IBM Opens Power Microprocessor Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/ibm-opens-chip-architecture-in-strategy-of-sharing-and-self-interest/

<comment><USER2> This sucks.

It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant.

POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good.

ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible.

It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers.

This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.

</comment><comment><USER3> A particularly desperate move from IBM.

This is uncomfortably close to SPARC's story. Sun opened up SPARC designs in 2005. Four years later, the "Rock" project was canceled, marking an end for world-beating SPARC performance.

(Later Sun/Oracle chips have all been based on "Niagara," a low-end chip that didn't even hope to compete on performance. It was intended to be massively multicore and inexpensive, and it was at least one of those things.)

<comment><USER4> I think your conclusion, "end for world-beating SPARC performance", is perhaps based on out of date information:

[http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance- scalability/s...](http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance- scalability/sun-sparc-enterprise-t-servers-078532.html)

Also, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see there's even more performance improvements scheduled in the near future:

[http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers- storage/servers/sp...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers- storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Oracle's current chips are derived from the massively-multicore Niagara, not from Rock or UltraSPARC III/IV. As a result, you might notice that the benchmarks Oracle brags about are SPECjbb and TPC-C. These are benchmarks that reward integer perf and parallelism, not single-thread or floating-point performance.

On SPEC's general purpose benchmark, SPECcpu, Oracle published only three SPARC results. All three are from Fujitsu chips in re-branded Fujitsu systems. Oracle just doesn't publish results for their in-house chips. I imagine they ran the benchmarks and decided the poor results did not fit their marketing message.

[http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html](http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html)

<comment><USER4> Oracle has actually published other SPARC results that are not for Fujitsu chips for SPEC CPU:

[https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_sp...](https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_speccpu2006_rate)

[http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html](http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html)

While I can't provide you my own detailed benchmarks, I can tell you anecdotally that the most recent SPARC hardware has significantly better single-threaded performance than the early T1, T2 series.

As an example, one of the projects I work on is written almost entirely in Python, and so is almost completely single-threaded (only the transport is multi-threaded using libcurl).

I had an opportunity to compare the performance on the T5 to the T1 and found it was practically night and day, and the performance of the program seems just as snappy as it does on any Xeon system I've used.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that given a choice between a fully-loaded Xeon box or one of the newest SPARC servers, most of the developers I work with will choose the SPARC server simply because builds take significantly less time.

<comment><USER3> Those are the SPECint_rate benchmarks, for throughput. These are different from the regular SPECint, and they're published separately. Oracle has published no regular SPECcpu scores.

Even the rate benchmarks are not very impressive. Oracle rigged the comparison in their press release. They compare a 16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel. If we do apples-to-apples, the Oracle result is pretty humdrum:

\- Oracle T5-1B, 16-core SPARC, 436 / 467

\- Dell M520, 16-core Intel, 533 / 553

The M520 contains 2x firstname.lastname@example.com GHz. This is far from the fastest Intel chip. You can get them up to 3.6 GHz. It's just a common and inexpensive configuration. Let's not even talk about the respective pricing.

Personally, I haven't used anything newer than a T1. Because I haven't seen anyone buy a new Sun box in that long!

<comment><USER5> If you normalise the SPEC results to per-thread per-clock, you get:

\- SPARC T5, 128 threads @ 3.6GHz, 463 / 467 -> 1.01 / 0.946 result/thread/GHz

\- Intel Xeon E5-2690, 16 threads @ 2.9GHz, 357 / 343 -> 7.69 / 7.39 result/thread/GHz

Or to put it another way, the SPARC needs 800% more threads and a 24% higher clock to achieve only ~30% faster than the Intel. The POWER is somewhat, but not that much better, at 2.54 / 2.24.

<comment><USER3> The Intel chip, as benchmarked, is 2.1 GHz. The same design is available in 3.6 GHz, as of Q2 '12\. We're comparing a top-clocked, circa 2013 SPARC to a 2012 Intel product running at 60% of the commercially available clock rate, and the SPARC comes up short.

