• thatradomguy@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I really do think it would be fun to compile all of the billionaires in the world and just have them fight to the death in a gladiator kind of rig. Would be awesome.

    • Sarmyth@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I feel like the only way it would work is if they got to keep the money of whoever they killed as long as that person had over a billion dollars… and I would almost be OK with that.

      I like to imagine it would reduce the collateral damage the rest of society faces when these people have a dick waving contest.

      Roided out billionaires with their hearts exploding out their chests from experimental steroids would really mix things up in a good way. He’ll maybe we’d get some truly sick cybernetic out of it too.

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        Wealth concentration is bad, so multiple billionaires is better than one super-duper-billionaire.

      • SippyCup@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        Y…yeah … sure. Yeah totally. The last one standing totally gets to keep everything and will absolutely be leaving the arena alive. Yup. That’s how we’ll do it.

    • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Kat and Kropp get in an argument over the war as they rest from an hour’s worth of drill (occasioned by Tjaden’s not saluting a major properly). Kat believes the war would be over if leaders gave all the participants “the same grub and the same pay,” as he says in a rhyme. Kropp believes the leaders of each country should fight each other in an arena to settle the war; the “wrong” people currently do the fighting.

      Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front 1929

  • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Bill gates is always spending his money eradicating diseases. Maybe he can eradicate this musk disease too

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      Or he considers that a good thing. It’s more likely that you think.

      He’s a breeder and a eugenicist. He believes the strong/successful should reproduce (how many kids does he have now?) and those less fortunate should die off.

    • eletes@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Gates, 69, on Thursday announced plans to spend virtually his entire fortune over the next 20 years, during which time he estimates his foundation will spend more than $200 billion on global health, development, and education against $100 billion over the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged.

      Yeah sounds like he’s trying

  • SleafordMod@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    I got downvoted on Lemmy the other day because I said that I prefer Bill Gates to Musk.

    Maybe there are things about Gates I don’t know. Maybe he is actually quite an evil person; I don’t know. But he does at least spend billions of dollars helping vulnerable people, right? And Bill’s stances on global politics are far more sensible than those of Musk.

      • gradual@lemmings.world
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        2 months ago

        I will wager that some people from some nations asked him to stop helping based solely on the fact that we can’t get millions of people to reliably agree on anything.

    • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Down to the wire, though, if Elon is responsible for killing the world’s poorest children of today then that logic should translate to Bill Gate’s being responsible for killing the world’s poorest children of yesterday.

      It’s pot and kettle. Gate’s might have used his position of great wealth for some good things but there are also some… questionable things. According to him his conversations with Epstein were ‘huge mistakes’… this is, of course, referring to Gate’s relationship with Epstein - something that took place after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.

      Idk, something for your brain to chew on.

    • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I mean Gates donated his own money to help the poorest people in the world. Elon spent his money to become president so he could steal money from the poor at people in the world.

      • IndustryStandard@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Gates donated his money to avoid taxes and start a big pharma company.

        Also Bill Gates comment is about USAID an imperialistic tool which has killed many millions of children. The irony of this statement is palpable.

    • Sturgist@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      I would like to recommend listening to the Behind the Bastards episodes on Bill Gates. He’s a piece of shit. Not as bad as Elon, but that’s not really the point.

      • SleafordMod@feddit.uk
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        2 months ago

        Yeah maybe there’s stuff I’m not aware of. I’ve seen some people on Lemmy point out that Bill Gates lobbied for the University of Oxford to not open source their Covid vaccine. I suppose that seems shitty on the face of it.

    • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Well yes, but no. If you see capitalism, which includes billionaires having a right to exist, as a set standard, I would 100% agree with you. But billionaires shouldn’t even exist in the first place. You only become a billionaire, by either massively exploiting your workerforce, capitalising every single aspect of your product/customer and not redirecting your profits back to society. We shouldn’t live in a world, where we are cheering for people giving away their money, that they shouldn’t own in the first place. There is no ethic way to be a billionaire.

      To prevent misunderstandings: I 100% agree, that this is actually a good thing, but we still have to raise awareness about the societal and political problems of billionaires existing in the first place.

      • prototact@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        I agree it should be illegal and it is immoral, but these are the current rules of the game. It’s not that Bill Gates is necessarily evil, the problem is how modern states and societies distribute wealth, which is based on a credit system where small incomes are dominated by large incomes (owners get most of the credit). The guise is that they also assume the risk but we know that very rich people eventually gain political power to mitigate that risk on the many not rich people. The problem then is that there is no easy way for not rich people to self organize and distribute credit more fairly, which also needs to distribute risk as well. Cause at the end of the day, it is about two things: people wanting to avoid risk and yielding credit and people accumulating wealth and gaining political power, over many generations. That said, Musk is a very twisted and malicious personality while Bill Gates is more of a typical rich entitled person with a savior complex.

        • subhuman_admin_cunt@lemmy.cafe
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          2 months ago

          . It’s not that Bill Gates is necessarily evil

          he made everybody pay 50 bucks on their computer just to have the privilege to have a blue screen of death right before saving your master thesis.

