Melinda Gates: Bill's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein led to end of marriage
boingboing.net
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Seems a lot of people liked that his wife encouraged him to spend all his ill-gotten gains on charitable causes. I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.
EDIT: Also, did Bill Gates steal anything? Manipulation and monopolies are fundamentally wrong, but they do not amount to stealing. IF they do, then the Carnegies and Rockefellers were 'stealing' as well. Maybe, by your logic, we should take away all those libraries Carnegie built too?
> I generally prefer people not to steal and undermine society in the first place.
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?
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.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220302212243/https://medium.co...
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?).
> 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-in...
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> If you have an idea that is so new, so unique, so different and unprecedented...
Telephone, television etc. were pretty unique. Even the iPhone is so different from what came before it that it is truly innovative. Even people who know Apple is working on a phone, and expected something awesome, were blown away when the product was finally revealed. That's innovation.
Uhm...no. The DEC computer they used when developing Altair BASIC was a PDP-10. DEC BASIC and Altair BASIC were both written in assembly language. The differences in architecture and memory constraints between a PDP-10 and an 8080 are too great for it to be feasible to steal code. At best you could use the PDP-10 code to learn some algorithms and then write your own versions for the 8080.
What people saying it was stolen from DEC are probably doing is getting confused over Gates and Allen's use of an 8080 emulator they had written earlier for PDP-10. When they decided to do an Altair BASIC they modified their 8080 emulator to be an Altair emulator and did all the testing and debugging of their 8080 BASIC on that since they did not have access to an actual Altair 8080.
That PDP-10 was owned by Harvard, and there was some question over whether or not using it for a commercial project like that was something students were allowed to do using their free accounts.
So if I take someone else's assembly code and port it to a new architecture then that's not a derivative work? Interesting stance!
Rockefeller was called a robber baron.
I think the Appalachians still have memories of those "great" men.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/bill-melinda-gates-founda...
I've personally given some of that money in return for MS Windows, Office, Excel etc. I'm not sure what's ill gotten about that?
I am disappointed in Bill. I am actually a beneficiary of their scholarship, for college. At the same time, I think this is Melinda playing the blame game.
Apparently yes. Numerous media reports have said that he had promised not to engage with Epstein any more, and that the event that suddenly precipitated the divorce was a revelation in the New York Times that Bill had been breaking that promise.
Does that implies Melinda knew what Epstein was up to?
That's the actual objective of the whole story: she wants the money, for herself, and her children. But Bill Gates had already pledged that money to charity. So she had to find a good excuse to get the money out. This is it.
Of course, once you divorce and become the richest woman on Earth, just from being married to the right guy, it's bound to attract scrutiny, so let's find a good escape and scapegoat. And in these days and age, what's better than blaming a rich white male, favorite scape goat of our times with zero redeeming chances on the horizon, not even after pledging his entire fortune to charity !
So here we are : Bill "had an affair", 20 years ago. Yeah. But somehow, this is now that it's horrible to recall. Maybe the period coincides with the monopoly trial. Likely a tense situation. But who cares.
Bill "knew Jeffrey Epstein". Sure, these days, it's an absolute sure blow. Well, Epstein also knew essentially everybody with money and power in US, but hey, no, let's phrase that as if it was a personal and deep connection, like, probably he was providing some under-aged "services" to her husband. Sure, she never said that. Just implied. Deniably.
And while the word is occupied blaming a rich white male, the world does not get to see that charity organizations now have 50 B$ less to use over the next few decades, so that a poor, poor, horribly traumatized but now Extremely Rich white woman can scam away with the money and transmit it tax free to her children through multiple offshore expert schemes.
But hey, that's not the story ! Too booooring ! Look, look ! Epstein here !
Two sentences, a video and then 6 promoted articles? Along with 37 adblocked items and 13 trackers?
how the mighty have fallen
If there's better then that's the standard. But this pseudo TMZ stuff doesn't belong here regardless of how many hatreds love the storyline.
She doesn't get a free pass on Common (News) Sense 101 simply because her axe satisfies some bias one might have towards Bill.
If the info about his relationship is already known then...why is this on HN? So haters can hate?? There are plenty of other forums for such things. This isn't one of them.
Stop buying into a news cycle that's based on revenue and the health of the corporate media's bottomline, and not on what's actually relevant, important, etc.
And again...source and context matters.
We won't get what we need and deserve if we keep accepting an LCD mindset.
P.s. This has nothing to do with his association with MS. It's TMZ lite.
many of the people on this site are redditors.
Effectively...this is suspect evivence in the sense that the context matters. Context always matters.
That is, ex-wife, that he cheated on, interviewed by CBS "news". And eventually she'll be pushing a book. She has an axe to grind and knows exactly how to hurt him.
He probably deserves it. But that doesn't mean we take her as a "reliable witness."
[p.s. fun fact. Epstein associate in MC2 "model management" agency, Jean-Luc Brunel, also died of suicide in prison.]
This doesn't matter anymore because the post has been flagged, as I had suspected.
In the few minutes it took me to scan down the front page to the time I clicked on this story the link was flagged. I'm interested to know which specific guidelines were violated.
I actually believe steve jobs when he says microsoft held back computer development by decades potentially.
