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.
Obviously Bill Gates is a household name and in the tech community everyone knows who is Steve Ballmer. However not many people know who Paul Allen is even though he was one of the founder of Microsoft at the very start. In 1982 Paul Allen was diagnosed with cancer and Bill and Steve were worried that if Paul died the shares of the company would go to someone else along with control of the company. While Paul was literally getting cancer treatment, Bill and Steve were scheming to dilute the shares of the company to wrestle the control of the company away from Paul. Fortunately for Paul he survived the cancer. It really doesn’t put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in very good light though. I remember reading about this from Robert X. Cringely’s blog about two decades ago and I heard Paul Allen wrote about his version of this story in his memoir before his death.
Edit: I tried to find the original Robert X. Cringely’s story from back in 2006 but looks like that link is broken but he did referenced it in 2011 when Paul Allen’s book was released.
Paul Allen got great cards.
He is literally in the Epstein List no?
Even if he wasn’t he’s still a capitalist pig.
*oligarchical pig
Capitalism is just free competition, which is the opposite of what Bill Gates is for.
In a communist economy he would be the same pig.
Capitalism always lead to monopolies and a lack of competition. At some point one company will always get lucky and be able to use its money to completely destroy competition, especially small competition.
*Oligarchy always lead to monopolies and a lack of competition.
Yes and capitalism has all the incentives to create oligarchies.
So does socialism and communism.
Ok buddy boy. Sounds like someone is a temporarily embarassed millionaire.
gates wife left him bc epstein hooked him up with a russian chick 30 years younger then him :\
but he was a piece of shit decades before that happened.
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
More of a total goatse of a man, an impressive gaping emptiness that consumes and gets ass all over everything while making us all look at it.
Except the wedding ring. He’s too much of a pedophile to keep one of those.
Upvote for use of goatse in an insult.
Most people are.
People are shaped by the conditions which they are subjected to. Currently, those conditions promote endless greed and exploitation as a way and means of life, and give out huge advantages to anyone willing and able to perpetrate them at scale.
It’s a continuum, of course, like everything. Most people sit somewhere in the middle, with a few people defining the extremes.
No, most people are not horrible.
It depends on your definition of horrible. Mine is quite broad.
I doubt you actually believe this, at least if we are understanding the words as written.
Just based on the website we are talking on, I am going to assume we have a few shared moral similarities, at least at a glance.
We think murder, rape, discrimination based on inalienable traits, domestic abuse, religious fanaticism, theft outside of exceptions are wrong.
If we start going down even that quickly thought up list, and just look at surveys from groups throughout the world, we start chunking massive percentages of people off of our “good” list very quickly.
These are nowhere near exact numbers because the point isn’t about any specific one of these, but about disqualifying behaviours and points of view.
Most people don’t murder, but many support it. Let’s just say we are only thinking about people who will murder at some point in their lives, and guesstimate that at 1% off the list.
99% good
Most people don’t rape… or do they? How many third world or religiously fanatic nations treat rape as standard, within marriages, on people of lower status, etc.
Even in western nations, the numbers of people who are sexually assaulted by people they know are more like 1 in [single digit number], and then further surveys always reveal that there is probably significant under-reporting going on, with many people unable to believe they were raped, told to be silent, and who ultimately rationalize away the event.
Now you go to countries with religious fanaticism, and many if not most condone rape in some fashion, especially spousal rape.
I would estimate, that the amount of people who rape, extremely roughly guesstimating, is around 1/10th the population, if not higher.
Some will overlap with the murderers of course, but this is just a thought experiment, and I already think this guess is on the low side, so lets move on.
89% good
Discrimination is where we start chunking hard. Even if you try to be charitable here, surveys show that even within western countries many are ok with and regularly discriminate against people for their inalienable traits. You go to poorer countries or countries with less stable situations and this gets even worse.
Lets just guesstimate that of the non overlaps, this takes 3/10 off the list, giving quite a bit of leeway to people with less blatant instances.
59% good
I could keep going but I hope you see the point I am making here and why I think that if just about anyone here sat down and truly pieced together what the average person was like, with whatever their personal list of disqualifiers from being a good person were, they would quickly come to the conclusion, that most people are not good, and could easily come to the conclusion that many were horrible, depending on what horrible meant in that context. Horrible doesn’t have to be saved for only hitler just because its not used for someone who steals a candy bar.
Speaking for yourself it would seem
Sounds like you need to keep better company
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
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
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.
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.
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…)
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
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.
