Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry
threader.app
threader.app
Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs have probably been just as brutal but at least they innovated and created cool stuff. They have/had vision.
MS under Gates was special in that they didn't come up with anything very innovative. MS totally lacked vision. They first killed innovative competitors, then maybe incorporated parts of that innovation after delay. Gates was incredibly knowledgeable and intelligent, but not visionary. Tech was only secondary consideration to business. MS under gates was technologically underwhelming and super dull. After Gates resigned from his position as Chief Technology Officer in MS, Microsoft's as a tech company started to improve almost instantly.
Microsoft executed. They executed mostly well and sometimes brilliantly. Because if the processes are good enough for long enough product innovation can be secondary.
Apple eventually became Microsoft and that's how they beat them.
A few years back, I was fortunate to have a random conversation with a reknown researcher from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He was lucid and blunt: if we had more money we could solve fusion.
A couple days later there was news of China having done the longest running fusion reactor burst (?) to date. Two-plus minutes.
I keep thinking about that conversation and his "promise."
If so, no it is very clearly not the same because Bill Gates is not a dictator nor is he responsible for killing people. To compare a wealthy monopolist to a murderous dictator lacks perspective, to say the least.
Erdogan haven’t executed a single person and yet Turkey has become a terrible place for people with ambition, sky high brain drain is the norm, almost all public contracts are won by the same few businessmen however the government has widespread social programs so no one is actually starving or lacks access to modern medicine.
Should people be grateful? Probably not as much as the businessmen that get all the contracts and becoming the biggest in the world.
And when he was immersed into the money-making game, he was all in, willing to do anything to win.
But when you eventually beat the game, you don't get that thrilled anymore, there's no big challenge ahead. You can play for a while to see how far can you go, but it ends up being boring after a while.
So, I think he moved on to basically a real life version of reversal Plague Inc (instead of trying to infect everyone, he tries to beat a disease). This is a harder challenge in many ways, because he needs to deal with tons of geopolitics, international affairs, research and development, human behavior, etc.
If you see it from that perspective, you can still see that he is still a hard player, but this time, he is playing a game that can be beneficial for everybody, not just himself.
To be pedantic, Plague Inc is just a reversed clone of the board game Pandemic.
But overall, I think you’re spot on with his motivation.
This sounds like what Apple is doing right now and everyone keeps defending it when it actual fact it's even worse.
Degraded non safari web browser performance on iOS ring a bell?
I believe Apple rectified the third party browser performance issue in the 2015 revision of WKWebView
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-i...
What is it exactly that Apple is doing that you are referring to (I honestly don’t know)?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11259152/chrome-ios-is-i...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micr...
A fascinating read.
It takes 5 minutes to realize that corporations don't make sense as a concept; the main benefit of a corporate structure over private business structures is limited liability... Why in the world would we need to shield people from being held liable for decisions that they made??? This is absurd.
The concept of a corporation is nothing but a way to deflect blame away from real individuals who actually exist and to redirect that blame towards a fictitious entity which is impervious to any kind of meaningful worldly punishment.
He's plainspoken on the issue, really. If he were a politician, he'd be restricted by laws and diplomacy and dealmaking. As a rich bastard, he can traipse around and wield unilateral power wherever he decides to shower with pennies. Of course, Bezos, Zuck et al have the same power. But they don't even bother to pretend that they give a shit about non-billionaires.
This is also what Matt Stoller is writing about, the "monopolisation" of the world, particularly in tech of course: https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Funnily, I've recently read "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism" by Lenin. Multinational companies were called trusts, monopolism was called imperialism, and train, coal and steel was since replaced with telcos and internet but it's incredibly apt at describing our world. Even the "systemic banks" were mostly the same 100 years ago : BNP, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, JPMorgan...
> "..The rule of law against the powerful has collapsed in America."
> "Monopolism makes companies act like mafias, stupid and lazy, with an emphasis on abusive commercial practice rather than technical or organizational excellence."
