So I just read Bill Gates' 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.

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[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not at all. It's absolutely true that Hitler had some good points to his personality. It's silly as fuck to bother defending him by pointing them out, but they existed.

The same is true of Gates, and it's nothing like the silly tomato analogy.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The fact that you don't get the nuance that I'm trying to show and going right to comparing to literally Hitler is exactly my point. That's not discussion, it's quite literally the Moral Equivalence fallacy. There have been a few good comments here that made me stop and think, actual discussion, weighing pros and cons. Jumping right to Hitler was not one of them.

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Oh, no, let me assure you, I totally get the nuance you are trying to show. I've only been hearing it from naive people about Bill Gates for about 30 years now, and he just keeps doing more things to make it more ridiculous every year.

I'm sorry dude. I've had a passion my whole life for technology most of my 50+ year life and this asshole has been doing his best to fuck it up since day one. Every dollar he made was by ripping people off and by leading the charge in ruining the software industry.

Sure, he peeled off a miniscule fraction of his ill gotten gains for some charitable causes, but who's to say that we wouldn't have been better off if he never took it out of the economy in the first place? Do you have any idea how much of a drain the Microsoft tax is on the world economy? Without companies like Microsoft, we probably never would have deteriorated to the point where we would elect a fascist like Trump.

Then he decided he was hot shit and knew better than professional educators how to teach and forced his opinions on the rest of us by buying influence, ultimately fucking up education for well over a decade.

Then of course there is the Epstein scandal. But who really cares about child sex trafficking anyways.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 points 21 hours ago

Honestly think finally found common ground, and I appreciate the thought out response here. This is the sort of discussion and comment I want to see more of here on Lemmy, thought out good discussion instead of "He's literally hitler". That's really the point I was trying to make, I don't care about Bill Gates, what I am tired of is everyone demonizing everyone else in the comments and us devolving into reddit comment sections. We've been better than Reddit in our comments until recently.