I used this poor comparison because that was what was readily available in SPEC's published results for single-processor (SPECcpu) and parallel (SPECcpu_rate) benchmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not actually "open" as in free and open source software.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation)

<comment><USER7> That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.

<comment><USER8> If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.

<comment><USER9> Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or the modern equivalent?

I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer was sending you stuff....

The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).

<comment><USER10> You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you could run real EMACS.

[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library/IBM+Redbooks/index.html#emacs)

[http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...](http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.bpxa400/cle.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM at this point; silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc. The benefits of using amd64 are beyond-compare experience of optimisation, commodity pricing, and legacy compatibility; the costs are negligible.

However, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Intel's increasing and complete near- domination of the "not-low-power" CPU market. I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. AMD's struggling with it, but there's plenty of scope for looking at interesting approaches to increasing performance or reducing power use.

<comment><USER12> (Mill mod)

 _Ahem_ , sorry to those suffering Mill Fatigue on HN, but any conversation about the ISA wars being over is a red rag to a bull with us! :)

Hope you like the talks on [http://millcomputing.com/docs](http://millcomputing.com/docs)

NOTE: bulls react to movement not colour

<comment><USER11> Apologies, I shouldn't have been quite so dismissive.

I mean that the ISA wars are over in the sense of multiple relatively similar architectures competing against one another for negligible gain.

There's still plenty of scope for nontraditional architectures to come in and offer something different. We've already seen that in the more general availability of general-purpose GPU programming. As an architecture nerd, I'm already super-excited by Mill.

<comment><USER13> Yea, thinking about it, many of the old UNIX workstation vendors used the same 68K CPUs but then they decided to develop their own RISC architectures, fragmenting the market and reducing the economies of scale.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's hard to say that Motorola had it's heart in the 68K CPUs, it was a wildly diversified and not entirely focused electronics conglomerate back then.

And their product plan was very conservative, with the "odd numbered" chips not being great advances on the even numbered ones, e.g. the 68030, which came out the same time as the first SPARC, used the 68020 microarchitecture with a 256 byte instruction cache and used the design shrink to put the MMU on the chip (but not the FPU). The 68040, three years later, wasn't a stunning success, was it? And the 88100, which came out a year after the 68020 certainly sucked up a lot of corporate oxygen, not to mention put into question the company's commitment to the 68K family.

And it's very dangerous for a company to depend on another company for one of the most critical components of its products, isn't it?

But, yeah, the economies of scale, the much lower unit sales to spread your Non-Recurring Engineering costs over, eventually doomed them to mostly bureaucratic and installed base niches when AMD successfully innovated for a short period and then Intel got its act together due to that threat.

<comment><USER13> Yea, I know the 68040 was late. On the other hand, not having SPARC for example would have been less competition for HP etc to deal with, making this less of a problem.

<comment><USER9> Which does a good job of proving my case. SUN very much didn't want to provide "less completion for HP" (albeit I very seldom heard a good word for HP-UX).

<comment><USER13> And my point is that in the long term this was probably a bad idea.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, and it's something I've been thinking about if I were in charge of Symbolics at the beginning.

But it's also in part 20/20 hindsight, e.g.:

Lots of people refused to believe that Moore's Law would last as long as it has; the corollary that you'd get higher speeds purely from design shrinks _did_ end about a decade ago.

I'm not sure very many people "got" the Clayton Christensen _The Innovator 's Dilemma_ disruptive innovation thesis prior to his publishing the book in 1997. He really put it all together, how companies with initially cruddy products could in due course destroy you seemingly overnight.

In this case, how a manufacturer of rather awful CPUs (the 286 in particular, but the 8086/8 was no price except in cost; caveat, Intel support to people who design in their chips was stellar back then), could start getting its act together in a big way in 1985 with the 386, then seriously crack their CISC limitations with P6 microarchitecture (Pentium Pro), etc.

And note their RISC flirtation with the i860 in 1989, their Itanium debacle, etc. etc. More than a few companies would have committed suicide before swallowing their pride and adopting their downmarket, copycat's 64 bit macroarchitecture that competed with the official 64 bit one.

