Posted on 04/23/2014 7:56:05 AM PDT by lowbridge
Common Core-loving billionaire Bill Gates has suffered a stinging defeat in his ambitious quest to reform every cranny of the American K-12 public education system.
The nonprofit educational-software company InBloom Inc., which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corp. of New York financed to the tune of $100 million, announced on Monday that it will shut down permanently.
The reason for the shutdown is a steady cascade of parental and legislative anxiety about student privacy, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The strategy driving inBloom had been to create a huge database connecting local school districts and state education bureaucracies with behemoth education companies.
To accomplish this goal, the nonprofit had hoped to provide a smorgasbord of data about students. What homework are they doing? What tests are they assigned? What are their test scores? Their specific learning disabilities? Their disciplinary records? Their skin colors? Their names? Their addresses?
The Atlanta-based company had originally signed up nine states for the database. It planned to charge school districts between $2 and $5 per student for the privilege of participating in the student data collection scheme.
Many parents across the country particularly in the otherwise fairly disparate states of New York and Louisiana hated the bizarrely intrusive idea from the start and rallied key state legislators to their causes.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Soon to re-form under another name?
Gates was a successful crooked businessman. Nothing more, nothing, less.
DOS was purchased from others having ability in computers.
From there, Gates used a very successful business ability to fost the software equivalent of the Yugo automobile on a gullible public.
I f*rt in his general direction and give thanks for Unix, which Jobs saw as the future.
Die, Microsoft, die.
Now!
Well...The Internet HAS been useful in shutting THIS down...for now
Does anyone believe that Gates would just walk away from $100 Million? There is more here than is being reported. Gates would not invest that kind of money without expectation of some kind of return, and not necessarily money.
Microsoft Word is largely a rip-off of Word Perfect, a company driven off U.S. shores to Ireland some two decades ago. Microsoft Excel is largely an improved version of Lotus 1-2-3 ripped off the Word Perfect version called Quattro.
Gates squashed Netscape, the only real competition to Internet Explorer at the time, by buying the company and allowing Netscape to die a slow death by not keeping up the technology.
Why? Er, let me rephrase. What possible utility does this have for the student?
Have no respect for Gates. He is a liberal nut case.
You are right about Gates buying DOS for $125,000 from Seattle Computer Products and then promoting it with his mother Mary Gates sitting on the board of IBM at the time.
But the owner of Netscape Navigator was a huge Clinton supporter who wanted to bury IE and got the Clintoons to launch a justice department investigation of Microsoft. At the time Gates was pretty much apolitical and had not donated to either party.
After years of legal persecution he bought Netscape and moved to the Dim camp where he could find safe harbor.
LOL. It’s likely not about money.
My guess is he’s such a nerd he believes that using his money to enable his wife’s save the world liberal crusading philosophy, is the only way he’ll be able to hang on to her.
For those running Windows OS, this is what you are paying for!
The students oddly resembled smurfs by the end of the program.
Just like Politics...all education should be Local!
Oh my, certainly not.
The deal is, you own say $20 billion worth of stock in your publicly-traded company. That’s not cash, just stock certificates. The price of which goes up and down.
You can sell a little of it here and there as one way to get cash, but you can also have a paycheck from the company.
Your annual earnings are therefore let’s say in the tens of millions range.
You can get your effective tax rate down a lot by using part of your own personal cash to do things that a) you want to do for money-making reasons and b) give you tax credits.
But you still have somewhere around $20 billion in stock certificates. When you die, your heirs would pay a huge chunk of that in taxes, and have to sell a lot of the shares.
Only the “little people” pay such high tax rates, and your heirs will do just as fine if you gradually give them in total $1 billion over your life as if they wind up with $10 billion after you die.
So, the ingenious move...
You transfer ownership of say $100 million worth of your shares to a tax-exempt foundation you set up. You have to really give up ownership of the shares. But the trick is the foundation can be dedicated to a purpose that helps the super rich (including you and your heirs) continue to dominate and control the world. Your foundation’s balance sheet will have $100 million in assets. Every year the foundation gets paid a dividend from the stock. The foundation may sell some of the shares and buy other shares in other companies, and realize a capital gain if the shares in your company went up in value. So let’s say your foundation can spend $2 million cash every year out of its investment income - and it will still have earnings left over to reinvest. You’ve got a self-financing organization that can work on it’s “mission” under the auspices of its trustees, i.e., you and your heirs. And those investment gains the fund earns - they’re tax exempt. So that part of your family’s (oops, your foundation’s) wealth pays no “little people” income tax.
Now, you can set up 100 foundations like that with $10 billion worth of your $20 billion of shares in your actual for-profit, publicly-held company.
You’re chairman of the board of that publicly-held company, you keep the board of directors membership limited to people who will vote WITH you to give you what you want. So even though it’s publicly-traded and you own say, only 30% of the shares, you still control board of directors and thus control the policies and strategies of the company.
And you control the boards of trustees of your 100 tax-exempt foundations, so you control their policies and strategies as well.
Key point: if the funds are shareholders in your for-profit “big” company which you are chairman of, then the boards of trustees of the funds would exercise the voting rights of the shares. Technically, they’re supposed to vote as they see fit, but since the trustees are your little minions, they will obviously vote their shares the way you vote your shares. So even though you “gave away” $10 billion worth of your shares in your for-profit company, you did not lose control of your for-profit company.
To get back to this particular situation, obviously you would never “walk away from” the assets of any of the foundations. You may decide to give up on a certain program one of your foundations has been spending money on, but you’d then design new projects for that foundation to work on and the foundation would simply continue.
If a foundation completely shuts down, its assets (that little old pile of stocks and bonds) would get transferred to other foundations you control to continue on in the same tax-exempt spirit of what its mission was.
A lot of people don't know that Apple OS is actually a wrapper for a UNIX system. I was surprised when I got my first Mac, found the Terminal app, and saw it was running a BASH shell. It was nice to know I already knew all the commands.
Yeah, it never would have happened without the big Clinton donor's connection, but there were actually some serious anti-trust issues involved.
So the investigation had some merit unlike BO using the IRS to make war on the TEA Party.
Gates is a hard core far left thief. Microsoft is garbage.
I’m guessing it served it’s purpose of filling that database.
He got rich off of garbage. Should I be so lucky.
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