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> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. Doubt it would have changed anything

by soperj 8mo ago

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.

pixl97 8mo ago
Turns out Bill is just actually a piece of shit through and through
- decimalenough 8mo ago
  The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
  - lifestyleguru 8mo ago
    I'd prefer if rich simply paid their taxes and contributions instead of spending money on fighting poor children in Africa.
    - wrs 8mo ago
      That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
      - refulgentis 8mo ago
        You're absolutely right in a cold logical sense, even if it makes other people emotionally react to the comment. This was a kind way to react to a lazy false dichotomy, that it's either taxes or donations.
    - mikepurvis 8mo ago
      One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from. Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense). So really it's a two pronged thing: * the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections). * eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for. But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
      - lifestyleguru 8mo ago
        I mean literally taxing the literally rich. Most population by "taxing the rich" mean those earning >90k EUR/USD on employment contract. They see the real rich maybe few times in life from a distance on a yacht in Caribbean or Mediterranean but don't connect the dots.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
        mikepurvis 8mo ago
        I don't have a magic answer for how to get people on board, but I can say that I make a lot more than that number, and my taxes (in Canada) are way too low. I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
    - verisimi 8mo ago
      They do pay their taxes. It's just that they wrote the laws too. And, if you use trusts, foundations, corporations, etc, you are able to legally avoid taxes, while retaining the same control.
  - stronglikedan 8mo ago
    Okay, a complete piece of shit with an undigested kernel of sweet corn stuck in it.
  - Lammy 8mo ago
    You don't get that rich in the first place without being a ruthless asshole.
    - markus_zhang 8mo ago
      This. And this also explains why sometimes girls fell love to apparent assholes -- if you are an asshole it doesn't mean you are powerful, however if you are not an asshole then definitely you are not powerful.
    - wewewedxfgdf 8mo ago
      Proof please, not a slogan. Like, actual facts.
      - jcranmer 8mo ago
        I mean, do you have a counterexample? FWIW, Bill Gates is one of the people I would have pointed to as one of the less disreputable modern billionaires, and finding out that Melinda divorced him over his Epstein connections really soured my opinion of him.
        dnautics 8mo ago
        john mackey, Definitely a bit ruthless but pretty good at maintaining integrity, only a little bit of an internet troll.
        n4r9 8mo ago
        Is this the same John Mackey that fired his own father from the board and criticises younger generations for trying to find meaningful work? I think OP has a point, it's very difficult to accumulate vast wealth without behaving ruthlessly and being kind of an asshole when it comes to making tough profit-over-people decisions.
        wudu 8mo ago
        Warren Buffett
  - sobkas 8mo ago
    >The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
    - com2kid 8mo ago
      They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard. Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
      - sobkas 8mo ago
        >They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard. It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary. >Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that. They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
        JuniperMesos 8mo ago
        > It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary. Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?
        sobkas 8mo ago
        Easy way is not doing charter schools. Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.
  - ceejayoz 8mo ago
    > The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth. He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      [flagged]
    - vee-kay 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  - dakiol 8mo ago
    You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.
    - bradlys 8mo ago
      Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history. These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
    - dwd 8mo ago
      "But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?".
    - colechristensen 8mo ago
      Earning a tremendous amount of money and then amusing yourself by spending it on "charity" for the rest of your life doesn't make you a good person. It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people. He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.
      - idiotsecant 8mo ago
        It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.
        colechristensen 8mo ago
        Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best" I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
  - saalweachter 8mo ago
    Listen, billionaires just have to do three things to be beloved: 1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities. 2. Don't abuse children. 3. Stay off Twitter. It's not a high bar, we don't need to give a silver medal to those that fall short.
    - MengerSponge 8mo ago
      This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not. Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
    - vee-kay 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - fromMars 8mo ago
        There is a lot of hyperbolic vitriol in your post. Saying that Gates "has no qualms in killing children..." is quite a stretch. Using words like "Big Pharma" to make working on vaccines look like something awful is also a poor rhetoric device. It would be nice if you had a second source on the trials you referenced in India as it is not clear who the blame lies with. Capital research isn't a serious source as they clearly have their own anti-vax agenda.
        vee-kay 8mo ago
        [flagged]
  - mrguyorama 8mo ago
    Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people. There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend. I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering. Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery Bill Gates is a piece of shit.
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      It's confusing to me how this needs to be spelled out. It seems pretty obvious and anybody in IT should know - long before the general public - that Gates is a complete asshole.
    - fromMars 8mo ago
      As far as I am aware, Gates was not knowledgeable of the extent of Epstein's crimes. At the time they met in 2011, Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. How did he help him and call him a friend?
  - oulipo2 8mo ago
    The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way. He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - soperj 8mo ago
    You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that. It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship. Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US. The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
    - decimalenough 8mo ago
      Malaria deaths have fallen by 60% in the last 15 years, saving on the order of 12 million lives. Bill's foundation has donated around $4B to the cause. And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.
      - saulpw 8mo ago
        But much of the motivation for starting a foundation is from Melinda.
        lazide 8mo ago
        It’s almost like it was done… as a team. Where one side provided all the money, the other side provided the direction. Both were necessary. Weird huh?
