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.
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.
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I read his memoir “Source Code”. He has had a fascinating life and I still don’t understand how such a geeky person turns into cold blooded business as he does. There are still a lot of other billionaire I would shit on before Gates and I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth and his work with charity, but yeah well, I guess he has pretty awful sides still.
I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth
Even if it is just a scam?
I mean - if he at least shows some motivation to do it, then it is still better than the many billionaire that simple don’t try to give a shit.
Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.
Sure.
What makes you think a help l geeky person isn’t cold blooded?
fake charity that benefits him in other ways.
there is zero altruistic motive in anything he does.That is simply not true. I might be that some of it benefits him partly or fully, but saying that nothing of all his projects does anything other than benefit him is something easily falsifiable.
Not saying the charity organization is fake itself.
But Gates doing things ‘for charity’ is 100% fake.Tax purposes, etc.
Gets a country to buy a vaccine (this specific one, no other generic cheaper one) and then Gates ‘helps’ by paying 10%.
Huge profit for his investment in the company that he happened to invest in and coincidentally made that specific vaccine.Noit to mention he profited from covid and was indirectly responsible for massive deaths
Pretty sure the charity actually does decent work
But yeah, it’s basically a way to clear his name in the history records
No, he doesn’t care about his name, it’s a scam to make more money. https://newrepublic.com/post/177019/billionaire-philanthropy-scam-bill-gates
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.
Bill Gates spent a lot of his pro years running a bad company quite well, and exploiting a dominant position in the market that any soulless biz guy would love to have.
He seemed to get a conscience around the time he stopped running the show, and seems to be different while not regretting his behavior in that phase.
I think we can decide he was a bit of a cock back then, while still noting he’s done some good work since. We are nuanced enough, right?
God you hit the nail on the head, and why I’m getting very annoyed here on Lemmy. People refuse to have nuanced takes and just comment incessantly about how people are evil and doing anything makes you a bad person. Turns out people are nuance, and we can judge them as such. You can say he did some terrible things to make Microsoft successful while also saying he has done some very good things with his fortune. It is not black and white.
Its not black and white to you but people have different values so him throwing billions of dollars at charity does not effect his choice to buy up farm land and potentially ruin innovation in the computing space.
These are not my opinions just saying why someone would act like it is black and white
Your take is more nuanced than most I see here and I appreciate that, see the other comment as a prime example.
I suppose I did see “ABAB” so I suppose you would be talking about those comments and I agree that is infuriating
It’s just every thread man, every one of them devolves into it and I’m so tired. It’s quite literally like the Good Place where even the act of buying a tomato will get people raging in the comments about how apparently you support climate change, slavery, and every other bad thing involved in the growing of it. Or, hear me out, I just bought a tomato. I’m just so tired of it here
It’s quite literally like the Good Place
LOL, just no.
Just hear me out guys, Hitler was a nature lover! You can’t be judging people by just their worst acts!
Again, no nuance and going right to black and white
I’m just so tired of it here
Have you tried asking a mod to unlock your prison cell and let you leave?
Maybe pick a billionaire that wasn’t a frequent flyer of the Lolita Express to have this epiphany.
Seriously. He is a deeply bad evil person that paid a lot of money for propaganda, and you fell for it.
Dude got divorced because his wife found out about his involvement with Epstein.
Some things aren’t nuanced at all. Some crimes and shittiness cannot be made up for.
In my dictionary “nuanced” has become synonymous with “childishly naive and misinformed” thanks to its use as a thought stopping cliche by people like you
And ad hominem attacks are empty and hollow to me.
People are nuanced, billionaires aren’t just people, they’re a distillate of oppression. The amount of wealth and power people like Gates have is perverse, obscene, and unsustainable. With power comes responsibility, if that responsibility feels unfair, give up the power, he could decide to drop everything and feed the hungry.
Lemmy is dogmatic yes, and sometimes that’s really fucking annoying but billionaires aren’t people like you and me, they are disgustingly greedy to the point it is abusive to not just individuals but millions of people.
Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.
He seemed to get a conscience around the time he stopped running the show
It was all a show. His “philanthropy” was about exploiting farmers in other countries.
He’s still the same self-serving prick, just that he’s trying to buy himself some karma whilst channeling his riches through his own foundations.
The Behind The Bastards postcast episode would suggest otherwise
I love that show. When you compare him to other billionaires he’s not the worst. I think Jeff bezos does more harm. He has an episode too
Not winning a race to the bottom doesn’t make someone good or decent, though
Any any good person wouldn’t become a billionaire in the first place.
Very true but if you’re deciding which of the rich to eat he’s probably not the first to start with.
i wouldn’t cry if he were the first tho
I appreciate your desire for more nuance, and I support it throughout discussions.
But the case of Bill Gates is fairly clear-cut. His philanthropy efforts are covering for shitty business practices and tax evasion.
This is one of the reasons why people are concerned about billionaire philanthropy in the first place. It creates a good image of a savior, while serving to reduce taxes and cover for malicious investments. We would be much, much better off taking this in form of taxes and actually allocating it for good.
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.
His wife left him when she found out he’s in the Epstein files. Because Bill Gates rapes children.
Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past him.
That is exactly how it looks. The timing is correct. I can imagine the argument, although, they might not have loved each other enough to even argue about it by that point.
If I was a billionaire looking to make waves, I’d release a memoir upon my death bed, admitting to the kid rapey cabal. Nothing to lose. Hi Bill.