Yet now he is some sort of god/genius for the elite. It's very nice that he's eliminating disease and helping with vaccines, but I just can't believe how much everyone's forgotten about his past.
And then there's the whole Epstein thing on top of that. I mean come on...
It is definitely not by accident. I'm sure someone was payed very handsomely to fix his reputation.
Elon Musk is an asshole, but great at developing and marketing products.
Bill Gates is an asshole, but a great business man and his charity seems to be doing useful work.
At some point, you just leave out the "he's an asshole" part, as it's sort of implied.
Most assholes aren't great people, either.
"It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice."
He bought Tesla. He didn't actually create that company.
A lot of what is attributed to Elon Musk is pure BS.
He is great at marketing, but not the "genius inventor" that many seem to think that he is.
These people are really good entrepreneurs who had a lot of luck on their side, but they are also severely overhyped.
Are you saying all you need to do is create a company and that equals success and a good product?
Because damn some people in silicon valley want a word, you know something they don't.
Credit where credit is due.
I'm sure that Hitler had a redeeming quality or two.
Nobody is purely evil or purely good, although Hitler can gain the "almost purely evil" tag.
Where Gates stands on that spectrum, I have no idea. He's done vast amounts of good and he's done vast amounts of evil. Balancing them depends on how you weight each action, and that's a very personal opinion.
I didn't downvote that comment though.
You can look at Apple's behavior in spaces where they dominate to see that. Or are we expecting that they will open the floodgates tomorrow and allow additional app stores on the iPhone? And the only reason they haven't locked down their desktop operating system as tightly as their mobile operating system is users have expectations of how open a desktop should be to running what software they choose... Expectations largely established by the Microsoft ecosystem and the alternative it would offer if Apple tried to seal things up.
For some reason, when Apple does it, people think it's pro-consumer, and when Microsoft does it, it's anti-competitive. The legendary reality distortion field effect of Apple's CEO seems to have outlived him.
For a start, apple builds products that every single consumer made a choice to buy. And over 50% of them still choose android.
Bill gates went above almost all consumer's heads and sold windows to governments and big corporations, and then bundled their own software with it. It's part of the reason why the UX of windows was always so bad, because the end user wasn't making purchase decisions.
So no, I don't agree. Jobs hasn't been leading Apple for a long time. You don't know what he would have done, other than that he likes closed garden products. That's a long way from the anticompetitive behaviour that microsoft did over the years.
And again, window was like 95% of the market at it's peak. Apple is nowhere near that.
The story of Apple versus Microsoft has always been a story of a vertical monopoly pointing to a horizontal monopoly and saying how evil they are.
This doesn't seem plausible to me. Decades is a lot even when accounting for compounding growth and some of their more questionable practices. They've also surely fueled a lot of resources into development, and I'm not sure if a different company would have definitely acquired as much money to be able to use in the first place. I also don't really see Apple as a beacon of light in comparison.
But then again, I also think that modern Gates is a huge force for good in the world, and a good role model for other rich people. As for Melinda, she also seems great but from what I'm seeing she focuses on less effective causes and I suspect her money will overall help the world a bit less (which is her right of course) than if they were in his hands.
I think Apple coming out on top would have been worse for computer software and development.
Are you kidding? He didn't wrestle anything. People chose to buy the iphone, and developers chose to develop for it. You can develop only for android if you want. Good luck developing for only linux in 1990.
As aggressive as Jobs could be, he did not force anything anywhere. The iphone is about as close you can come to a voluntarily purchased high end purchase as you get. It's a free choice. And it's a free choice to develop for iphone.
Don't pretend you are a retard, if you are a government or business that provides a website or mobile app you HAVE no REAL choice then to also target iOS.
If the local factory poisons the air you should move if you don't like it right? IF society(probably in EU and Asia) decides that Apple damages the "environment" they will be free to force Apple to do better or Apple will be free to exit.
That’s not to so say it’s right, the internet is meant to democratise society and remove these middle men. Apples cut should be significantly lower.
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
Spend enough money, and a wealthy person can buy back their public image. I wonder if they think money can also buy back their souls.
So, pretty much no change in the way things work. While they might not have been billionaires in the past, they were rich. Heck, you don't even need to be a billionaire today. Simply rich enough will do.
And it isn't like "The media" has a long history of truthfullness: This has really been a development of the last century. Papers in the 1800s printed falsehoods for sales. The "Spanish Flu" being call 'spanish' is really a result of wartime censorship. War often brings censorship itself. Right now, a lot of media is owned by a few companies. The bright side is that it is easier for everyday citizens to report on things around them (thanks, internet) but everyday folks don't have access to folks like Gates.
I'm not sure where you got that he was a covid expert, though. The main reason the media would interview him is because of his foundation's past 'experience' with communicable disease. Doesn't make him an expert, just possibly a smarter ask than, say, asking me about it.
Have you seen this creepy leading to gangster interview?
"We'll, he's dead now so ... be careful."
You can thank conspiracy theorists for that. Mainstream media just followed along.
How would your wife feel if that statement could be made about you?
Citation Please
> How would your wife feel if that statement could be made about you?
Well that's understandable if its true.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
The publication of this article has been reported as the event that precipitated the divorce filing.
So anyone associating with him after 2008 should not have the benefit of doubt.
I can fully understand why someone like Melinda did not approve of her husband having any sort of relationship with Epstein.