        spiderice 8mo ago
        It's really easy to give away money you didn't earn lol
        saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin. How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that? Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
  - godelski 8mo ago
    > basically his entire fortune Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich. If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt. But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing. Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
    - globular-toast 8mo ago
      Warren Buffet wrote about this years ago. If you want to judge how "good" someone is you need to look at what they sacrifice. Gates sacrifices nothing. In fact, the entire thing is just marketing and basically worked for a long time. I was shocked to see people talking about Gates like he was a saint a few years ago. Glad to see that's changing.
  - Larrikin 8mo ago
    Its like George Washington and the other founding fathers, didn't become a king voluntarily, helped create the country and modern democracy, but loved his slaves so much they could only be freed after he was dead. You can create good while actually still being a terrible person. Much of this era is people being upset about their fallen "heroes"
    - manuelmoreale 8mo ago
      > helped create the country and modern democracy I’ll give you the creation of the country but modern democracy was not born in the USA. Your overall point is still valid though.
  - jmyeet 8mo ago
    A lot of the so-called "charity" by wealthy individuals is anything but. It's placing assets in a tax-advantaged positions where some of the proceeds gets used for "charity" (whatever that means) but they still maintain control. For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund. That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power. Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in. All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.
    - verisimi 8mo ago
      Also, don't forget, that the work itself can be about 'preparing the ground' for your non-charitable interests (which are probably held in trust, ie not held personally). Eg if you involve yourself in child education (perhaps making it worse) this is not an issue if it makes it more like that your classroom software is adopted. Or, if you are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, singing the praises of vaccines, is just a tax savvy way of increasing the market that you will benefit from.
    - technothrasher 8mo ago
      Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities. I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
  - bigfatkitten 8mo ago
    I’m sure Peter Scully[1] donated to charity at some point, too, and doesn’t make him any less evil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully
  - bsder 8mo ago
    Andrew Carnegie funded a whole lot of stuff we still enjoy today. He was still a piece of shit and responsible for a lot of people winding up dead. Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?). You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.
  - owebmaster 8mo ago
    No, decimalenough, "donating" his money doesn't change what he did, doesn't even make it slightly better.
  - gessha 8mo ago
    I saw a recent video by Zizek where he mentioned the original gray eminence - François Leclerc du Tremblay who was Cardinal Richelieu’s right hand man. During the day he orchestrated the thirty year war and during the night he wrote the most beautiful meditations. Does doing good excuse the bad?
  - testing22321 8mo ago
    How many dollars does one have to donate to make up for raping a child? Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother. Now you get it.
  - gosub100 8mo ago
    The charity was cover for something. Just like the "Clinton foundation".
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- Insanity 8mo ago
  These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both. He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing. The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
  - _whiteCaps_ 8mo ago
    You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?
    - Insanity 8mo ago
      They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy.. I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company. I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.
      - sobkas 8mo ago
        His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.
    - jmcgough 8mo ago
      I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives. Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
      - sobkas 8mo ago
watwut 8mo ago
Same with Summers. He had reputation beyond Epstein contacts.
- vintermann 8mo ago
  "There are two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price for their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes." -- Larry Summers, according to Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room" It sounds a bit cartoon villainy, but honestly, I see no reason to doubt that he said this. Everything points to these people being casually desperate to be let into ever innermore circles. Even now that this particularly ugly circle is blown open, notice that they still simply do not talk about what their fellow insiders did except in vague generalities.
  - Nevermark 8mo ago
    It isn't really surprising that discretion matters to villains. As much as it matters to everyone else. Except for the parts involving criminal coverups. That seems to plague close-nit groups at any level of society, e.g. world religions, police, finance, families, etc.
  - watwut 8mo ago
    I cant help myself. "Adults in the Room ... with half naked teenagers putting the cloth down" or "Adults in the Room ... working hard to destroy the democracy and create violent authoritarian world". Back to your main point, mafia operates similarly. In fact, there is not much difference between the two. What is Larry Summers not saying there is that being part of this circle is making this circle more powerful. Them not talking about what they know is itself "influencing powerful people and outcomes".
  - disqard 8mo ago
    You reminded me of this excellent essay by CS Lewis, titled "The Inner Ring": https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
sgentle 8mo ago
A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.
- actionfromafar 8mo ago
  Wait - I thought it was a Democratic hoax and that only Epstein was the bad guy? Is Trump wrong?
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo ago
  He's strangely breezy about the whole thing. '...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.' Uh. Really?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - TimorousBestie 8mo ago
    Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia. “Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight". (I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)
  - canjobear 8mo ago
Cthulhu_ 8mo ago
Not to go full pizzagate conspiracy theorist, but, Epstein is just the most out in the open and famous tip of the proverbial iceberg. These people didn't stop being nonces because some of them got caught.
- gosub100 8mo ago
  He was the access agent and the one procuring girls for powerful men. He would then produce blackmail and force the men to capitulate to his demands. He was a mossad operative.
veunes 8mo ago
But it might've changed one decision, one meeting, one normalization step
gowld 8mo ago
There's a comment exchange on the blog: Peter Says: You think Bill Gates or Larry Summers would have listened to your Mom’s advice? Scott Says: Peter #1: If she was their mom, maybe they would!
scruple 8mo ago
> Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least. I get the sense that Bill does care about money, and so does Larry Summers, so Mom's advice probably wouldn't have done much there.

