this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe, but that's clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Hmm you do make a compelling argument
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
That is true maybe there were some exploits done by them here and there but everything is gray there are no black and white.
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
Making a good car isn't doing a good thing . What are you on about ?
No, it's pretty black and white with Billionaires. None of them have changed the world NEARLY as much as literally any figure from history. At all.
No billionaire has earned their billions for the simple fact that a person cannot produce that much wealth on their own. They MUST steal from others to get that rich. It literally HAS to be the case, because there is no physical way they generated that wealth themselves.
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.
That's one stupid argument backed with made up numbers there
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it's a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation... yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn't justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
Some people would say that he has given negative 130 billion, or whatever his net worth is right now
I wouldn't go that extreme, but still think he has had net negative effect in the world
I would pay 130 billion to save 122 Million lives. That's only 1066 USD per life saved. You must be greedy af if you think that's a bad deal.
That's not how stocks work. He hasn't taken 130 Bn USD. Most of his 129.2 Bn net worth is unrealized gains in the form of shares of companies such as Microsoft, meaning when or if it ever becomes income he will likely donate that as well, in fact he has promised to do so on many occasions. To date, Bill has donated 59 Bn USD to charities, the vast majority of his income.
Okay I take that as you did not read the article, but only the misleading title, if you claim that Bill and Melinda saved 122m infants...
The article says that infant deaths (0-5yo) have halved from 1990 to 2015. From 1990 to 2000 the number already gone from 12 million down to around 9.5 million yearly. This is when Bill and Melinda Foundation was founded and they started pouring money on vaccinations which is good of course.
So yes, they've certainly done a part in reducing infant death rates, but they're only a small part of it. And most of the money invested wasn't even theirs, but donation from Warren Buffet who actually donated away most of his wealth.
Charity is the oligarchy picking the winners.
So the only way bill gates can set himself apart as a billionaire is by destroying capitalism singlehandedly?
Humanity is fucked by these idiotic binary ways of thinking.
Who gives a shit about whether "Bill Gates can set himself apart as a billionaire?" That's a moot point because he shouldn't have become a billionaire to begin with.
I care that moronic ways of thinking discount the good done with billionaire money.
It doesn't matter that you ignore it, it does happen occasionally. It makes no sense to evaluate the world only as it should be, and ignore how it is
I’m just saying, the Native Americans didn’t have highways before the settlers, so even though there was a lot of bad, there was also some good.
No, he can be taxed to millionaire status. Then we can democratically decide who the money is used to help. He no doubt got to where he is because he benefitted from the help of the US.
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
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.
Black or white. Gray doesn't exist. Like at all. I get angry when people say it does.
You're not wrong. Compared to his peers, he's a saint.
Everyone is compared to his peers