Having read Slashdot 15 years ago, a part of me is shocked to hear anyone wish that Bill Gates stays rich. But don't worry, Bill will be just fine.
For those of us who've been around for a while - as your reference to Slashdot points out - this can be surprising considering just how hated he was a decade or two ago when Microsoft was in a much different position than they are now.
I still have a negative opinion of him, and feel his business practices were extremely negative to the world.
But I will give credit to his ability to white-wash his image via numerous PR campaigns (Reddit AMAs, lots of other blatant social manipulation in the media). He and his marketing team have played the long game, and have been brilliant.
You think spending billions of his own money every single year is about cleaning up his image over the anti-trust case? Give me a break.
So what he's really doing os disposing of money that rightfully belongs to others.
That's only generous in a very perverse sensenof the word.
(Personally, I don't care about that either. In my eyes, all the good Gates has done to this day already far outweighs any shady business practices Microsoft has been engaged in the past.)
That's not the thing people worry about, it's the thing Microsoft got convicted for. Stifling competing operating systems is still far worse in my opinion. Although it's true that the legacy of Internet Explorer still haunts the web development industry.
Still, credit where it's due: I really appreciate how he's been using his wealth to fight disease ever since he left Microsoft.
Mnh. How many billions of hours were lost to crappy software?
Which might have been supplied by better sources, if not for sharp operator practices.
(Spilled milk, anyways. But let's not say it was without cost.)
Yes it would. That's the whole point of Public Relations, you, as part of the public, now relate differently to something than you ordinarily would.
> It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that things like aggressively stifling competing software
Well, that is because you are a terrorist, and your ideas are a cancer on society.
The above is basically a post-2000 translation of Microsoft's 90's "stifling competing software" tactics for software development they could not squash outright.
> helping [..] people in the developing world with basic things like nutrition, sanitation, and disease prevention.
By taking away education, self-determination, local opportunities? Yes, not quite as dramatic as people dying, but equally important for long term stable development.
> and I have no shame
No, you have a different frame of reference. I'd say one that lacks a complete historical record.
Do you realize that the money $billionaire using were taken away from $company customers? Those money were not created out of thin air by $company. They would have been used in many other ways by the customers - including making the world a better place.
The only value $company really creates is in the products and the company behavior - everything else is just transferring money.
Now, transferring money from large masses to socially beneficial organizations it's done by taxation through a democratic process or by voluntary contribution.
Individuals having the power to grab your money and decide how to spend it, like kings in a feudal society, can easily do more harm than good.
You can't accomplish anything in this life without being hated for it.
Yup. In case of accomplishing good for other people, that's sometimes called "the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics", per the article already linked elsewhere in this thread.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
I may need to pin that somewhere and just start writing a lot more ranty posts about women's issues and just accept that the entire goddamned world will accuse me of blaming the victim for trying to inject a half ounce of female empowerment into some lame, ignored personal blog with nearly zero traffic. Because, clearly, I am the single most evil person ever for thinking women can do something about women's issues other than whining about how men have all the power, so they need to just fix their shit, wah.