So I just read Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.
That’s why one should not trust billionaires who make noises about changing the world for the better. It is merely to stoke their egos. I’m not even religious anymore but I still remember being taught that it is better to share the success without bragging about it. There are genuinely good rich folks, but they don’t brag about how nice they are. Chuck Feeney, the billionaire founder of Duty Free, quietly donated the majority of his wealth by the time he died. He was left with $2 million after the donations and was renting an apartment in New York. There is also a millionaire who built houses for the homeless. But I would say that the “good ones” are far and few.
However, the darker side of trying to “be rich and be quiet about it” are some billionaires donating to regressive causes. I think I don’t need to mention the Koch brothers and Murdochs. Being the “power behind the throne” is more effective way to actually wield power. That’s why I don’t think ridding Trump will solve anything unless there is a more robust system to prevent money in politics being put ever again.
The “doing good” thing is just a cover to avoid paying taxes. All the money Gates has donated just went to charities he set up and his heirs own/control…
Precisely. And to belabour the point, if they really want to “do good”, just shut up and do it. No need to announce on the megaphone that they are good for wanting to donate most of their wealth, but are still billionaires and getting richer. If they are serious about helping, their net worth would have decreased by now and would not be billionaires anymore.
Mackenzie scott made more money than she donated, and shes donated quite a bit, idk the logistics of that or how it works, donated 19 billion worth 32
There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning “ripping off” software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it’s easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won’t be “stolen”.
—Jim Warren, July 1976
Sometimes it’s about the effort of paying than the actual cost.
Of course, with Microsoft it’s both.
Or the service. Software that goes out of its way to ensure you paid, and poses limitations on the paying customer. Like always-online DRM for video games.
That’s kinda what I meant by “Microsoft is both”. I branded those as under the “effort of paying” (though I probably shouldn’t have).
Very well put. I cannot stand the entitlement in the original letter.
The most lemmy take ever
AstraZenica COVID vaccine was going to be opensource but he used with weight as a donor to pressure the university to sell it to a firm he had ownership instead
No, I don’t think that’s accurate. Oxford Unkversity was going to waive their rights to the vaccine, and Gates pressured them to instead partner with Astra-Zeneca. But to my knowledge Gates never profited from that deal. Now, was there still some shady backroom dealing going on? Very possibly.
who cares if he didnt profit? “I convinced this man to make money off of the sick and he did it and profited off of a global contamination, but at least I also didnt get a kickback right? He was just gonna give it away the fuckin idiot!”
such a swell dude. totally not a shitbag human
I care when someone claims that they did. It’s important to gets the facts straight imo. They commenter you’re replying to didn’t imply Gates was a good guy or something.
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Listen m8 all I do is try to do is stop the spread of misinformation. If X thing is just as bad as Y… just say he did X thing. No need to embellish the story.
He, through his foundation, own a significant portion of AstraZenica.
Where do you see that? That isn’t anywhere in your link. The only reference to AZ is that they partnered with one of the companies that Gates invested in.
His foundation owns stocks in Immunocore who is an Astra partner.
Edit: immunocore does not own Astra that was a lazy read on my part
No they don’t dude. AZ doesn’t have a parent company. Immunocore has about 1 billion dollars in assets, AZ has about 100 billion. Stop making stuff up.
My bad partner “Immunocore’s specialty, however, has been working in oncology. Its therapies induced industry giants including AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN), Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY), GSK (NYSE:GSK) and Genentech to partner with the biotech over the years.”
That’s completely different though. So they partner with all the big pharma companies, which makes sense given their research. Unless you think he’s secretly on the take from AZ (idk how you would even attempt to bribe Bill Gates), he does not benefit at all financially from the Oxford/AZ deal and there’s no sign of wrongdoing.
I read about that, yeah. All hail Mammon; money above all. Sometimes I think wealth changes something in a person’s brain, like psychologically or neurologically. It’s as if they get so detached from reality that they lose all empathy and sense of community. I’ve heard the term ‘affluenza’ used as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense as a legitimate thing.
It takes a certain kind of personality to even become a billionaire. You don’t become a billionaire by being kind and ethical
Also the issue of you need to be a deranged psychopath to get wealthy in the first place.
There’s plenty of wealthy people who aren’t psychopaths, but they are all broken in some way. Usually it’s because capitalism has completely alienated them from our natural communal instincts and taught them that the individual is god. Many are capable of empathy, they just choose to do the selfish thing because they’ve been told their entire lives that “taking care of number one” is a virtue.
