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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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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.
Aside from anticompetitive actions, I don't see much harm having been done by selling an operating system.
Did he code it all by himself? Or give the profits to the programmers in direct proportion to how much they worked on it?
I'm not saying Wozniak didn't get fucked by their dealings or that CEO to Worker pay rate is justifiable, but they're a lot better off than most. Wozniak is working as a US treasury and defence contractor and he likes to sell uncut pages of bills to strangers for fun, man is worth at least 120 Million USD.
Woz was at Apple, not Microsoft.
Ah, shit, you're right. Yeah I've never even heard of a disgruntled Microsoft programmer, I guess Paul Allen? But he still got 60-40 split with Gates even after Allen left to deal with cancer. Then there is Charles Simonyi who is also quite affluent after moving on to bigger and better things.
Lol shows how much you know
Yeah I really fumbled on that one, Woz was with Apple not Microsoft. Can you name anybody who worked at Microsoft before 1990 who didn't become wildly successful?
I mean, if you can name them, it's probably because they were successful, right?
Microsoft is not a paragon of good employee treatment btw. As others pointed out, they had their asses sued to pieces for trying to maintain employees as contractors because it allowed them to save money by not paying benefits.
This might be the pot calling the kettle black, but absence of evidence is not evidence. My lack of information on a group of tech entrepreneurs who existed over 40 years ago doesn't prove anything, and neither does your lack of ability to present such information.
So I don't know what I'm talking about because I didn't link you to a super well-known and easily found piece of info? Sure bro.
Took me 15 seconds on DDG to find it btw
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2589538/it-personnel-microsoft-to-pay-97-million-to-settle-permatemp-case.html
Honestly that doesn't sound all that bad. They even chose temporary staffing agencies that already paid benefits. The lawsuit was basically over whether recurring temp workers could utilize the stock-option plans that permanent employees got. The worst part about this case is that it went on for 8 years before Microsoft settled it.
Wow you really are a corporate simp. The lawsuit would never have been necessary if MS hadn't been trying to stiff their workers.
The article you linked claims it was never a corporate policy, plus I mean, I've never heard of a corporation that gives temporary workers stock-option plans. I agree it would have been a lot cooler of MS to just have more permanent roles available, though. Would have also saved them the lawsuit and settlement.
lol at "it was never corporate policy".
So you, with a straight face, are claiming that companies always write down and distribute policy to govern their intentional unethical behavior?
You are ignorant about this. I happened to work for a company that changed their practices as a result of this lawsuit (or maybe a later one? if so, further proves the point which you're jumping over). That company let about 8 contractors go that I know of, and replaced them with about 3-4 permanent hires. Kind of shows you how much money they were saving by hiring people as "temps" which they intended to renew indefinitely until it was no longer convenient for them. They, like MS, required contractors to report in person during specific hours for work. Something you legally cannot do with contractors. They got scared of a lawsuit so they stopped. They admitted that was the reason to me and referenced MS by name.
Believe what you want, this isn't actually debatable though...
I feel like you're getting a little off track with the personal anecdotes. We're discussing if Bill Gates is a bad person, if Microsoft is comparatively evil, and I don't think you've really established that.
I do think that taxes should disallow the existence of billionaires, though, so maybe we agree on that?
Right, when an entire industry shifted after they got into trouble for doing that, it was just my anecdote...
Yeah the conversation went off the rails because you took it there. You're wrong about most things but instead of conceding or going away, you just keep moving goalposts. Bye.
Goodbye.
"Aside from 95% of the shit he did, I don't see much harm from the other 5%."
Bill Gates' anticompetitive behavior probably set the entire computing industry back a decade or more.
Lol, as if. Computing industry limitations are still dictated by Hardware, which has advanced at the same rate it would have without Windows. Plus, the vast majority of servers run Linux, anyways, so all he did was be one of three or four firms that helped bring computing into people's homes when otherwise it would have required more technical skills than anybody had in that time period.
It's so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn't even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft's poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It's the customers that get fucked.
I don't know when the last time you checked is, but I don't think it's funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as "permatemps". That isn't counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of "making bank".
"In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft's employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases)."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft
You can't be that naive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-slammed-over-child-labor-accusations-2010-4
Also, it's very funny, you talking about "socialist rhetoric", because I don't think you even know what socialism means by "exploited worker".
Have a look.
https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/28/what-do-we-mean-exploitation