And that's not even getting into all the mistakes they made with memory systems, million part recalls on the eave of OEM shipments, etc. What allowed Intel to win? Superb manufacturing, and massive Wintel sales, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I keep hearing "IBM is opening POWER", but I still don't see any obvious route to dial up Asus or Tyan and order a cheap ATX motherboard that I can slap a POWER processor on, and build a machine to play with. Until that day comes, it's hard for me to get excited about POWER, as much as I might otherwise want to.

<comment><USER3> SME (Sun MicroElectronics) did exactly this in the 1990s. You could buy a standard ATX motherboard with an UltraSPARC II and PC DIMM slots on it. It was called the Ultra AXmp.

Unfortunately, the internal cost structure was such that the Ultra AXmp cost only a few percent less than a "proprietary" workstation/server from the parent company.

The moral of the story: sticking a high-margin, low-volume chip in a commodity board doesn't put it on a commodity cost basis.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I was gonna say earlier, but got distracted... it would also help if one could call up IBM (or a reseller) and actually buy a POWER chip - for a reasonable price - to plug into said motherboard.

In the end, it's the entire ecosystem... it's either affordable and accessible or it isn't. It's sad that IBM keeps coming out with pretty cool hardware (Cell, POWER, etc.) that nobody can afford to get convenient access to. :-(

<comment><USER15> Alpha and sparc both had moderately affordable hardware (atx boards and such). Outside the geeks, what's the compelling story? I owned a couple of those devices, fact of the matter was you paid more to be on an isolated moderately performing island. To be interesting, you need an Atx board or something with a better chip at the same price or the whole thing has to be cheaper. Basically, when cell came out they should have put ps3 spec workstations on the market for $300 or maybe even less. One thing arm really does right is low cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> the major power licensees were Freescale and AMCC, the rest is too small to be meaningful, if any. Both Freescale and AMCC are shifting towards ARM and not in the foundation?

With or without them, it's probably too little too late for this architecture, sigh.

MIPS, UltraSparc, and Power, are sadly fading away.

</comment><comment><USER17> If they want adoption they will have to bring the price of entry level power pc systems down.

Also wonder if its a year or two too late. AMD seems to have picked ARM as their plan B strategy realising that competing with Intel on x86 is hard to do with reasonable margins. Wonder if AMD would have picked POWER if it was available as an alternative a couple of years back.

<comment><USER18> No, they still would have picked ARM. Why? Because every mobile device with uptake uses ARM, and Intel has no play there.

<comment><USER17> AMD is not playing in the mobile space with ARM. They realise they are not large enough like Intel to spend their way into the ARM market. ARM is interesting because you have Apple and Qualcomm at the high end, but you also have Mediatek and RockChip at the low end. AMD cant play the "more value for money" in ARM mobile that they do with x86 - because there are already people doing it.

<comment><USER19> No, but following the disruption innovation theory, ARM should soon work its way up, while it will cannibalize Intel and force it to move increasingly upmarket (servers, etc) to chase profits. Intel is already losing _billions_ subsidizing Atom chips [1], their "real" competitors to ARM chips, to make them at least semi-attractive to OEMs (which will really get the short end of the stick, if they go with Intel anyway, because if they do help Intel succeed, Intel is going to immediately increase prices on them, to turn the division profitable again).

ARM chips don't have to "beat" Intel. They just have to become good enough for desktop performance, while costing much less.

[1] - [http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel- lose-1b...](http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1bn- quarter-mobile-year-2014-04/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't actually see anything on Tyan's site about a board. Elsewhere Google says it is going to be cheap. But it would be nice if it was available.

</comment><comment><USER21> That is very cool. I know that John Cocke who invented the architecture (and was an old drinking buddy of mine) would definitely approve.

It was an outgrowth of his work developing the first optimizing compiler (Fortran) with Fran Allen which earned him a Turing Award. Good on ya, Johh, wherever and with whomever you might be sipping now. :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can someone explain Google's involvement?

<comment><USER23> Sure, the article itself can explain it: "But analysts say the embrace of Power has two crucial advantages for Google. First, the Internet giant builds its own data centers and tweaks the technology in its server computers, and the licensing regime in the Power foundation is hacker-friendly in a way Intel's handling of its intellectual property is not. The second advantage for Google is negotiating power..."

