Bill Gates the farmer?
Just trying to find a decent link led me past so many deceptive headlines like Bill Gates owns a lot of American farmland, but not the majority.
So… he’s the largest private owner of US farmland , but he doesn’t own a majority-- What a relief /s
Wow that AP article is insanely deceptive. They make a fact look like a conspiracy theory and then “debunk” it with a strawman.
I love how the conversation went from “all billionaires are bad eat the rich!!” to “hey this good billionaire is talking smack about a bad billionaire, time to defend them from criticism because they did good thing”
Anyone with billions of dollars or even multi millions who isn’t using most of the amount to aid humanity is an asshole, regardless of what their political views are
literally the first episode of the citations needed podcast details how Bill Gates uses his “charitable” foundation to support the privatization of education via charter schools
they have another two parter episode later on about how his “charitable” foundation uses “partnerships” with media organizations to launder its own reputation even as it spends to influence government policy across the entirety of Africa
Throughout the 90s Microsoft was the company equivalent of a serial killer, so Gates had to really step up his public relations. Goldfish-brained liberal techies ate it up, and love him now.
you know that batman quote “you either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain”? well with billionaires its backwards apparently, you throw enough money on PR campaigns and you’re literally worshipped
Many are new blood having no idea what Microsoft used to be. Add to that the modern good-guy MS face, funding (usefu for theml) open source and all that, and it gets difficult to convey how things used to be.
As if one of them isn’t a piece of shit?
All billionaires are shit, but Gates is only an elephants diarrhoea, whereas musk is the sick triceratops’ shitmound from Jurassic Park.
Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?
Now to be fair, they’re both Epstein guys.
An Epstein guy.
I hope you remember what Bill Gates did to corona vaccinations
Can you remind me? I’m afraid the microchip conspiracy theory people have taken over that portion of my brain
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation fought to tooth and nail to prevent a patent free vaccination
I’m too drunk to find a better source: https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/
Gates’ argument about the TRIPS waiver—and the one being vociferously lobbied by pharmaceutical companies—is that waiving patent rights would not help poor countries scale up manufacturing and would instead eliminate incentives for future research.
This coming from the guy who has preached for population control for decades is pretty grim
Rapid population growth in some of Africa’s poorest countries could put at risk future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health, according to a report by the philanthropic foundation of Bill Gates.
Bill Gates is just as much a fascist as Elon Musk
libs not falling for the lesser evil challenge LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE
Pretty much all of Reddit right now
Kind of surprised that Lemmy fell for it too.
Fell for what? From all publicly available information, Bill Gates is an objectively better person that is putting his money to far better good than Elon and is an example of how billionaires should behave.
Does that mean that he’s overall a net “good” person in the grand, karmic, life total sense? Hard to say, given the abuse that Microsoft perpetuated to become Microsoft, probably not, but that doesn’t change any of the first part.
Bill Gates is one of those secret elite Epstein list pedophile Zuckerberg-lizard people ruining and draining the planet. Gates wife divorced him for his Epstein escapades.
Running a big pharma company disguised as a charity and using his money to influence the WHO and WEF.
Elon Musk is a neo Nazi idiot who is too stupid to keep their schemes going and canceled USAID.
In terms of human casualties Elon is a lot lower than Gates. Because Bill Gates is competently evil.
Lol, the idea that a billionaire liked to go to his friend’s party Island and fuck prostitutes automatically means he’s also part of an intentionally world ending cabal is flat out tin foil hat level conspiracy theory.
Occams razor would suggest that Epstein was popular because people like to fuck, not because he was an evil mastermind.
The parent is being a bit hyperbolic, which isn’t useful, but that’s not Alex Jones-level tinfoil hattery, even if it appears similar at first glance. Of course you’re right that he was an Epstein bud because he liked to fuck the classmates he couldn’t in school. At the same time it’s also true and provable that uncle Bill spends his money lobbying various domestic and international organizations to further his and by proxy the owner class’es interest. I distinctly remember for example good uncle Bill lobbying the US government and the WHO against IP sharing at the height of the COVID crisis:
Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world. A chorus of support from pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration didn’t hurt.
Source: Wired Magazine
PS: Being an Epstein bud could help if you want to lobby big names with words and capital. People pay good money to sit at the table and talk to some big shots at various places.