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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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.
He’s also a thief of course, as that’s the only way to become a billionaire.
Yup. He stole a bunch of ideas and code, then got upset that people were stealing his ideas and code. Do as I say, not as I do.
Wait… You’re telling me that people born into extreme privilege and wealth turn out to be self-aggrandizing, egotistical, sociopaths who drastically over-estimate their own importance and contribution to society?
My world view is shook!
Well yes.
Being a Billionaire should be criminalized
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.
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.
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.
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.
It should be classified as a sign of mental illness.
It is. They call it hoarding disorder.
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?
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 ?
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
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”
I don’t mind billionaires as long as everything is fairly taxed.
If taxes were fair there would be no billionaires.
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.
Watch the TV movie from the late 90s “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which pretty much paints both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as really shitty people. I mean just look at what Gates did with the Altair. Said he had an operating system, didn’t have an operating system, and what have you.
Then there’s the whole Xerox Park thing where neither Apple nor Microsoft would be where they’re at today without the engineers at Xerox who were pretty much forced to hand over their stuff because Xerox execs didn’t see value in a GUI and Mouse. Gates and Jobs both were more than happy to go in there and pillage what was developed in order to create Windows and The Macintosh/MacOS
Yeah, that’s a good one, and I also enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Stories like Jobs getting a bonus when Wozniak was able to design a board with fewer chips and then not mentioning the extra money to Woz are perfect examples of how sociopaths like Jobs and Gates operate. It’s sad that ruthless charlatans like them who exploit the true geniuses and innovators are allowed to accrue so much money and power in our society.
*Xerox PARC. It’s an acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.
Yep I remember that movie, but read Steve Levys Hackers. Gates was always a douch. I also read the letter he wrote. I think it was an opinion piece in a newsletter.
We all know that every billionaire is a horrible person. They can’t be anything else.
You don’t get to a billionn without exploiting people along the way.
ABAB
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.
There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
And for any of the people saying “he changed”.
One of his most recent “philanthropic” ventures was to partner with Nestle (good start) to “modernize and increase yields” of the dairy industries in impoverished countries.
The two organizations then sold modern (likely non-servicable) equipment and entrenched them in corporate supply chain systems geared towards export and making it much harder to trade locally (not sure how that part worked, but was in what I read).
For a grand total of… 1% increased dairy yields.
Then 3-4 years later they pulled out, leaving heavily indebted farmers without the corporate supply chains and delivery systems they were forced to switch to, and making it very difficult to switch back to the old ways of working, so they can’t sell nearly as much locally.
Who do you think will buy up those farms when the farmers go bankrupt and have to sell ar rock bottom prices.
His work on malaria in Africa focused on bed nets to the explicit exclusion of larvacide control of mosquitoes. Millions of preventable cases over the last 30 years.
Then there’s the circumcision to fight aids.
Guy’s a fuckwit.
He is doing what the robber barons did, they are trying to clear their name before they die.
His mother was an influential person on the board of directors of several firms. She met with John Opel, who was the IBM chairman, and secured her son’s Microsoft contract with IBM in the 1980s, where it then became dominant and made her a ton of money.
It’s vested interests, and who you know.
Yeah, I read that he was a nepo baby. Also, people say “But he dropped out of university to start Microsoft.”
He dropped out of fucking Harvard. His life was easy as piss from the get-go.
Is everyone at Harvard a nepo baby or has definitely had an easy life? I don’t understand your argument.
Yes, aside from a few scholarship kids, the Ivy League schools, and especially Harvard and Yale, were specifically built and continue to this day to be schools for the children of the elite.
It’s a reasonable assumption that a family that could send their child to Harvard in the 70s was very well off already.
His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?
In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.
Hear hear. I had real hopes for Lina Khan during Biden’s term, but that seemed to have petered out to nothing. Let’s see if something happens once the monster is out of power
Lina Khan is now co-chair of Zohran Mamdani’s transition team!
I’ve got my fingers crossed
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
He saved Apple to avoid an antitrust trial.
It’s just business right?
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
What drives me crazy is when I hear this fact being cited as a positive thing that makes him a role model.
It is a very good sales person. But he didn’t understood how could the network (or Internet) change the world, even with his Windows monopole. He had Encarta and lost it, without reusing it, to Wikipedia.
He didn’t even write that software, he had to buy it from someone else because his own version sucked.
He and colleagues wrote an interpreter to use BASIC on the Altair system. They didn’t write basic from scratch