<comment><USER22> I read the article and didn't find their little explanation to be that good, that's why I asked. Why PowerPC? Why not SPARC or ARM? What got them this involved?

<comment><USER24> PowerPC and POWER are different architectures.

<comment><USER22> The PowerPC chips fall under the Power ISA standards documents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What can today POWER do that neither Intel nor ARM can? What is its relevance?

<comment><USER2> The performance is in the SYSTEM architecture. Even a mid sized POWER box can address Hundreds of gigs of RAM, Petabytes of direct attached disk and rooms full of tape stored data. You can make an x86 box do that, but it's not really supported at the "plug bits and go" level. You put POWER boxes in place and don't reboot them for years. (Unless you are smart and do your HA/DR tests like a good kid)

For example a Google plays around with racks of disposable X86 boards like candy. When their app becomes "fixed" rather than growing exponentially, they'll want to move to something like POWER because it's DESIGNED to work with dozens of CPUs sharing Petabytes of attached disk easily. Not the silly kludges like Blades, SANS or iSCSI or virtual machines people play with now to hide x86 OS vendor scaling limitations.

<comment><USER25> What you're describing sounds more like a combination of better HW (bus, components) and SW (operating system). I agree, IBM delivers superb systems.

However: are there any inherent limitations in the x64 architecture which would make it impossible to achieve the same as with POWER, _if_ you designed it from scratch for that kind of robustness?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I honestly thought that the Power architecture was already open. Guess not.

<comment><USER23> It's been varying degrees of open all along; there was AIM and Exponential in the 90s and then PA Semi and AMCC ten years ago. But marketing/branding/strategy people need to stay employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced Risc) is an extremely nice architecture compare to the x86. It's firmware system was so ahead of the BIOS disaster (EFi might change this a bit, yet). I remember loading and booting kernels from NFS because you could load the network card drivers[1]. This is 2006, EFI was not known/used widely. The CPU itself has amazing features too.[2]

I guess we are seeing another occurrence of Gresham's law applied to the technical field. "Bad architecture drives out good". In this case bad is cheaper, and this is the only thing we care about after all.

1\. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

2\. [http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Perf...](http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Performance_Overview.pdf)

<comment><USER28> > EFi might change this a bit, yet

As far as I can tell the only reason EFI even exists is NIH syndrome. Intel could have just adopted OpenFirmware for x64, and they still should.

<comment><USER13> [http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/](http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anybody know the architectural advantages that POWER has over x86?

<comment><USER23> Depending on what you mean by architecture, there probably aren't many. Maybe reliability and decimal floating point. But IBM's Power server processors tend to be bigger and higher performance than Intel's; e.g. Power8 has four times the threads, four times the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth as Ivy Bridge-EP.</comment></comment>


DigitalOcean has updated its Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> https://digitalocean.com/tos

<comment><AUTHOR> Just saw that pop in my dashboard:

We have updated our Terms of Service on January 17, 2014. To review our updated ToS, please visit [https://digitalocean.com/tos](https://digitalocean.com/tos).

It was sent on 01/27/14 at 22:04.

edit: spelling

</comment><comment><USER2> See [http://diffchecker.com/epfzt29h](http://diffchecker.com/epfzt29h) for 5/29/2013 vs. 1/17/2014.</comment>


The Harried Leisure Class - <AUTHOR> http://opus1journal.org/articles/article.asp?docID=145

<comment><AUTHOR> When I saw this book mentioned in _From Dawn to Decadence_ in the context of the 19th century increase in mechanization and loss of free time it struck a cord. I've noticed my own free time activities become increasingly harried as I strive to make my leisure time as "productive" as my work time. One solution I've found is to deliberately spend more time doing traditional time-consuming activities such as reading, cooking, making cheese, physical activity, etc.

<comment><USER2> Tell us more about cheese-making!