Of course, the impacts of their behavior are the same as if they were psychopaths, so this isn’t me excusing them. But it’s important to know what capitalism does to people and how it requires us to ignore our natural instincts, because the wealthy (the ones capable of empathy, anyways) are the same as the rest of us, only luckier.
as someone who recently escaped the labor trap (that is what capitalists call it…wages are suppressed for a reason…), the shift from needing to work and not is…profound.
no wonder so many rich cunts are batshit psychopaths, nobody born into $ can ever truly know this feeling of relief (and the resulting stress, just from your brain leaving “survival mode”…hierarchy of needs stuff, then realizing just how fucked everything is, how powerless you still are even as new-rich to change anything…)
Its any position of power in my experience. People get power, justifying in their mind that they and people like them should be in power. Even games about being in charge run into that problem. Maintaining power becomes a major part of the game at some part.
That’s a good point, as illustrated by things like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
That experiment was massively flawed to the point of uselessness.
That’s exactly what a rich and powerful squirrel would say.
I think there’s research to that effect.
Well, it would make sense. Rich people have always creeped me out, just instinctively.
I’m sure the threshold varies, but I would back research that attempts to pinpoint or at least narrow down what amount of wealth starts to change your brain chemistry for the worse.
I saw something recently that suggested their brain scans look similar to serial killers.
And in retrospect it’s too bad more people didn’t steal from Microsoft so that it failed as a business.
Well yes.
Being a Billionaire should be criminalized
I don’t mind billionaires as long as everything is fairly taxed.
If taxes were fair there would be no billionaires.
I kinda compare it to semi truck weigh stations. I found out some time ago that if the math works out that a truck got from one weigh station to another too fast the driver can get a speeding ticket since its assumed they broke the law getting there. Apply that to money. If a person accumulates too much money, it should just be assumed that person broke laws getting it and they should be severly fined (like, most of it).
They’re not assuming anything, they are doing calculus.
For the record, i literally said “if the math works out” 😁
i tried reading that article. I am waaaaaaaaay too dumb to understand it
It does not have to be your cup of tea, but for the record, reading math does not require being smart so much as being patient.
Lol, wikipedia in regards to math is always fucky. I love statistics and calculus, and I still struggle through their pages.
I’m a little disappointed this wasn’t a link to the film strip we saw in high school. The cop drawling “Now this here is Rolle’s theorem…” is classic.
Aw, that makes me sad that I never got that. We just had the example in our textbook be a cop at a tollway.
You can be a billionaire if you are willing to pay a million per month as taxes.
That’s a rate of only 1.2% per year, was that your intention ?
No, if he is earning a billion a year that’s too low. But most billionaire have familial wealth and might be earning a few millions in a month. I don’t mind taking a million or two off of it even if he is not earning anything.
“earning”
oh man. Remember when the ultrawealthy were getting taxed like 80%? Those were the days
There were a lot of tax write offs through incentives which was a good thing because it actually encouraged rich people and businesses to be proactively productive towards the public good.
So done right, they paid nowhere near the 80%. Of course there was abuse and loopholes.
And off topic and contrary to popular thought, Jimmy Carter was the one who started deregulation in this area. He was trying to get the economy moving again and was taking a “reasonable” approach. Reagan took Carter’s idea and went on a heist with it to enrich buddies and doners
It should be classified as a sign of mental illness. If I had half of a billion dollars I wouldn’t work another day in my life and the general public would never hear from me. These fuckers have more money than they could ever spend and still desperately want more.
i don’t see the point. It really is fucking pointless. They will NEVER spend billions in their entire fucking life, and yet they want more. More money. More money. So much more money. We need to take after star trek and abolish money
But then how would they track their high score?
It should be classified as a sign of mental illness.
It is. They call it hoarding disorder.
Now the only thing I will say is that Bill Gates is giving away much of his fortune and yes it may be to his benefit to a point however other people are actually benefiting from him giving it away. Bill Gates even admits that most of what he did when he was younger was driven out agreed. However he is doing quite a bit to try to change that and make up for that.
His donation pledge was more of a flex because he’s increased his net worth more than he has donated. Also, people who were friends with Epstein should not get to decide where that money goes.
Gates hides behind his psychopathic greed and thirst for maniacal influence and power behind charity, what few people know is that the Bill’s foundation is an excellent exercise of venture philanthropy, where seeking profits comes first over everything else, at the expense of you know, philanthropy. They admit this.
It is something a lot of billionaires do, the Zuck has one, many do. They are not charities at all, in the practical sense but they are tax shelters. Gates will say that he has no day to day control, but he does help lean it where he wants it to go, plus you know who does by proxy and by earmarking the major donations? The Gates and Melinda Trust Fund. Who controls that? Bill and Melinda Gates and until a few years ago, also Buffet.
Bill is smart. He wants to make a shitload of money on vaccine tech? Sure, have the foundation give earmarked donations to the WHO that can only be used for that, then GABI, his other arm of the foundation can serve as the middle man for that cash. That’s before he invested hundreds of millions in big pharma and then what? = Profit. He does the same on education? = Profit. He pushed fake meat, invest a bit on it --relatively speaking to him-- and then, on the side, becomes the largest if not second largest farm land owner in the USA who then leases that land back to farmers. = Profit.
