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.
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?
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
About 10th, really
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Have you tried asking a mod to unlock your prison cell and let you leave?
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
Love how the definition of nuance changes with you based on your pop culture understanding of history and the world
If Buggs Bunny fights someone it’s okay to have a one sided opinion of them lol
Not at all. It’s absolutely true that Hitler had some good points to his personality. It’s silly as fuck to bother defending him by pointing them out, but they existed.
The same is true of Gates, and it’s nothing like the silly tomato analogy.
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.
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.