At the same time it’s also true and provable that uncle Bill spends his money lobbying various domestic and international organizations to further his and by proxy the owner class’es interest.
It’s provable that he seems to do it to further his own interests, but it’s also entirely possible (if I personally think unlikely), that he lobbied for that path because he thought it was the more practical path that was more likely to succeed or gain traction for whatever reason.
Or he may have done it because he has a vested interested in maintaining IP law, or maybe he has friends who do who convinced him it was important, and he did it because he wanted to please his friends.
Or maybe he did it because he was really conniving and constantly thinking specifically about class principles and how to fuck the lower classes. But I suspect the reality is simpler.
I mean if it’s children you’re fucking, that is kind of evil…?
But it doesn’t take a mastermind, nor imply a larger world ending plot.
☝️Case in point, LOL.
It isn’t hard at all to say whether Bill Gates is an “overall net ‘good’ person” or not. He became a billionaire (which is an inherently exploitative act), and no amount of trying to whitewash his legacy with philanthropy after the fact can change that.
Oh I’m sorry, did I express an opinion that wasn’t an overly simplistic black or white answer? Thank god the internet edge lord economy is still going strong to correct me.
Crazy how people feel the need to be able to judge everyone in a group exactly the same huh? One billionaire not being an asshole and they need to shut it down because it would break their reasoning. Billionaires can be assholes and Bill Gates can be an exception, doesnt change anything really. The saddest part is that this is the line of reasoning to racist people use to evaluate ‘other races’ : group them up and condemn them all, easier than actually evaluating each case.
If you buy the argument that billionaires have become such by collecting the extra value their employees create above the wage they get paid, then it’s easy to see why many consider them harmful regardless of their personal traits. In that framework, the billionaire that’s the least harmful is the one that has the fewest billions. Luckily, unlike race, there’s an easy way to become a non-billionaire. One option is paying higher wages so that you never become one. Another is lobbying for high taxes and paying them. Yet another is giving enough of money away as to become a millionaire. With race, there are no options to become not-that-race.
And so we judge billionaires as a group, as a class, because of their function and effect on society, the economy and the political system. Not because we think they’re all bad people that we have to hate. They cannot be billionaires without having these effects.
Speaking of value employees make above their wages, here’s a fun fact. If you take the average yearly net income (profit after costs) of Google and you divide it by their number of employees, you get a number around half a million per person, per year.
I mean, he hasnt been CEO of microsoft since like 2000 and his foundation is one of the biggest donors to WHO, competing with whole countries, I’d say he is pretty good
Remember when he lobbied against sharing vaccine IP at the height of the pandemic?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Quite frankly I agree, but was being more pessimistic to show that the original point stands regardless of how you feel about his time at Microsoft.
What we fall for?
Billionaire “philanthropy.”
- The Nation: Why Bill Gates’s Philanthropy Is a Problem
- Jacobin: Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Giving Is a Racket
- Adam Ruins Everything: Why Billionaire Philanthropy is Not So Selfless
- Citations Needed podcast:
- Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire: Bill Gates and Western Media
- Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire, Part II - Bill Gates in Africa
- News Brief: Big Pharma, Bill Gates Spin Against Generic Vaccines for Global South as Biden a No Show
- News Brief: #VaxLive is a PR Scam So Those Causing Vaccine Inequity Can Pose as Saviors of Global Poor
- Episode 146: Bill Gates, Bono and the Limits of World Bank and IMF-Approved Celebrity ‘Activism’
Billionaire philanthropy is like doing 100 damage to humanity, then returning 5 health. Then the 5 health gets amplified by information channels and it gets to feel much bigger in the collective consciousness. It gets a further boost when there’s other prominent billionaires that don’t give any hp back making it stand out as the good guy. So you end up in a bizarre position where objectively the philanthropist is the good guy compared to the rest, but the vast majority of us have no hp left.
Woke
Going to need a little more than a word that seems to have lost all meaning.
I am saying what you said actually was in the original meaning.
Waking up from a snooze?
Aware of social dynamics that are just not quite right.
Like the existence of billionaire celebrities.
Anyway i guess this thread does settle it. I take full responsibility for this mess of a comment chain.
The term i considered at one point a uniting concept of progressive values is dead. If it no longer conveys the message we want to express it becomes useless. Propaganda seems to have won that battle.
But a good thing, we are still here and we still seem aware of social dynamics that are not quite right, like billionaire celebrities.
