Hardly any Gates cheerleader knows the first thing about his foundation and its activities. They’ve read the headlines and believed the hype. That’s not some immutable brute fact of reality that simply must be negotiated. It’s a mistaken impression that can be corrected, and must be corrected if people generally are to accept that billionaires shouldn’t exist.
2 Likes
What makes you so sure of this?
MSDOS was him buying the rights to QDOS which was a reverse engineering of CP/M. Windows sucked for the whole time Gates could have had anything to do with it. I think he wrote a version of BASIC.
He got rich because he was ruthless at business and lucky (mostly that IBM was dumb), not because he’s a super genius.
7 Likes
The assumption that the great geniuses of tech are the billionaires is so absurd and wrong. Gates and Zuckerberg both got rich off of plagiarism. A guy like Ken Thompson who was a creator of UNIX, C, and Go (Golang) is virtually unknown.
5 Likes
Charles Koch. Sam Walton was great. Jeff Bezos. Larry Page. Michael Bloomberg. Most billionaires made their money by doing good for the world.
What is the argument against Sam Walton? I do 100% of my grocery shopping there and buy household supplies there. They have much better prices than any comparable store. Wal-Mart is an amazing place. Wal-Mart is a couple thousand dollar yearly tax cut. I just bought Michael Bloomberg’s biography for the cost of shipping on Amazon. Twenty years ago that book would be twenty five dollars and it would be hard to find after a few years. And he was an innovative entrepreneur in disseminating financial news. Google provides an amazing product for free. I just used the Google Map thing on my phone yesterday to get someplace when I was lost. And Charles Koch has built a conglomerate by continuously creating efficiencies all the while employing 90,000 people at high paying jobs.
Bill Gates took and passed Math 55 at Harvard. I’m pretty confident in saying that he’s pretty goddamn smart.
Why would you want to impede him from delivering value? You only make money if you are adding value. I have a better idea. Tax him at zero percent except when he or his heirs spend money. If he is delaying consumption and reinvesting he is doing nothing but good. He is making the world more productive.
Bill Gates has the right idea with a progressive consumption tax. It accomplishes progressive goals of dealing with wealth inequality without doing harm.
I don’t think taxing someone who has $100B at 99% would impede the delivery of value. That’s not to say I disagree with taxes being shifted towards consumption (see my comment on Warren Buffett).
Do both. A wealth tax that starts at $50M isn’t going to stop anyone from starting a new creative venture.
1 Like
And again M$ has get generally sucked. Apple has a hardware business, so they were able to abandon an OS that was better than Windows and wisely just make their OS just a *nix skin (based on FreeBSD). MS’s value has been 100% based on network effects/monopoly.
1 Like
Given the consistent, ahem, quality of your posting, I was curious if you had ever received a like for one of your posts. So I checked.
56 posts, 1 like. What a ratio.
Keep up the good work npc!
2 Likes
The racism was only relevant because I was responding to a very specific point.
I hate to break it to you, but some times when you’re talking about one thing, sometimes other things come up (e.g. the existence of this thread).
Nevertheless, in this case, there is nothing more to discuss on that point. Even the dude I was responding to basically conceded it.
Having to read the trash posters work is why I’ll never be a mod. Ever. Zero chance I ever give up the ability to run my own version of the forum. See… for you to ban someone you feel the need to open a thread and navel gaze for literally days… I just put someone on ignore and forget they were ever alive.
1 Like
Seriously, microbet, come on. The dude may be evil, but calling him not extremely intelligent is absurd. The dude had lots of impressing academic achievements including below.
Now, I’d agree that doing what he did with microsoft didn’t require extreme intelligence. But there is pretty much no doubt that he had it.
Just out of curiosity, when you do your shopping at Walmart, how do you feel about their employees being on welfare and walking past the signs asking for donations to help them while the Walton family continues to rake in billions each quarter?
People like you are the problem. You are oblivious to how destructive the Walton family is to America. You happily shop there so you can save 2 cents on veggies.
6 Likes
Wasn’t Microsoft being successful a stroke of dumb luck? I remember reading somewhere that they were in competition with another company and that company went down because of an earthquake and there was no power for the employees. So Gates was able to capture all the orders that company normally would have fulfilled but wasn’t able to because of the earthquake.
Lol at passing a lower division math class as a huge achievement. I’m not saying he’s not a smart guy, like pretty smart, but passing that class or writing some not incredible software when he was a kid is no indication that say, he’d stand out here as obviously the smartest guy in the room.
2 Likes
It is possibly the most difficult undergraduate mathematics course in the world. Come on, micro, you’re better than this.
I’m not. Lol at passing an undergraduate math class as proving you’re a super genius. Standard Harvard bullshit.
2 Likes
Definitely true, but getting rich is pretty inversely proportional to virtue and in tech that has really shown where guys like Ken Thompson didn’t get insanely rich and remained unknown while guys like Gates and Zuck got the recognition and money despite not accomplishing that much technically. Even when the smart guy did get kinda rich and famous like Wozniak they were eclipsed by the ruthless business dude.
1 Like
I just looked up some of the Math 55 examples. Pretty sure anyone that can pass that class has a high level of intelligence.