Good thing he exploited all of those people, now he’ll get some good PR.
Billionaires should not exist. Being a better person than Elon Musk is the lowest bar a human can possibly clear.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Go to your local big box store and find one of the aisles that’s got pallets loaded up on the upper shelves.
Those pallets are 48" square and the shelves are generally 36" tall though sometimes they’re taller.
A pallet of 100 dollar bills, stacked neatly and put in one of the 36" shelves would be about 125 million dollars.
You’d need 8 of them to get to a billion.
1 million seconds is about 11 days.
1 billion seconds is about 32 years.
I’ve always liked the seconds one because time is something anyone can relate to, and the gap there is staggering. Of course then there’s a trillion seconds, which is almost 32,000 years.
What’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars.
If you worked at an hourly rate of $1000, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you’ll need to work for 114 years to earn a billion dollars.
In a more “realistic” scenario, $17/h, 10 hours per day, no weekends or holidays, it would take you more than 16000 years.
Totally agree. Open Letter to Hobbyists will be his legacy. Embrace Extend Extinguish will be his legacy.
IDK. Something tells me we aren’t done hearing about his ties to Epstein or him sleeping around as CEO.
Giving away 200 billion dollars means having 200 billion dollars. Bill Gates might be one of the 'better billionaires, but just the act of hoarding that much capital is harmful, let alone the method used to obtain it.
So… Where did that $200 Billion come from?
Right, Gates is no saint. He became a billionaire the same way they all do, and he has caused a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world.
But that doesn’t invalidate his criticism of Musk. If anything, he’s speaking from experience, with his unique perspective from atop the same mountain. Doing charitable work doesn’t change the past, but it can change the future.
Gates probably disagrees with me, but at least he acknowledges the problem.
Fun fact, because of the sheer quantity of fucking people over Gates is guilty of in his time at Microsoft, we can assume that at least a handful of the people he screwed died prematurely as a direct result of Gates’ actions. Something about every 1% increase in unemployment sees an accompanying increase of 37,000 deaths by various means.
Bill Gates killed people, is what I’m getting at.
And let’s not forget Clippy.
Can someone recommend me some good local LLMs I can get from HuggingFace? I’m new to all of this stuff, but running it locally with “Clippy” seems like a fun thing to do when I’m bored and don’t have anything to do. (I usually don’t have a lot of time, but damn it, I want to at least try this stuff once!)
This is an absurd stretch.
This is literal cause and effect in reality.
If I start a Rube Goldberg machine that ends with it shooting and killing you, should I not be held responsible?
I’d say it’s more butterfly effect than Rube Goldberg. A Rube Goldberg would be engineered with the intent and goal of shooting and killing you. Anyone who has made one can attest to the time and effort and focus needed to get it to accomplish its goal (which in this case is killing you).
Gates’ actions are not intended to kill you. Just to make himself rich. You are just collateral damage.
I mean it’s still about as moral as burning down the Amazon rainforest to make some money, but Bill Gates isn’t setting out with the goal to murder you specifically. Unless you slept with his wife or something.
He worked 500000 times as hard as other people! It’s well deserved! If you worked 168 hours a week instead of 40, and 120000 times as hard, you could easily make that, too.
🤫
Philanthropy shows us a breif glimpse of what life would be like if wealth were equally distributed.
I think it’s too little too late. Not for Gates but for this kind of philanthropy. We need it, yes, but corrupt governments can outlast goodwill. He needs to be exerting influence. He and other so-called “good billionaires” need to be the anti-Musk, not the ones that walk behind him and clean up his messes. Make more Tesla and Starlink and Amazon competitors with air-tight bylaws to keep them from turning into the thing we’re trying to destroy. Don’t just show compassion but how we can have a compassionate and sustainable economy.
Agreed, but I don’t think they want to try that hard.
Surely this will make us forget about their war profiteering
When a guy whose wife divorced him because he wouldn’t quit hanging out with a sex trafficker goes after you, you must really be a monstrous piece of shit.