> "Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. But it’s not the result of some wrong turn or a rogue abuse of corporate power — it’s the system working as intended."
---
Here's the whole pamphlet by Lenin:
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism - https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
I'm no Marxist by any means, but I think it's possible to appreciate some of these insights into society, without dismissing (or agreeing with) the ideology that it's become.
You should think in the terms of opportunity cost.
I'm convinced that there would have been more jobs and innovation without MS monopoly. MS under gates killed and slowed down progress in personal computing. They didn't innovate.
It would be better to focus on individual actions that may have been nefarious, on Bill Gates's part, than the overall fact that everyone started to use MS Windows. I think this is the only way to have some sort of audit of opinions. It is not clear to me that humans are able to en masse adopt actions that are always mutually beneficial.
You could also say that humans have universally adopted a stance that gold is valuable. The question of whether gold should be valuable or not is rather difficult to answer, and indeed this is what cypherpunks were thinking about in 2007.
I have a somewhat unpopular opinion that leather is more nature friendly than synthetics---since many hides, globally, are often discarded due to the cost of tanning---and if I were to make leather products more popular, on average, then it may become difficult to say whether it should be popular or not. And at that point one would need some sort of critical appraisal of individual actions and the individual intention and results of actions.
Also all the things mentioned are pretty standard these days.
How many you made worse off, and how much you made them worse off is a function of how much you got ahead and in how much time.
"Free-market is not a zero sum game", is a lie that morons that go by the name of 'economists' like to tell you. The world economy is growing by a minuscule amount of 4% every year. Yes it's pretty much a zero-sum game, when some grow way more than 4%, and others less, or even grow negative.
When CD tech became widespread, the VCR industry went out of business. When DVD tech came along, CD industry went out of business. Online streaming put pretty much everyone else out of business.
Do you not call this making people worse off? I do.
Is it a bad thing? that's a different question.
If you had more than 4% annual growth the whole time (on average), and the world grew only 4% (on average), yes you did make someone somewhat worse off. You may not know who that is, or where, or how many, but they exist.
edit: The one who you made worse off might be a billionaire, while you a middle class person. That's why I said it's a different question if it's a bad thing. But the fact remains.
You allude to the fact that you don't consider it to be a bad thing at the end, but even calling it a zero sum game is plainly wrong.
You are right about one thing, though. The incumbents are made worse off by a better innovation. Sometimes that comes in the form of mom and pop shops, sometimes big slow corporations. However, the positive net wealth gains and the fact that this is the only way to achieve progress makes it seem worthwhile.
It doesn't make sense to measure stock prices in terms of fiat currencies anymore because the Reserve Banks of the world can and have printed unlimited amounts of it. You should only measure the price of stocks relative to the value of scarce assets which have a stable intrinsic value (which is not the case for the dollar or any fiat currency).
In Venezuela, the stock market yields hundreds or even thousand of times your investment per year if returns are denominated in the national Venezuelan Bolivar currency; this is way higher than any ROI you can get from any modern stock markets in the US or anywhere else... It doesn't mean that these companies are good investments and are actually growing (they're not; they're tanking just like Venezuela itself).
If you think this is not what's happening in the US, just consider that the price of US stocks are strongly correlated with each other... This is totally consistent with what's happening in Venezuela; the degree of correlation in price of unrelated stocks tells you the degree to which the so-called 'growth' can be attributed to currency inflation.
However, total wealth certainly hasn't been stagnant, which is what this thread is about.
I can stack millions of rocks on top of each other into a giant pile but that doesn't mean I've been productive or that I created any wealth if nobody benefits from my pile of rocks or if people are coerced into accepting its legitimacy as a measure of wealth.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/01/how-much-you-...
There's a large swath of pro-capitalism sentiment on HN because it's overwhelmed with people who've "won" the game at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't thousands of millionaires that read this site at least once a week.