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Paris Marx Profile picture
@parismarx
Jan 24, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Oxford University was going to open source its vaccine, then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stepped in and convinced them to sell exclusive rights to AstraZeneca.

Now AstraZeneca is failing to deliver and poor countries are struggling to access vaccines. ImageImageImageImage
It’s important to remember that Gates has used his foundation to launder his reputation, but there are a lot of serious questions about its activities, including supporting strong IP rights for drugs that make them less accessible to poor countries. thenation.com/article/societ…
You can read the full article about Oxford reversing course and selling its vaccine’s rights to AstraZeneca (at the encouragement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) here: khn.org/news/rather-th…
@IronicProfessor has been a big critic of Bill Gates’ philanthropy, including in his recent book “Bit Tyrants.”

I spoke to him about it on my podcast:
Bill Gates responded to this tweet. He confirmed the foundation told Oxford to make an agreement with pharma, then made a questionable argument for strong IP protection.

I’ve already been contacted by someone in pharma who also confirmed the IP argument is bullshit.
It’s important to remember that Bill Gates has his own views and interests, and they include strong IP protections whether on software or pharmaceuticals.

That doesn’t mean vaccines, especially when developed with public funds, require IP protections. It’s a capitalist approach.

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More from @parismarx

Paris Marx Profile picture
Jan 3
Pierre Poilievre says Canadians are too obsessed with race because of “wokeism” and agrees with Jordan Peterson that Canada essentially had to invent and import racism because it didn’t exist here before recent decades.

Canada is so fucked if this guy forms government.
Wondering what the Conservatives will do to social programs if they return to power under Poilievre?

He says all those “socialist policies” like public healthcare and the like are actually bad for the poor and redistribute toward the “super wealthy,” so they need to be cut.
Throughout the interview, you can see how Poilievre has deceptive but effective stories and cherrypicked stats that serve his agenda.

He’ll fabricate a narrative that government spending is what’s driving up home prices, to distract from developer and speculator profiteering.
Read 9 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Dec 19, 2024
Canadians are watching as Silicon Valley takes over the US government, but few realize Shopify executives are trying to bring a similar project to Canada — and the Conservative leader has started praising them for it.

Read my latest for @TheBreachMedia: breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…
Executives like Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and President Harley Finkelstein spout increasingly right-wing opinions online, including opposition to unions, support for Trump’s threat of a 25% tariff, and right-wing arguments smears against migrants.

breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…He has also praised Trump’s threat to enact 25 per cent tariffs on Canada, stating that the U.S. is “within its rights” to do so. He has retweeted posts calling for social support programs to be cut because “Canada spends billions on illegals, asylum and refugees.” And he’s generally spread right-wing misinformation about the state of Canada and the world. Lütke’s statements are well at home at Shopify, where he is one of several high-up execs regularly espousing right-wing views. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein isn’t as outspoken, but he still frequently criticizes government policy....
Meanwhile, Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian is a former Conservative staffer who founded and funds a far-right media organization aimed at reshaping the conversation in Canada to be more anti-migrant, racist, and transphobic.

breachmedia.ca/canada-far-rig…The right-wing ringleader among Shopify’s executive leadership appears to be Kaz Nejatian, the company’s vice-president of product and chief operating officer. Before going into tech, Nejatian was a Conservative political staffer. In 2011, when Nejatian worked for then-immigration minister Jason Kenney, he was forced to resign after mistakenly sending out fundraising requests on parliamentary letterhead and accidentally leaking a strategy to target “very ethnic” voters. Two months later, he was invited back as director of communications. Nejatian’s right-wing associations became even clea...
Read 6 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Sep 17, 2024
For decades, internet politics was shaped by a cyberlibertarian perspective that obsessed about government while enabling the corporate dystopia we live in today.

If we want a better internet, we must abandon it and reclaim sovereignty over digital tech. disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
The arrest of Pavel Durov and suspension of Twitter/X in Brazil is a shot across the bow in a wider fight to rein in the harms that have come from the cyberlibertarian approach to the internet. But it will not end there.

disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
The internet is at an inflection point. The platforms have cemented their power, generative AI and associated financial pressures are pushing companies to further degrade the online experience, and more than anything else, the notion that democratic governments should leave the internet alone is rapidly breaking down. Nothing shows that more than the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France and the suspension of Twitter/X in Brazil. Make no mistake, governments’ stance on the internet has been changing for some time. Beyond the actions of French authorities and the Brazilian Supr...
Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum wrote that “the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today.” Globally, that view has a lot of support.

disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sov…
This movement is more widespread than it might otherwise appear. Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum, a group of civil society groups, published a letter about the ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. “It is eminently clear that the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today,” the group wrote. “Governments are needed in the digital space not only to tackle harm or abuse. They have a positive role to play in fulfilling a gamut of human rights for inclusive, equitable, and f...
Read 9 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Feb 9, 2024
The AI boom requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of water and energy.

