6 ms·

Would you have preferred that he didn't spend his gains on charity? EDIT: Also, did Bill Gates steal anything? Manipulation and monopolies are fundamentally wr

• avgcorrection 5y ago
  > IF they do, then the Carnegies and Rockefellers were 'stealing' as well. Rockefeller was called a robber baron.
  • orwin 5y ago
    Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron too. I think the Appalachians still have memories of those "great" men.
• alophawen 5y ago
  He literally said what he preferred: > I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.
• CPLX 5y ago
  Yes I would prefer the government take it from him in the form of taxes, allowing a democratic process to determine how the money is spent.
  • cloutchaser 5y ago
    Ah, because governments spend money according to democratic process... Yes.
    • CPLX 5y ago
      Yes. Governments where the leaders are selected by voting are taking action via a democratic process.
    • ss108 5y ago
      ?? Yes, in the US, for example, POTUS submits budget for Fed Gov executive branch, Congress approves. Congress generally has power of the purse.
    • DonHopkins 5y ago
    • anders_p 5y ago
      That's literally how it works... You can vote for someone different, if you are unhappy with how the politicians in charge spend money. You have no say whatsoever, in how billionaires and oligarchs choose to spend theirs. Not sure how you could even come to any other conclusion?
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
    Or to have prevented him doing all those anti-competitive practices that led to all that money. Remember when you couldn't buy a PC without also buying windows, even if you wanted to use a different OS. F Bill Gates.
    • scld 5y ago
      Like an iPhone?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • anders_p 5y ago
        > Like an iPhone? No, not at all like an iPhone. If there was a line of PC's with Windows installed, like the iPhones, it wouldn't have been a problem. Not long ago, it was literally impossible to buy a PC in regular stores, without it having Windows pre-installed.
        • aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
          Not to mention the fact that computer manufacturers who offered Linux instead still had to pay Microsoft a Windows royalty for each machine. https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-v-microsoft-corporation https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
  • eaplmx 5y ago
    Broken democracy, but government by the people at the end https://web.archive.org/web/20220302212243/https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597 https://web.archive.org/web/20220302212243/https://medium.co...
• crispyambulance 5y ago
  It's sad that the world depends on the largess of a billionaire for basic disease eradication. That's really the job of governments and their public health departments, but yeah, there are worse things he could spend his money on (see Koch bros). None of us know much or anything at all about the ethics of Gates, I think it's even unfair to smear his name with Epstein's unless there's actual evidence/allegations of something (Epstein did seek out tychoons, after all, perhaps he was slowly working up to enticing Gates into something compromising?).
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Government intervention should always be a last resort, since it inherently involves coercion and violation of people's rights as opposed to voluntary action. We should be glad that people are willing to donate to charitable efforts that address critical problems such as disease.
• potamic 5y ago
  Warren Buffet's son had something interesting to say about this. > As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-in...
• petilon 5y ago
  > Also, did Bill Gates steal anything? Wow, what a question! Some would argue that all he did was steal! Is there anything Microsoft did that was not stolen from somewhere else? Starting with the Basic interpreter that got Gates started. That was stolen from DEC. Isn't .NET and C# a copy of Java? It may or may not be theft in a legal sense, but morally it certainly is! Microsoft's software development process is program-manager driven. That means even when they hire smart developers, they don't give the developers a free rein. Instead PMs decide what you will do. And where do PMs get ideas? By looking at competitors' products. That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company.
  • chirau 5y ago
    I am glad you recognize that technically what you have explained is not stealing. >> That's why Microsoft is not an innovative company. You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too.
    • redprince 5y ago
      > You may not like the company, but it is definitely an innovative company. They may not innovate on the things you are drawn to, but they definitely innovate. A lot too. They certainly innovated world leading business strategies like "embrace, extend and extinguish". As far as technical ideas and innovation are regarded, I have not seen a single instance of something they built which was not a copy or an extension of something which had been seen before.
      • cudgy 5y ago
        Sounds like Apple too. Steve Jobs was a master at copying technologies but evolving them into arguably better mousetraps. Electric cars have been around for over 100 years But Elon musk evolved them and brought them to the masses. These examples abound.
  • yodon 5y ago
    This is how innovation works. New ideas build off previous ideas. Companies launch products after seeing what else is in the market. The legal system determines when this is an allowed and when it isn't, that's why that legal system exists. If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented that no one else has ever had a similar idea or done something remotely similar, there's almost certainly something profoundly wrong with it.
• tjpnz 5y ago
  It's impossible to quantify by how much but the widespread adoption of open source seen in the 2000s might've come sooner if Gates wasn't actively trying to hobble it. Where the world might be today is something which bothers me.