by soperj 8mo ago

pixl97 8mo ago

Turns out Bill is just actually a piece of shit through and through

decimalenough 8mo ago
The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
- lifestyleguru 8mo ago
  I'd prefer if rich simply paid their taxes and contributions instead of spending money on fighting poor children in Africa.
  - wrs 8mo ago
    That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
    - refulgentis 8mo ago
      You're absolutely right in a cold logical sense, even if it makes other people emotionally react to the comment. This was a kind way to react to a lazy false dichotomy, that it's either taxes or donations.
  - mikepurvis 8mo ago
    One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from. Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense). So really it's a two pronged thing: * the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections). * eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for. But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
    - lifestyleguru 8mo ago
      I mean literally taxing the literally rich. Most population by "taxing the rich" mean those earning >90k EUR/USD on employment contract. They see the real rich maybe few times in life from a distance on a yacht in Caribbean or Mediterranean but don't connect the dots.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - mikepurvis 8mo ago
        I don't have a magic answer for how to get people on board, but I can say that I make a lot more than that number, and my taxes (in Canada) are way too low. I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
  - verisimi 8mo ago
    They do pay their taxes. It's just that they wrote the laws too. And, if you use trusts, foundations, corporations, etc, you are able to legally avoid taxes, while retaining the same control.
- stronglikedan 8mo ago
  Okay, a complete piece of shit with an undigested kernel of sweet corn stuck in it.
- Lammy 8mo ago
  You don't get that rich in the first place without being a ruthless asshole.
  - markus_zhang 8mo ago
    This. And this also explains why sometimes girls fell love to apparent assholes -- if you are an asshole it doesn't mean you are powerful, however if you are not an asshole then definitely you are not powerful.
  - wewewedxfgdf 8mo ago
    Proof please, not a slogan. Like, actual facts.
    - jcranmer 8mo ago
      I mean, do you have a counterexample? FWIW, Bill Gates is one of the people I would have pointed to as one of the less disreputable modern billionaires, and finding out that Melinda divorced him over his Epstein connections really soured my opinion of him.
      - dnautics 8mo ago
        john mackey, Definitely a bit ruthless but pretty good at maintaining integrity, only a little bit of an internet troll.
        n4r9 8mo ago
        Is this the same John Mackey that fired his own father from the board and criticises younger generations for trying to find meaningful work? I think OP has a point, it's very difficult to accumulate vast wealth without behaving ruthlessly and being kind of an asshole when it comes to making tough profit-over-people decisions.
      - wudu 8mo ago
        Warren Buffett
- sobkas 8mo ago
  >The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
  - com2kid 8mo ago
    They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard. Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
    - sobkas 8mo ago
      >They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard. It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary. >Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that. They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
      - JuniperMesos 8mo ago
        > It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary. Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?
        sobkas 8mo ago
        Easy way is not doing charter schools. Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.
- ceejayoz 8mo ago
  > The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth. He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.
  - lazide 8mo ago
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  - vee-kay 8mo ago
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- dakiol 8mo ago
  You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.
  - bradlys 8mo ago
    Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history. These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
  - dwd 8mo ago
    "But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?".
  - colechristensen 8mo ago
    Earning a tremendous amount of money and then amusing yourself by spending it on "charity" for the rest of your life doesn't make you a good person. It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people. He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.
    - idiotsecant 8mo ago
      It's like you're allergic to subtlety. Yes, saving untold numbers of children from malaria is a good thing. You can do bad things and good things and while everyone else is arguing about morality, the thing that matters is the end effect. Did Bill Gate's time on earth result in a better world when he's gone or a worse one? I won't pretend to know enough about his life to answer that, but he has prevented a lot of really, really brutal suffering.
      - colechristensen 8mo ago
        Nope. I'm not weighing "good deeds" that amount to his entertainment against the aggressive selfish business destroying greed that got him the money to spend and everything else he's clearly done in his personal life, shrugging my shoulders, and saying "who knows! maybe him doing all this is all for the best" I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
- saalweachter 8mo ago
  Listen, billionaires just have to do three things to be beloved: 1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities. 2. Don't abuse children. 3. Stay off Twitter. It's not a high bar, we don't need to give a silver medal to those that fall short.
  - MengerSponge 8mo ago
    This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not. Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
  - vee-kay 8mo ago
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    - fromMars 8mo ago
      There is a lot of hyperbolic vitriol in your post. Saying that Gates "has no qualms in killing children..." is quite a stretch. Using words like "Big Pharma" to make working on vaccines look like something awful is also a poor rhetoric device. It would be nice if you had a second source on the trials you referenced in India as it is not clear who the blame lies with. Capital research isn't a serious source as they clearly have their own anti-vax agenda.
      - vee-kay 8mo ago
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- mrguyorama 8mo ago
  Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people. There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend. I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering. Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery Bill Gates is a piece of shit.
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    It's confusing to me how this needs to be spelled out. It seems pretty obvious and anybody in IT should know - long before the general public - that Gates is a complete asshole.
  - fromMars 8mo ago
    As far as I am aware, Gates was not knowledgeable of the extent of Epstein's crimes. At the time they met in 2011, Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. How did he help him and call him a friend?
- oulipo2 8mo ago
  The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way. He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
- deleted 8mo ago
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- soperj 8mo ago
  You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that. It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship. Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US. The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
  - decimalenough 8mo ago
    Malaria deaths have fallen by 60% in the last 15 years, saving on the order of 12 million lives. Bill's foundation has donated around $4B to the cause. And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.
    - saulpw 8mo ago
      But much of the motivation for starting a foundation is from Melinda.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        It’s almost like it was done… as a team. Where one side provided all the money, the other side provided the direction. Both were necessary. Weird huh?
        spiderice 8mo ago
        It's really easy to give away money you didn't earn lol
        saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin. How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that? Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
- godelski 8mo ago
  > basically his entire fortune Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich. If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt. But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing. Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
  - globular-toast 8mo ago
    Warren Buffet wrote about this years ago. If you want to judge how "good" someone is you need to look at what they sacrifice. Gates sacrifices nothing. In fact, the entire thing is just marketing and basically worked for a long time. I was shocked to see people talking about Gates like he was a saint a few years ago. Glad to see that's changing.
- Larrikin 8mo ago
  Its like George Washington and the other founding fathers, didn't become a king voluntarily, helped create the country and modern democracy, but loved his slaves so much they could only be freed after he was dead. You can create good while actually still being a terrible person. Much of this era is people being upset about their fallen "heroes"
  - manuelmoreale 8mo ago
    > helped create the country and modern democracy I’ll give you the creation of the country but modern democracy was not born in the USA. Your overall point is still valid though.
- jmyeet 8mo ago
  A lot of the so-called "charity" by wealthy individuals is anything but. It's placing assets in a tax-advantaged positions where some of the proceeds gets used for "charity" (whatever that means) but they still maintain control. For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund. That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power. Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in. All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.
  - verisimi 8mo ago
    Also, don't forget, that the work itself can be about 'preparing the ground' for your non-charitable interests (which are probably held in trust, ie not held personally). Eg if you involve yourself in child education (perhaps making it worse) this is not an issue if it makes it more like that your classroom software is adopted. Or, if you are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, singing the praises of vaccines, is just a tax savvy way of increasing the market that you will benefit from.
  - technothrasher 8mo ago
    Naive me was pretty shocked when, after my financial advisor suggested I start a donor advised fund for the tax advantages, my lawyer then explained the loopholes to use to cheat and have the tax free money come back to me instead of actually to charities. I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
- bigfatkitten 8mo ago
  I’m sure Peter Scully[1] donated to charity at some point, too, and doesn’t make him any less evil. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully
- bsder 8mo ago
  Andrew Carnegie funded a whole lot of stuff we still enjoy today. He was still a piece of shit and responsible for a lot of people winding up dead. Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?). You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.
- owebmaster 8mo ago
  No, decimalenough, "donating" his money doesn't change what he did, doesn't even make it slightly better.
- gessha 8mo ago
  I saw a recent video by Zizek where he mentioned the original gray eminence - François Leclerc du Tremblay who was Cardinal Richelieu’s right hand man. During the day he orchestrated the thirty year war and during the night he wrote the most beautiful meditations. Does doing good excuse the bad?
- testing22321 8mo ago
  How many dollars does one have to donate to make up for raping a child? Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother. Now you get it.
- gosub100 8mo ago
  The charity was cover for something. Just like the "Clinton foundation".
deleted 8mo ago
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Insanity 8mo ago
These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both. He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing. The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
- _whiteCaps_ 8mo ago
  You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?
  - Insanity 8mo ago
    They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy.. I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company. I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.
    - sobkas 8mo ago
      His "charitable" contributions are only in place to charity wash his awful actions in the past and now. And it worked, everyone thinks of Saint Bill and his supposed good deeds while forgetting what he actually did or doing right now.
  - jmcgough 8mo ago
    I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives. Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
    - sobkas 8mo ago