<comment><USER3> www.leeners.com

I haven't made cheese yet, but I know someone who does it all the time and he recommends them. I have done a fair amount of winemaking. It's like making bread: you just need the patience to accept that yeast works in its own timescale. Other than that, there's nothing particularly difficult about it.

Now that I have a source of raw milk (it helps to live out in the sticks, surrounded by small farms), I plan to get started cheesemaking soon.

<comment><USER2> I am quite into breadmaking, keen to take on something else. We'll need these skills when the West collapses!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill and Melinda Gates Are Paying Off Nigeria's $76M Debt to Japan - <AUTHOR> https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/gates-paying-off-nigeria-debt/ <comment><USER2> A. Nigeria GDP is ~$500B US, sovereign debt is $67B, for debt/GDP ratio of 13%. Nigeria can afford to repay this loan.

B. If we fail to eradicate polio, it will be back again someday. The rich world should pay for this with all urgency. Kudos to the Gates.

[https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nga/](https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/nga/)

[https://dmo.gov.ng/](https://dmo.gov.ng/)

<comment><USER3> That doesn't actually tell anyone if they can afford it. What sorts of things does the money go to? Salaries? Food for folks? Other obligations and contracts? Infrastructure? Health care? How much do they have leftover afterwards - can they meet their obligations? How much of that GDP is the government able to capture as a tax? How efficient is tax collection and what is the rate?

The second, though. Fair point.

<comment><USER4> Yeah the missing number there is population (for GDP per capita) 1% of American GDP hurts a lot less per capita than Nigerian GDP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A book by Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, argues in favor of this approach where, wealthy individuals or nations help write off debt of poorer countries. The cost of servicing this debt is often crushing enough that no meaningful uplifit is possible from their current poverty.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Poverty)

<comment><USER6> Given these regimes often are unstable politically and/or corrupt, what prevents new debt being made and filling the pockets of the leaders?

In the Jeffrey Sachs model.

<comment><USER7> Lining the pockets of leaders and their friends is a cost-of-doing business in democracies. Yes, an economy would do better without that, but it very much does happen in all well-developed economies.

<comment><USER8> _Lining the pockets of leaders_

If you consider the most hated politician in the UK, Tony Bliar, he netted a personal fortune of estimated £20m. That's a tiny fraction of what a dictator could amass in a far poorer country.

<comment><USER9> Tony Blair?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the face of it $76m seems like a staggering amount of money. Then we learn that the foundation dedicates $3b a year, and this seems like a drop in the bucket.

Amazing what massively focused resources can accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER11> In return to handing Nigeria's agriculture industry to Monsanto;

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty- matte...](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty- matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto)

[2] [https://www.ecowatch.com/5-million-nigerians-oppose- monsanto...](https://www.ecowatch.com/5-million-nigerians-oppose-monsantos- plans-to-introduce-gmo-cotton-and-1882200020.html)

<comment><USER12> Has any consumer ever asked for GM crops?

<comment><USER13> Of course. They're cheaper. Consumers love cheaper goods. Personally, I'm very much in favor of GMOs and think it's a shame that so many countries overregulate them so much. There's no evidence of that the crops themselves have caused any harm whatsoever to human health or the environment. Now, may not be the case for the chemical pesticides and herbicides often used with them, but that just means we should regulate those chemicals.

<comment><USER12> Given a choice of organic vs GM I never heard anyone preferring GM so far. To me it seems all these benefits are somehow always for _others_ to capture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome and it's inspiring to see the Gates' making huge moves in philanthropy. It makes me wonder what the philanthropy would look like if other business leaders like Warren Buffet were also to run major charitable institutions.

<comment><USER15> Regarding Buffett, specifically, it would look an awful lot like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: [https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Informati...](https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General- Information/Leadership/Executive-Leadership-Team/Warren-Buffett)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can't they just help more directly to eradicate polio instead of paying a corrupt government to do it?

Payments like these can be interpreted as buying a state's benevolence (aka corruption), something that Soros is regularly accused of.

I'm sure there are quite a few NGOs that are more efficient in fighting polio than the Nigerian government.

Likewise, should we pay Kim Jong Un to feed hungry North Koreans if it were possible to send them food directly?