How come most people do not know most of this, because he also “donates” hundreds of millions to big media, you know, out the kindness of his heart. You know, so why would they report or say or rpeort anything negative of the guy? Quite the opposite. Remember Covid, why is a billionare on the news telling you what to do? Why him? Why any billionaire? Luckily, the link below tells us who they bribe, I mean, help with generous donations to their yearly budgets. And this is a couple of year old but the trend continues.
Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets](https://www.mintpressnews.com/documents-show-bill-gates-has-given-319-million-to-media-outlets/278943/)
You question any of this? How dare you you? You bigot, conspiracy theorist! Admittedly, that narrative keeps most people from looking at his BS critically.
Hey, remember when people cared about the environment? Nah, Gates said that we have to focus on Energy production instead now. Wait the guy who is now heavily investing billikns in AI and power hungry data centers wants more energy? You don’t say!
https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three-tough-truths-about-climate
Luckily for us he already had created a seeding/funding program where such initiatives will be invested on and much profit will be had on this exact front, and most will fall for it, because they always do.
He was friends with Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted for child abuse. Bill Gates is just an awful awful billionaire.
I’ve read that rather than little kids, Gates was interested in Epsteins influence with other members of the elite because Bill has an obsession with getting a Nobel Prize. Doesn’t absolve his character but I haven’t heard any rape allegations from victims yet.
Bill’s wife was very mad that Bill kept hanging out with Epstein and cited it as one of the divorce reasons.
She refused to elaborate and told people they should hear the rest from Bill himself. So I think we all know where this is going.
I’m not defending Gates, I’m saying he allegedly had other motivations. Definitely could have been a 2 birds with 1 stone for him.
I didn’t say he did. Is more of Billy at the height of his wealth and influence he couldn’t ditch Epstein. He has no good bone in his body.
He have no life
I think he genuinely believed it was the best thing for society. He, like so many, was (and likely still is) convinced that everyone thinks like he does. So he believes the only thing that drives people is money.
Now if that were the case, the only way to advance society and facilitate growth in software would be to offer smart people a lot of money.
In that flawed logic, he really thought it was for the best.
Fair point. It’s not an excuse, but it does explain a lot. Nobody is the villain in their own story, after all.
A tale of greed ending with a despicable billionaire.
We all know that every billionaire is a horrible person. They can’t be anything else.
Warren Buffet is ok in my book.
Would you care to elaborate why he is okay in your book? Do you believe that he can make money out of thin air, without harming other people (mostly those who have the least)? Do you believe that when he invests in Goldman Sachs during the economic crisis in 2008, that it was a good choice? That making money of people losing homes and lives is what a good, or even “ok” person does?
I’m a simple man. Ok is ok enough.
You don’t get to a billionn without exploiting people along the way.
People or natural ressources. Even if it’s on stock trade, someone had to create that worth - and those who created it, didn’t get it…
Buying low and selling high is fundamentally taking advantage of other peoples losses.
ABAB
There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
Billionaire being a selfish person? Who woulda known? But yes, even though he donates a lot of his wealth, becoming a billionaire is a sign of being a sociopath.
His donations are a tax dodge. Besides this billionaire philanthropy is a way to say that the people should not dictate how funds are allocated to things like medical and scientific research, international aid, etc. it’s saying that we instead are okay with our wealth being extracted to pseudokings and allowing them to make these decisions on our behalf. Should we research aids? Space? Should we give food aid to foreign nations experiencing famine? We don’t get to decide, let’s hope one of the oligarchs shines their light on these plights.
Meanwhile it buys great PR to rehab an image. Bill gates is “the nice billionaire” who sends people 10k of Microsoft shit he didn’t even pay for through reddit secret Santa (eg an ad buy). No one then cares that was instrumental in making computers full of proprietary bullshit, destroying interoperability, eliminating competition and killing open source efforts (look up embrace, extend, extinguish if you want to get angry about 90s and early 2000s Microsoft), or even that he probably raped kids on epsteins island
He desperately wants a Nobel Prize
Nobody cares about a Nobel Prize. He buys up vaccines using his “charity” and then puts them all behind a patent wall. And bill uses his influence to do capitalist psyops, like doing climate change denial through channels like Kurzgesagt.
My PC repair teacher hated Gates. The first story he told us about him was about how he essentially obtained DOS for a literal pittance, turned a massive profit on it, and never credited the original creators.
I might’ve skewed the story over the years of trying to keep it in my memory, but if I did it just goes to show how much I hate Bill Gates.
Nah you about got it.
He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.
Idk who these ppl are even donating to, never benefits my life, wherever they go its not benefiting the ppl they took the money from, some third world country if that
I remember reading somewhere that his foundation was all a massive tax avoidance scheme. It was quite a compelling argument when broken down. I wish I could find it again.
Simply follow the big money. He’s got more net worth now than when he said he would start donating.
Bingo
