this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Malaria (fedia.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. There's no good billionaires
  2. Bill Gates is not any kind of exception
  3. Even in comparison to other living billionaires
[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Lives have been saved through his funding . Can you see elon or zuck doing that ? Ever ? So in comparison i do consider him good but i could be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The reason is that there just isn't an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.

Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn't any kind of moral absolution.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No one said it was absolution. As was obviously stated, it means he's better than others.

But sure binary thinking is the best. either he is good or bad, either his charity is meaningless or completely erases any bad he ever did.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hardly anyone is all good or all bad. But with any billionaire ever, the bad will always outweigh the good because of what monumental injustice was necessary to collect a billion dollars.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don't really agree but even if so, there still are degrees of wrong doing. Gates has helped to eradicate disease but to many in this thread that means literally nothing because of their binary thinking

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

The reason is that there just isn't an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.

I would agree that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire, but I think that lacks context and scale.

Most billionaires make their fortunes from exploiting the labour and material wealth of the global south. Gates made his fortune by bullying the rest of silicon valley in the 90s, leading to the monopolistic tech market we know and hate today.

This is unethical in that scope, but when compared to global exploitation of other billionaires in the same tax bracket.... it's the best we could realistically hope for. Gates has essentially been unethical in the realm of wealthy 1rst world nations, all while directing a significant part of his wealth to improve material conditions in the places most billionaires extract wealth from.

Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn't any kind of moral absolution.

I mean 50 billion dollars is not just a small fraction of his wealth, and he's literally cured diseases that have killed millions of people over time.

Moral absolution isnt something that can be weighed and measured, it's subject to ethical belief systems that are not uniform across people or cultures.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Aside from anticompetitive actions, I don't see much harm having been done by selling an operating system.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Aside from anticompetitive actions

"Aside from 95% of the shit he did, I don't see much harm from the other 5%."

Bill Gates' anticompetitive behavior probably set the entire computing industry back a decade or more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Lol, as if. Computing industry limitations are still dictated by Hardware, which has advanced at the same rate it would have without Windows. Plus, the vast majority of servers run Linux, anyways, so all he did was be one of three or four firms that helped bring computing into people's homes when otherwise it would have required more technical skills than anybody had in that time period.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Did he code it all by himself? Or give the profits to the programmers in direct proportion to how much they worked on it?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn't even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft's poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It's the customers that get fucked.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I don't know when the last time you checked is, but I don't think it's funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as "permatemps". That isn't counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of "making bank".

"In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft's employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

You can't be that naive.

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-slammed-over-child-labor-accusations-2010-4

Also, it's very funny, you talking about "socialist rhetoric", because I don't think you even know what socialism means by "exploited worker".

Have a look.

https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/28/what-do-we-mean-exploitation

THE TERM "exploitation" often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a "fair wage day's wage for a fair day's work"--the supposedly "normal" situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a "middle class" standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.

Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe, but that's clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.

Take for example case covid

In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was criticized for suggesting that pharmaceutical companies should hold onto patents for COVID-19 vaccines. The criticism came due to the possibility of this preventing poorer nations from obtaining adequate vaccines. Tara Van Ho of the University of Essex stated, "Gates speaks as if all the lives being lost in India are inevitable but eventually the West will help when in reality the US & UK are holding their feet on the neck of developing states by refusing to break [intellectual property rights] protections. It's disgusting."

Gates is opposed to the TRIPS waiver. Bloomberg News reported him as saying he argued that Oxford University should not give away the rights to its COVID-19 information, as it had announced, but instead sell it to a single industry partner, as it did. His views on the value of legal monopolies in medicine have been linked to his views on legal monopolies in software

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm you do make a compelling argument

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's easier to just assume all billionaires are evil. The chances of it being wrong is about the same as for any good person to become a billionaire

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That is true maybe there were some exploits done by them here and there but everything is gray there are no black and white.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah obviously. I'm not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can't call Hitler a good person because of that one thing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Making a good car isn't doing a good thing . What are you on about ?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Who gives a fuck whether some other rich sociopath would've done better?

What you should be asking is why important shit like this should be left to the whims of a single private citizen with too much power instead of handled by government. The notion that Bill fucking Gates is some kind of savior übermensch who somehow knows better than the entire voting public how to spend the money is fucking ludicrous.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Black or white. Gray doesn't exist. Like at all. I get angry when people say it does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're not wrong. Compared to his peers, he's a saint.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We can say Bill Gates is the best billionaire without accepting that there are any good billionaires.

He doesn't realise best of shit is still shit. Like talking about "the best rapist", haiyaaaaa

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

He's not even better than Taylor Swift IMO

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

He’s not even better than his ex-wife

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

He's pretty terrible. I don't know whether or not all of the other billionaires are worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think we can say that.