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Comment by egonschiele | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

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Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.

> Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.

That's gonna be really difficult as the heaven's manager probably have full access to the Epstein files.

Classic example of Gate's avariciousness at the expense of others is:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

In a sense [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/HEMbp6Epfz8?is=D6YFfNuYQo3o0VTi

When that was a thing, I could never forgive Bill for Windows ME.

But, where would you like to go today?

The Road Ahead.

No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.

It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max

Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense

I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.

I think it just sounds the best for the point he was making and it makes the point well, I’m being intentionally pedantic in this space

One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough

So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation

"He's dead, so..." [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C

Hahaha what a moron

was that before or after he caught STDs?

Gates was a ruthless businessman who fought his way to a couple of monopolies and would have happily had a lot more if he could.

And what did they achieve?

It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems.

Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion.

There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.

I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.

>you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems"

No, this is the bar the general public sets for billionaires. They, ignorant of the scale of the problems, believe billionaires could afford to solve the world's problems. That is a widespread belief.

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