Comment on Malaria

• TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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

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• TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

  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.

  Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn’t any kind of moral absolution.

  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.

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• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Aside from anticompetitive actions, I don’t see much harm having been done by selling an operating system.

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Aside from anticompetitive actions

    “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.

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    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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