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.
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.
All billionaires are horrible humans and parasitic to all of humanity
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.
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.
I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.
ai is the rich stealing from us, piracy is usually us taking it from the rich.
That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.
Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.
Hardly. Bill Gates came from a wealthy family, attended a private school, and through it had thousands of hours of computer programming time several years before even the Altair 8800 came out. He had a personal connection to IBM through his mother, which is how Microsoft got the DOS deal. His circumstances were unique, and his success the result of a hefty dose of luck.
What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?
a rich person
Yeah, one would think so. And those were the hobbyists that Gates was addressing in that open letter.
And piracy is actual enjoyment of art made by hardworking devs who unfortunately work for multi billion dollar companies T-T
the common denominator is money
One day chat got won’t work without a paid subscription…
Intellectual property as a concept is a cancer to humanity, and we’d be in a much better world without it.
This is why they want Wikipedia and internet archive, etc, killed off. They have it for their training data but they won’t have a profitable model via paid subscriptions without a monopoly on information.
“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.
I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.
I’m on the side of abolishing intellectual property, with the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.
If there wasn’t a profit motive we’d get much less “slop art” and more challenging art made with passion. The slop would also be far less off-putting because at least the slop would be made with love for slop.
the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.
So, not actually abolishing IP, then.
Commercializing means sell for profit. If a non-profit were to create a cracked version of Windows 7 with security updates and sell that for $200 an install that’d not count as commercialization. The idea here is that if Netflix took someone else’s work and made a bajillion dollars off it they’d need to ask for permission and credit the original author.
I don’t know if something still counts as intellectual property if it can be infringed upon except by for-profit entities.
In the US, copyright is limited by Fair Use. It is still IP. Eventually, you’d just be changing how Fair Use works. Not all for the better, I think.
Maybe one could compare it to a right of way over someone’s physical property. The public may use it for a certain purpose, in a limited way, which lowers its value. But what value it has, belongs to the owner.
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.
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?
The most lemmy take ever
yeah, but on the other hand, he fucked up the entire reduction system in the US.
And in retrospect it’s too bad more people didn’t steal from Microsoft so that it failed as a business.
There have been many times when I thought to myself: “Hold on. Can I be absolutely sure that billionaires are scum? Maybe there’s a crucial part of the story I’m missing?”
Every single time I just found even more cases of them blatantly lying, manipulating data and taking advantage of everything and everyone around them for personal gain. And every one of those times, it got me more depressed about the current and future state of society and the world in general.
You can try this yourself. I highly recommend it, even though the outcome is obvious. We can very rarely, if ever, be 100% sure about anything, so it’s always a good idea to put your beliefs to the test. However, I find it fairly self-evident that anyone seriously arguing in favor of any billionaire has simply never critically examined this topic.
No matter where and how deeply you look, it’s just evidence upon evidence upon evidence that they are, in fact, the worst filth that has ever shared the air with us. Though at least this one thing is comming to an end. Soon, we’ll be breathing toxic waste while they’ll be enjoying clean air in their doomsday bunkers larger than entire neighborhoods.
There’s some 0.0001% theoretical possibility that a billionaire could be a non-sociopath. If they literally dedicated their life to extracting money from the wider economy or top crust, not spending any of it on themselves or their descendants, but instead solely redistributing to the most needing people in the world. Monetary wealth at the end of the day is just economic control - it doesn’t become evil until it’s actually used for your own benefit, i.e., the economy is being rewired for you to live in luxury.
Assuming of course (big fat assumption) that you don’t screw people over to get it in the first place - and, even if you are giving it all away, it’s questionable why you’d end up with a surplus of money that large, if your goal is to donate it, why would the rate coming in exceed the rate going out, unless the goal was to purchase some institution or something, i.e., purchase Walmart and turn it into a cooperative. Probably not to invest the money to grow it to have more to give, because the return on investment for the money also has to come from somewhere, i.e., has its own ethical ramifications.
But I mean, name a single person in the last century who fit that profile. I can’t name one. So. And at the end of the day the best situation for the society isn’t to have single people controlling things and hoping they use their power responsibly, it’s to democratize that power and have everyone use it responsibly.
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Even Taylor.
Oooh, ruin Warren Buffet for me!
(This isn’t a snarky rebuttal I just never heard anything but figures it’s too good to be true)
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.
His wife left him when she found out he’s in the Epstein files. Because Bill Gates rapes children.
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.
Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past him.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