<comment><USER17> Judging from the statistics quoted in the article, the government has almost eradicated polio in Nigeria. Pretty effective, no?

(P.S. Cheque's in the post, right, George?)

<comment><USER16> That's why I wrote 'efficient' while you answered 'effective' :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The current richest person in Africa (with a net worth of just under 13 billion US dollars) comes from Nigeria. I hope he's taking notes.

<comment><USER19> He died recently and I'm helping his lawyer transfer his money out of the country. I'll email the lawyer and see if he might be willing to donate some of the royal estate to a humanitarian cause like this.

<comment><USER20> If you need some help getting inherited money out of Nigeria, I have lots of experience in e-mail-based initiation of intermediate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nigeria loses tens of billions of dollars a year to corruption, especially in their oil industry, especially among politicians. If I was Nigerian, I would find this sort of charity to be very embarrassing.

<comment><USER22> Hey there! I'm a citizen in a country where the current minister of finance was caught with a briefcase of 100.000 DM illegal "donations" from an arms manufacturer to the ruling party. The then-chancellor of 16 years took the fall to protect black party accounts, but nobody spent time in jail. That same party produces nepotism scandals in their home state but nobody cares because nepotism is an open secret through all state institutions. Every citizen knows this dt a continuing functioning press.

What is a German like me to do?

<comment><USER23> 100,000 DM is quite small change no? All countries will have corruption, the difference is the scale of it and in third world countries, the amounts are much much higher (look at Wen Jiabao's family in China or Mahatir in Malaysia)

<comment><USER22> Isn't that worse? People in the highest echelon of power in Germany are corruptible by a mere 50.000€? I could understand millions, but our Democracy being threatened by chump change is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm I the only one who thinks that Japan kinda looks bad here?

I mean, Bill's foundation is already dedicating $3B a year on development assistance, couldn't Japan just say to Nigeria: "You don't have to pay us back. Consider it a donation". How could they reasonably expect Nigeria to pay them back $76M?

<comment><USER25> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics strikes again.

 _" when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."_

[https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of- eth...](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

<comment><USER26> I think I am missing the relevance here, or not getting your point, could you clarify please? Possible I'm missing the obvious reference.

As a side note, I find that articles arguments troubling for several reasons that appear to be glossed over, but in interest of not derailing onto a different comment, I'll wait for what aspect you are specifically referring to in this case.

<comment><USER27> Japan did something to stop polio when no one else would. And now because a billionaire did more as charity Japan looks like a monster for doing what no one else would at the time.

Would it have been better if Japan had done nothing and Bill gates committed the charity now? No, people would have died. So unless you are japanese my question to you would be what has your government done for polio irradication in Nigeria? Because I bet it's less than the Japanese government.

<comment><USER26> From that perspective, I can see what he meant. Fair enough.

The ethics of profiting off the act might need to be truncated off it though, that is a genuine moral discussion that has so many shades of grey I feel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Awesome.

I used to think very badly of Bill Gates. (New corporate PCs often came bundled with Word. The newest PCs wouldn't be compatible with older ones, so everyone had to constantly upgrade. It was a huge scam.) But it's nice he's giving his money away. I look forward to hearing about more acts of charity in the years ahead.

<comment><USER29> I agree. I get the feeling maybe he's trying to make up for having brought Microsoft/Windows into the world. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am so glad the Gates foundation is doing so much good in the world. Kudos to them.

</comment><comment> clark-kent The problem here is that the Nigerian Government don't see this as a priority. I was just in Nigeria a month ago, the government just allocated $1 billion to fight Boko Haram, the terrorist group that has already been defeated in Nigeria and chased out to other neighboring countries. The gist is that corrupt politicians in the Senate want to quietly siphon that $1 Billion into their foreign bank accounts.

The embarrassing thing is not that the government can't pay back the loan, its that they won't make something like this a priority. Politicians are too busy looting the government funds and enriching their family & friends.

</comment><comment><USER31> > "No new cases of the wild poliovirus were reported in 2017 and there were > only four cases reported in 2016, according to the Global Polio Eradication > Initiative."

