All of the comments here attacking Warren Buffett's authenticity, suggesting that he should put his money where his mouth is and write the Treasury a big fat check, are missing the whole point.

Services provided by the government are public goods. It's blindingly obvious that a single person cannot pay for those public goods. Just Buffett's own contributions, no matter how much he donates, will not be enough to solve our budget issue. It's called shared sacrifice because it's meaningless unless everyone participates.

It's like the neighborhood park (i.e. medicare/social security): Everyone wants one, but nobody wants to pay for it. In steps the neighborhood's rich kid (Buffett), who suggests that all the rich kids pitch in to pay for the park. If that happened, everyone would be made better off, but one kid alone isn't enough.

This is a very canonical problem of public services provisioning and funding. It's completely naive to sit back and suggest Buffett tackle the issue himself, because we all know that's ridiculous.

Open your eyes. The problem is not Buffett's to solve. But he recognizes that there is a problem.

Apologies for the harsh tone, but it baffles me how members of Hacker News can think so naively. The attacks on Buffett are utterly unfair and unjustified. We should all have an open mind and try to understand the proposal.

"Reading pithy superficial quotes about startups changed my companies trajectory."

Quick question for PG. Would you be interested in running a similar event in London? We've been organising an HN meetup for over a year and currently have a community of over 1100 people that would love to attend an event like this. There are also several YC companies including Songkick that have been involved in the meetup that I am certain would be interested in helping out.

If there is one company I trust to not screw this up it's Google and I think they have a good shot at getting this right. I'm sure their partner companies are going to be a bit ansy to start but they all compete on hardware / price anyhow which this doesn't change. A few points that pop to mind:

A. They already had to compete with Motorola, so they haven't lost or gained a new competitor.

B. They don't pay for Android so Motorola hasn't gotten some new financial edge. Google just has to ensure that all companies still get source releases at the same time. What they do with them is up to them. (aside: I expect we will see MotoBlur disappear with some of its key features rolled into future Android releases)

C. This will allow Google to protect Android much better which is very beneficial to their bottom lines, especially if it keeps patent licensing costs off of their products.

D. Google just has to be sure they don't play favorites but from what I have seen up until now they have been good about that.

E. This may have just brought the competition for who gets to build the next Nexus to an end. (unless the next Nexus is already basically "done" at another partner company)

I think they can get this right... and now hopefully we can get a whole line of nice Motorola hardware with current Android and unlocked boot-loaders, etc. I might have to reconsider the Droid 3 again (more like Droid 4 one day, since 3 is already in the wild as is)