Tech CEOs have plans for hundreds more, but activists are fighting back to protect their communities and force us to ask who benefits from Silicon Valley’s future.disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
Everything we do online has a material footprint and people started becoming more aware of that during the crypto boom. But the AI hype of the past year is also far more resource-intensive than the applications it hopes to replace.

disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
The cryptocurrency hype of the past few years already started to introduce people to these problems. Despite producing little to no tangible benefits — unless you count letting rich people make money off speculation and scams — Bitcoin consumed more energy and computer parts than medium-sized countries and crypto miners were so voracious in their energy needs that they turned shuttered coal plants back on to process crypto transactions. Even after the crypto crash, Bitcoin still used more energy in 2023 than the previous year, but some miners found a new opportunity: powering the generative...
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all have massive business selling computation as a service, meaning they’re all incentivized to increase the amount of computer resources we collectively use so those businesses keep growing—regardless of the social benefit.

disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-…
When selling computation and associated services as a business, “cloud” companies need to make everything we do more computationally intensive to create a justification for the growth of that business, which means the demands for computation must increase and along with it the number of data centers to facilitate it. In practice, that means more AI tools are pushed on companies that don’t need them, more data needs to be collected, and everything we encounter needs to become bloated with unnecessary features and trackers, just to give a few examples. There isn’t necessarily a tangible benef...
Read 8 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Jan 24, 2024
Sam Altman’s vision for AI proliferation will require a lot more computation and the energy to power it.

He admitted it at Davos, but he said we shouldn’t worry: an energy breakthrough was coming, and in the meantime we could just geoengineer the planet. disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
Over the past year, Altman ensured we were focused on the future by promising incredible AI benefits or scaring us with terrifying futures. That ensured OpenAI could capture the attention of lawmakers to share AI regulation. But now his story is shifting.

disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
By directing our gaze to the future, Altman and the AI industry effectively distracted a lot of people from the very real threats their technologies pose in the present. Instead of thinking about the harmful and discriminatory ways AI might be deployed in policing and social services, we were told to fear a fantasy scenario where computers exceed human-level intelligence then decide they want to enslave or kill us. That allowed Altman’s company OpenAI to influence regulatory efforts in the United States and Europe to ensure they wouldn’t hamper the company’s goals of rolling out their gener...
The media seized on his comments at Davos that AGI wouldn’t change as much as he thought, even though he was still boosting the tech. In his new story, the fears are gone and AI adoption must accelerate because he imagines the benefits to be enormous.

disconnect.blog/sam-altmans-se…
Altman’s new story still has contradictions, but not nearly as many as the one he was telling last year. Instead of being a major threat and/or transformative moment, Altman recently told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that even though artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point where computers match or surpass the intelligence of humans — would arrive in the “reasonably close-ish future” that it wouldn’t have the sizeable impact he once believed. “It will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we al...
Read 6 tweets
Paris Marx Profile picture
Dec 22, 2023
As Hyperloop One shuts down, we need to admit that the Hyperloop was never meant to be built.

Its goal was never to transform transportation for the masses, but to stop or delay high-speed rail from reaching North America. And sadly, it succeeded. disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloo…
It’s been ten years since Elon Musk first laid out the white paper, and it never really went anywhere. It was an idea that survived so long because of cheap money and is finally dying now that interest rates have made such useless projects untenable.

disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloo…
Ten years after Elon Musk unveiled the white paper for the vacuum-tube transport system he dubbed the Hyperloop, it’s time to drive the final nail into its coffin. Earlier this year, Motley Fool was already reporting that things were tough in Hyperloop world with startups “dying a quiet death” as higher interest rates meant investors weren’t going for projects that were clearly never going to pay off. Hyperloop One, previously known as Virgin Hyperloop One, was struggling too. Last year it finally had to admit its passenger tube dreams were never going to be realized, so it tried to convin...
Hyperloop emerged during a big debate around California’s plans for high-speed rail, where Musk adopted the dogged conservative opposition designed to protect the interests of automakers and airlines who saw their profits threatened.

disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloo…
A decade on, people often forget what was really motivating the Hyperloop when Musk first started pushing it. In the early 2010s, there was a big debate around California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with further extensions to San Diego and Sacramento to follow. Naturally, conservative, automotive, and airline interests were vehemently opposed to a technology that Japan and Europe had been living with for decades arriving on American shores because it threatened their commercial interests. Elon Musk, as an automaker and (let’s be honest) somewha...
Read 10 tweets

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