Other than verified infections, is any health organization able to sample this virus out in the wild as a discrete virus? Even in the US is polio just circulating impotently about us unable to hook-on from all the vaccinated individuals?

</comment><comment><USER32> Moral hazard?

<comment><USER33> Probably not. First this is a highly unusual event, not something other debtors could reasonably expect for themselves.

Second, the money was used to fight polio, a terrible disease. Moral hazard would be Nigerians driving Ferraris purchased by Melinda and Bill. This is not that.

If the Gates want to eliminate such diseases, they must be elated to see effective programs spending their money to do it.

<comment><USER34> > Moral hazard would be Nigerians driving Ferraris purchased by Melinda and > Bill.

The Nigerian kleptocrats have effectively externalized their healthcare costs so that they _can_ buy their Ferraris or more likely a fleet of pimped out G-wagens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is amazing to see how Bill Gates immersed himself in his nonprofit work. I hope he stays rich so he can do more of these.

<comment><USER36> Having read Slashdot 15 years ago, a part of me is shocked to hear anyone wish that Bill Gates stays rich. But don't worry, Bill will be just fine.

<comment><USER37> Gates is worshipped by most millennials, including the techies.

For those of us who've been around for a while - as your reference to Slashdot points out - this can be surprising considering just how hated he was a decade or two ago when Microsoft was in a much different position than they are now.

I still have a negative opinion of him, and feel his business practices were extremely negative to the world.

But I will give credit to his ability to white-wash his image via numerous PR campaigns (Reddit AMAs, lots of other blatant social manipulation in the media). He and his marketing team have played the long game, and have been brilliant.

<comment><USER38> The thing is, it seems pretty clear-cut to me that the good that Gates has done with his foundation has _far_ exceeded any bad that was done through MS business practices. It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that things like aggressively stifling competing software is the same or larger magnitude as helping millions of people in the developing world with basic things like nutrition, sanitation, and disease prevention. Gates is worshipped because he's currently making a very serious, very earnest, very large positive impact on the developing world, and I have no shame in supporting him.

<comment><USER39> > the good that Gates has done with his foundation has far exceeded any bad > that was done through MS business practices

Do you realize that the money $billionaire using were taken away from $company customers? Those money were not created out of thin air by $company. They would have been used in many other ways by the customers - including making the world a better place.

The only value $company really creates is in the products and the company behavior - everything else is just transferring money.

Now, transferring money from large masses to socially beneficial organizations it's done by taxation through a democratic process or by voluntary contribution.

Individuals having the power to grab your money and decide how to spend it, like kings in a feudal society, can easily do more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The problem is a charity paying off your debt does not make your credit better. While its slightly better than a writeoff/forgiveness because the creditor isn't as angry, it still shows they can't pay back loans. Is a future creditor going to count on a charity showing up to pay them off?

<comment><USER41> The article isn't clear, but I'd guess from the small outbreak in 2016 after being Polio-free in 2014/15 that the concern is that polio still isn't completely eliminated in Nigeria. Presumably it will need ongoing monitoring for several more years to ensure it is completely gone. Having to pay back the debt could jeopardise that ongong effort. In which case, this seems a good investment.

<comment><USER42> A 3y interval without cases in any member countries is what's required for the WHO to call a region "polio-free". [1]

[1] - [http://www.searo.who.int/immunization/topics/polio/eradicati...](http://www.searo.who.int/immunization/topics/polio/eradication/sea- polio-free/en/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, nothing is free.

</comment><comment><USER44> To all the commenters too busy being aghast at giving money to a government to read the article:

> _Nigeria's debt to Japan is the result of Overseas Development Assistance > (ODA) provided by the Japanese government in 2014 for increased polio > eradication._ efforts.

> _The country has made great strides in its efforts to eliminate the disease > thanks to this funding._

> _Nigeria did not record a wild case of polio from July 2014 to August 2016, > when two cases were reported._

Presumably, the Gates Foundation wants to encourage state partnerships from nations like Japan in the service of eradicating solved diseases, regardless of a recipient nation's ability or willingness to settle incurred debts.