Now he can explain why he fought against the COVID vaccine ip being distributed freely. I wonder how many people he indirectly harmed with that action
That’s how all his Charities are. It’s all bullshit. None of them are actually to help people. They always involve private funding of some bullshit that’s going to harm the world. Never public good, for a guy who’s entire career is based upon the use of free software he spent his entire life killing anything that could be free and open to people.
He’s the poster boy for capitalism. Take something given in good faith for the betterment of humanity, wall it off so that they HAVE to come to you to get it, and then make your millions while having to do nothing for anyone to keep up your monopoly.
People like him want to turn the world into a bizarro Chuck E. Cheese where all of us “poors” have to pay for each and every breath.
Bill Gates is probably one of the best billionaires. But it is very important that we all remember how he ended up with $200 billion dollars. Predatory monopolistic behavior.
Everyone should carefully read this 1999 article that I found in the archives of the New York Times.
How Microsoft Sought Friends In Washington - Nov. 7, 1999
Twenty months ago, Representative Billy Tauzin walked into the office of William H. Gates 3rd, chairman of Microsoft, bearing a 10 inch by 10 inch white box and a warning.
Mr. Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the telecommunications industry, placed the box on Mr. Gates’s desk. Inside was a lemon meringue pie, a reminder of another pie that had been thrown in Mr. Gates’s face several weeks earlier by a Microsoft critic. The message to Mr. Gates, the richest man on earth and the leader of the digital world, was blunt: You need to make friends in Washington.
Mr. Gates apparently took Mr. Tauzin’s message to heart – with a vengeance. While Microsoft and its executives contributed a relatively modest $60,000 to Republican Party committees in 1997, those contributions shot up to $470,000 as part of the company’s overall political contribution of $1.3 million in 1998. The 1998 figure included donations to political candidates, with the bulk of the money going to Republicans. This year, the company’s contributions of nearly $600,000 have been more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Mr. Gates and his top lieutenants have made dozens of trips to Washington, cultivating powerful figures in both parties and hiring some of the city’s priciest lobbyists. Microsoft has retained Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee; Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman from California; Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman from New York and a close friend of Vice President Al Gore; Mark Fabiani, former special counsel to the Clinton White House; and Kerry Knott, former chief of staff to Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the House majority leader.
Microsoft has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to research groups, trade groups, polling operations, public relations concerns and grass-roots organizations. It has financed op-ed pieces and full-page newspaper advertisements, and mounted a lobbying effort against an increase in the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement budget.
In June, Mr. Gates met for lunch with the Republican leaders of the House in the small whip’s room off the House chamber. They discussed Microsoft’s public policy agenda, ranging from exports of encryption software to Internet privacy to antitrust actions, said several participants at the meeting. Mr. Knott, now a top official in Microsoft’s Washington office, attended the session.
Eight days later, Mr. Armey introduced what he called his ‘‘e-Contract,’’ a list of Republican legislative initiatives that pointedly adopted Microsoft’s view of the role of government antitrust actions, like the one that now threatens to dismantle Microsoft.
Microsoft has hired as two former heads of the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a dozen or more prominent academics and writers, who publish articles and give interviews advocating Microsoft’s position.
Among them are Charles Rule, director of the Justice Department’s antitrust division in the Bush administration, and Paul Rothstein, a professor of law at Georgetown University and frequent network and cable-television commentator.
Another Microsoft move on Capitol Hill drew criticism for heavy-handedness. Its lobbying to trim the antitrust division’s budget brought a flurry of editorial condemnation. The Washington Post said Microsoft’s actions were ‘‘a comical caricature’’ of a company trying to bully its way through Washington.‘’
One Justice Department official said, ‘‘Even the mob doesn’t try to whack a prosecutor during a trial.’’
Bill Gates is probably one of the best billionaires.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but last time I checked, he hadn’t snuffed it yet?
Best billionaire my ass. Same meaning as “nicest serial killer”, or “rapist that leaves a mint on the pillow”. Screw you for even saying “best billionaire”.
Did you read the sentence after that big guy
He’s done way more damage than just harming the poor unfortunately.
Considering how much trouble I have paying my fucking bills in this country I’d sure love to have a piece of that money. Fucking rich people.
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