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” 😁
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Lol, wikipedia in regards to math is always fucky. I love statistics and calculus, and I still struggle through their pages.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
“Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
And he is one of the “better” billionaires. He has donated over $100 Billion to help people around the world, which makes him look like a great guy on paper.
I think it’s not so much him as a person, but his business decisions in the context of capitalism. That’s the real evil, not any one person.
Just to be clear, I’m not defending him or his actions.
Brave of you to hold a nuanced opinion! So many people have a very binary view of others, and Lemmy’s the same, as the downvoting shows.
And yes, totally, he was a typical morally corrupt businessman and one of the first tech bros in a time before most of Lemmy was even born. But he’s also done a lot of good in the second half of his life. People are dismissive of that but they bloody well shouldn’t be.
Who else has contributed $2bn specifically to fight malaria? Nobody. There’s quite a few now who could have helped but nobody else has. The Gates Foundation has also contributed that much again towards fighting Tuberculosis and AIDs. These are big numbers and they’ve had a real effect. Those of us who live comfortable lives are fortunate where these diseases aren’t everyday killers of friends and family and we cannot fully appreciate the benefit this work has done.
Does this offset his earlier negative behaviour? I honestly think it might do.
I wish there was a better way than the “be a horrible piece of shit for the first half of your life until you get your bag, then do nice stuff to rehab your image” path a lot of of them seem to take, but at least we get something out of some of them that way I suppose.
He never stopped doing bad things, he just started rehabing his image
So many people have a very binary view of others, and Lemmy’s the same, as the downvoting shows.
What a ridiculous argument you’ve made here. The voting system is literally binary. No one can vote 7/10 on messaging, 4/10 on points.
Does this offset his earlier negative behaviour? I honestly think it might do.
This is exactly why hes done it. You don’t know what hes actually responsible for. You don’t see the pharmaceutical investments hes made, farmland he owns, or his bad takes (like recently suggesting that we should abandon the climate because he’s dipping his toes into the AI space).
You see some flashy figures and figure, well that must be a good guy!
Some “nuance” that is.
This is exactly why hes done it.
Why would he give a shit what people think about him? Others rich people don’t because when you’ve got enough money you can insulate yourself entirely from what the world thinks.
You don’t know what hes actually responsible for
Nor do the people judging him so harshly.
You don’t see the pharmaceutical investments hes made
The fuck? Why would he donate money and save countless lives just to benefit from it via some claimed business link?
What a ridiculous argument you’ve made here.
Why would he give a shit what people think about him? Others rich people don’t because when you’ve got enough money you can insulate yourself entirely from what the world thinks.
This is the most ridiculous line of reasoning.
Firstly, many rich people care. Many care about their “legacy”. They want their names on big donations, and on school campuses.
Secondly, many rich people spend inordinate amounts on PR advisement firms, demonstrating that there are significant dollar values put into caring about this. We’re talking about PR for the person, not even for a business.
Nor do the people judging him so harshly.
They judge from what is known. You judge from giving him the benefit of the doubt between the cracks.
The fuck? Why would he donate money and save countless lives just to benefit from it via some claimed business link?
This is such a bizarre misrepresentation of what my comment is clearly saying.
I am clearly pointing out that he is still doing evil and you are being blinded by some fancy curated numbers.
I don’t even know how you got to that conclusion.
Yeah. He has shaped the world in very negative ways through his decisions. He could donate his entire fortune today and live out the rest of his life in a monastery, but I would still hate him.
That doesn’t even scratch the anti consumerist behaviour behind what he did to Linux that piece of shit.
Honestly it makes me so fucking depressed when I hear people saying something as fundamentally disconnected from reality, something so needless and unthinking, something so flavorless and insipid as even ironically implying Gates is one of the “better” ones, that “as a person” he may be fine and that no one is “defending him.”
I wasn’t being ironic. Better is a relative term, and I do believe that gates is a significantly better person that musk or zuckerberg, or many other evil asshat billionaires. But that doesn’t make him a good person. I’m not defending him, he has greatly contributed to the rampant capitalism that is destroying our climate and society.
Things are seldom black and white in this world, pure good and pure evil do not exsist. Is it easier for you to see things in absolutes?
Why even make the comparison though
You are right, it’s a worthless endeavor.
Things are seldom black and white in this world, pure good and pure evil do not exsist. Is it easier for you to see things in absolutes?
Jesus, you’re really doubling down on the unthinking and insipid takes.
I’ll triple down if you like. Absolutism is stupid and a hollow comfort. It’s easy to vilify people, and difficult to hold cognitive dissonance about how any one person can be both good and evil.
Gates is a Epstein customer, an IP thief and a con artist. I 100% agree with the OPs original comment about him. But he also helped eradicate polio from the face of the planet.
It would be nice and simple if we could point to him in his volcano lair of villany, touriring small animals for fun, and say “there, that’s pure evil, that’s him, the devil incarnate”, but the real world isn’t a movie or a video game. It is just not that simple.
If that sort of opinion is a sign of “unthinking” to you, then I suppose I’m wasting my time here.
He is moving money in his own foundation
I think it’s not so much him as a person
Gates is in the Epstein files.
He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.
Most people are.
Sounds like you need to keep better company
Speaking for yourself it would seem
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.
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.
It depends on your definition of horrible. Mine is quite broad.
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.
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.
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.
*Xerox PARC. It’s an acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.
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’s missing out on his redemption arc. But I doubt if put in his shoes that anyone would pass up the opportunity he had.
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 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
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.
All billionaires are horrible humans and parasitic to all of humanity