Money well spent.

<comment><USER45> This is the correct perspective. It seems that, Reddit style, many people here comment just the titles, don't read the articles.

Polio is on the way to complete eradication all over the world. AFAIK the only place where it remains endemic is Baluchistan in Pakistan where the warlords are suspicious of vaccination agents.

Victory on polio is a fantastic story that doesn't get the attention it deserves.

<comment><USER46> well last time they claimed to be giving vaccines in pakistan it was to collect genetic information against a us target.

<comment><USER47> It wasn't the last time. Pakistan is an extremely large nation with 40+ years of substantial vaccination efforts by the US and West in general. It'd be fair to say that at least 99.9% of that effort was entirely innocent.

The CIA doing what it did should have never happened obviously. That simultaneously doesn't excuse non-vaccination, which is extraordinarily inexpensive and could be performed by Pakistani government persons as a compromise.

<comment><USER48> > and could be performed by Pakistani government persons as a compromise.

Political opponents still can frame anyone associated with "being an US puppet"... and for the chemtrail-lovers with an addition of "they're not vaccinating you, they're putting tiny microchips into you". Do note I didn't make up that last one, it literally flew somewhere over my Facebook feed today.

<comment><USER49> Do you really wanna try to frame the DNA analysis thing as an insane conspiracy theory?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake- vacci...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations- osama-bin-ladens-dna)

The leaders being suspicious of vaccination efforts is a direct link to this activity, please stop making a cheap "THOSE CRAZY KOOKS BELEIVE ANYTHING" style dismissal.

<comment><USER48> > Do you really wanna try to frame the DNA analysis thing as an insane > conspiracy theory?

No. Of course this is real. What I meant was that even using Pakistani staff would not help to restore trust. The CIA really did the world a service...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why does the 6th largest oil exporter in the world need a $76M loan paid?

Edit: Downvotes? Legitimate question guys. Can someone explain how that works?

<comment><USER51> Wikipedia gives 2.231 million barrels exported per day for Nigeria in 2013. At $50 per barrel this amounts 40 billion Dollar per year. I have no idea what the profit margins are but at 10 % this yields only 4 billion Dollar in profits per year which seems rather little to me, especially given that it is the 6th largest oil exporter. So 76 million Dollar would be 1.9 % of the annual profits from oil exports, not much but also not negligible. But I think I must have committed an error somewhere, those 4 billion Dollar just look too tiny to me.

<comment><USER50> According to this,

[http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/06/18/wsj- nigerias...](http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/06/18/wsj-nigerias- cost-of-oil-production-now-worlds-3rd-most-expensive/)

Nigeria charges $4.11 per barrel in taxes. So I guess they get that $4B in tax revenue. 1.9% of oil tax revenue is not negligible, but I would think Nigeria would have more national pride than accept. Like Bolivia with Bill Gate's chickens.

Anyway, by GDP, Nigeria is 27,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's like their are their Nigerian Prince.

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER53> I hope they'll bail us out when it comes back to the US due to the lack of vaccinations.

-In no way meant to belittle what they did. I think what they do is awesome. Just being sarcastic about vaccinations in the US.

<comment><USER54> The US has a 93% polio vaccination rate. What are you talking about?

[https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6334a1.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6334a1.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Their couch is going to be considerably more comfy with $76M worth of spare change dug out from under the pillows.

</comment><comment><USER56> So will Nigeria use Microsoft's solution after being "bought" by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? (lol)</comment>


IT-free fortresses for future elites - <AUTHOR> http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/36847 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of those turn-of-the-century articles about the future, replete with cozy bomb-shelters and flying cars.</comment>


Ask HN: Canadian demographics data - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am currently trying to build a customer analytics product and am looking for Canadian demographics data. Unfortunately, it costs $4,500 and I am wondering if there are other alternative sources out there? I have taken a look at Statistics Canada but even there, I'll be required to fork out $900 to make the data useful.
If anyone has ideas, please share. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Could you please define "useful data" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. For example, Census data is currently not linked to postal codes. You'll need to purchase a database that links the 2 together.</comment></comment>