes

How To Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates – Book

If you like a level-headed, carefully researched roadmap to ‘get to zero’ (zero greenhouse gas emissions), tapping into the mind of a man who brought on the age of technology can’t hurt. Bill Gates in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, is exactly the unemotional problem solver, backed by a team that has helped collect data and facts (you remember facts) who could foment the kinds of changes the humans on our planet need.

Did you know that 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere in a year? How do we get that number to zero? Gates comes as close to showing us how we can do this, without making our lives unrecognizable, as any one has. “I came to focus on climate change in an indirect way – through the problem of energy poverty,” says Gates. (pg. 8) Eventually Gates divested of all stocks in coal, gas, and oil.

Gates offers plenty of graphs and charts but not to prove that carbon dioxide and methane are heating up the world and causing global warming that is great enough to affect climate. He begins with the assumption that this correlation is real and spends his time exploring every thing humans do that creates emissions and how we get each to zero global warming emissions. He uses one graph and some dramatic examples to show how warming affects the earth and some people more than others. He admits that ‘getting to zero’ will be hard. The effects of warming will be worse in poorer countries that are not responsible for emissions. The changes will have to be made in rich nations who will be most reluctant to change their ways.

“To sum up: we need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. We need the energy systems to stop doing all the things we don’t like and keep doing all the things we do like – in other words, to change completely and also stay the same…But don’t despair. We can do this.” (pg. 48)

Gates starts us off with a chart on page 51 which shows “How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do?” Making things (cement, steel, plastic) – 31%, Plugging in (electricity) – 27%, Growing things (plants, animals) – 19%, Getting around (planes, trains, trucks, cargo ships) – 16%, Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) – 7%

Using this chart every greenhouse gas producing activity is assigned a Green Premium. That green premium needs to go to zero. Gates, with the help of his research groups (Gates Ventures and Breakthrough Energy) takes each greenhouse gas emitter and shows how we get to zero carbon emissions. This is another climate book you really need to read. In fact, if you are an inventor, there are any number of areas where you could follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates and perhaps get in on the revolutions in energy that we all need. Will you end up skyrocketing to fame and fortune? Perhaps, perhaps not, but you could end up in some future history books. Help Bill Gates, help yourself.