watwut 8mo ago

Same with Summers. He had reputation beyond Epstein contacts.

vintermann 8mo ago
"There are two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price for their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes." -- Larry Summers, according to Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room" It sounds a bit cartoon villainy, but honestly, I see no reason to doubt that he said this. Everything points to these people being casually desperate to be let into ever innermore circles. Even now that this particularly ugly circle is blown open, notice that they still simply do not talk about what their fellow insiders did except in vague generalities.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  It isn't really surprising that discretion matters to villains. As much as it matters to everyone else. Except for the parts involving criminal coverups. That seems to plague close-nit groups at any level of society, e.g. world religions, police, finance, families, etc.
- watwut 8mo ago
  I cant help myself. "Adults in the Room ... with half naked teenagers putting the cloth down" or "Adults in the Room ... working hard to destroy the democracy and create violent authoritarian world". Back to your main point, mafia operates similarly. In fact, there is not much difference between the two. What is Larry Summers not saying there is that being part of this circle is making this circle more powerful. Them not talking about what they know is itself "influencing powerful people and outcomes".
- disqard 8mo ago
  You reminded me of this excellent essay by CS Lewis, titled "The Inner Ring": https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

sgentle 8mo ago

A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
Wait - I thought it was a Democratic hoax and that only Epstein was the bad guy? Is Trump wrong?
TheOtherHobbes 8mo ago
He's strangely breezy about the whole thing. '...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.' Uh. Really?
- deleted 8mo ago
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- TimorousBestie 8mo ago
  Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia. “Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
  Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight". (I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)
- canjobear 8mo ago

Cthulhu_ 8mo ago

Not to go full pizzagate conspiracy theorist, but, Epstein is just the most out in the open and famous tip of the proverbial iceberg. These people didn't stop being nonces because some of them got caught.

gosub100 8mo ago
He was the access agent and the one procuring girls for powerful men. He would then produce blackmail and force the men to capitulate to his demands. He was a mossad operative.

veunes 8mo ago

But it might've changed one decision, one meeting, one normalization step

gowld 8mo ago

There's a comment exchange on the blog: Peter Says: You think Bill Gates or Larry Summers would have listened to your Mom’s advice? Scott Says: Peter #1: If she was their mom, maybe they would!

scruple 8mo ago

> Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least. I get the sense that Bill does care about money, and so does Larry Summers, so Mom's advice probably wouldn't have done much there.