          • cepelinas@sopuli.xyz
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            2 months ago

            Fuckin’ hell you realize that by windows 8 he wasn’t even the ceo and he wasn’t the one who made it he hired people who went on to make windows! Edit: the commenter is a bot (or average tankie idk) the account is 1h old and has made like 17 comments all about how bill is the worst and etc. and saying he has a friend in Ukraine who is hiding from recruiters. How do you signup for lemmy nameyourself subhuman_admin_cunt and comment all that in your first 1h would advise ip ban

    • caboose2006@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Nuance is lost on a lot of people on here. All billionaires bad therefore no billionaire is preferred. While I agree there’s no good billionaire there’s a spectrum of bad. Like would I rather break my pelvis or break my legs? Both are bad but one is preferable.

      • Michael@slrpnk.net
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        2 months ago

        None are preferable. Nobody should have that much wealth, power, and influence.

          • Michael@slrpnk.net
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            2 months ago

            That nuance is not important - it’s not worth wasting your breath on. If people focused on root causes of the dysfunction and the change needed to solve the issues plaguing our societies - we’d be much better off.

            The nuance isn’t lost to me, I just don’t care to quantify it and then shout it out to the heavens. It makes no difference to me whether Elon Musk is worse than Bill Gates. They can duke that battle out themselves if they care to.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          2 months ago

          None are preferable.

          Yes, that is accepted.

          But, given the reality that billionaires do exist, one that spends his money curing diseases is less bad than one who is closing hospitals serving war round populations or actively starving people.

          • Michael@slrpnk.net
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            2 months ago

            I think making value judgements on individuals is a counterproductive use of our time, energy, and voice. That’s what I’m trying to point out.

            If we focused on root causes and the change we’d like to see to solve those problems, we’d be smooth sailing as a world already.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      People on lemmy know that “A is better than B” means “A is good.” You have to learn to speak the language.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      There are no good billionaires. But I must agree that Bill Gates cannot be compared to Elon Musk. Bill has done evil, but his evil doesn’t compare to what Elon Musk is doing right now

      • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
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        2 months ago

        I think it’s a silly to waste one’s time struggling over deciding which one is worse. They’re both billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars undermining the public interest. Gates just cares more about his PR than Musk.

      • windowssuxxx@lemmy.cafe
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        2 months ago

        Not sure. Bill gates ex-wife told his relation with Eipstein was the reason of its divorce.

        Which is bad. Bad that motherfucker also made windows, which is worst. I hate Elon but he didn’t make my computer BSOD every half an hour

      • subhuman_admin_cunt@lemmy.cafe
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        2 months ago

        You obviously never had a blue screen of death after a night of unsaved work the day before your thesis presentation

      • delgato@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The massive cock slobbering that Warren Buffet got at his Woodstock of Capitalism last week was nauseating. All the media were fawning over how he’s still a small-town Nebraska bumpkin. I have to hand it to him he crafted his image perfectly as a “good billionaire” too.

  • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    like that time bill gave mone to warren buffet for “investment”. warren buy cheap food in africa, food price soar, kids die, melinda foundation to the help, bill begging for nobel peace award.

    anyway, americans are just greedy pigs no matter what. even if they drown in money to hang out with epstein to abuse children they scumbag as much as possible.

    bill gates maxed out the harm to children; starving them in africa, abusing them on epstein island.

    get fucked americans!

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I mean… Bill Gates was on the eugenics hobby horse of “Brown countries are having too many children” for decades before this. His original foray into West Africa was about forcing contraception on people in order to curb their population growth. The revelation that vaccination reduced infant mortality and lead to local women no longer feeling like they needed to have six kids and hope two survived was a happy little accident of history.

    The irony is in how Elon and RFK Jr’s war on vaccinations is a Dark MAGA Reflection of this philosophy. They’ve embraced eugenics from the white side of things, by buying into revanchist Alpha Male / Survival of the Fittest pseudo-science and concluding high infant mortality is some kind of longtermist beneficial genetic selection scheme.

    But it bares remembering that both of these billionaire personality cults came out of the Jeffery Epstein / Steven Pinker influence peddling project. The Gates Foundation is ultimately focused on patenting and rent-seeking high end medical technologies to state governments in exchange for lower mortality rates - effectively ruling the Global South through economic extortion. The Musk/Thiel Network State project is focused on explicitly segregating the population into In-Groups and Out-Groups, with the intention of forcibly breeding Alpha Male Humans to dominate the Global South militarily.

    Neither of these two groups is benefiting The World’s Poorest Children. They’re just arguing how to force poor people into subsistence level wages on industrial plantations - via the Velvet Glove or the Iron Fist.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      And yet that’s also not the same. Yes, many impoverished countries are stuck in a cycle of poverty by overpopulation and too high a birth rate. Yes, helping them control that goes a long way toward helping them to help themselves. No, not eugenics

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        impoverished countries are stuck in a cycle of poverty by overpopulation

        That’s simply not true. Countries with large populations regularly produce enormous quantities of materials and offer professional services that post-industrial consumers pay high prices to access.

        The problem isn’t the size of the population but the share of revenue received by the people doing the work.

        Diamond miners in Nigeria and Congo and South Africa aren’t getting anywhere near the face value of the rocks they dig up. Call center workers and IT professionals in the Philippines and India are getting a tiny fraction of the rate their employers charge. Textile workers seeing pennies on the $100 when they output luxury apparel.

        Yes, helping them control that goes a long way toward helping them to help themselves.

        No. Charging them through the nose for medical technology is what’s hurting them.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Musk is doing other things. He’s a mass polluter having launched thousands of rockets each burning a shit load of fuel, distributing heavy mentals into the statosphere, q and punching holes in the Ozone layer.