I consider Gates to be “better” than most billionaires, but, I recognize that he’s still a billionaire, and as such, his philanthropic endeavors are as much about him having wealth and maintaining his wealth as they are about him being a “good person”.
Let me explain: it’s a tax write off. Basically, billionaires often donate to charity, not because they’re particularly giving, but because it reduces their taxes. They basically take the money they would otherwise pay in tax, and instead pay it to a charity that then does whatever they do with it.
By establishing a charity for himself, he can personally pay his charity the money that would otherwise go to tax, then as the charity, dictate where those funds are spent. Instead of giving the money to someone else to do with as they will, he basically pays himself, so he can dictate what happens with his money.
In turn, he pays little to no taxes, and only has to ensure the money circles around his charity somehow. That may be in the form of paying himself (or others) as a function of running the charity, or sending the money to places and people who he believes can benefit from it (or indirectly, benefit him).
It becomes a large circle jerk of money that otherwise would have gone to the government for taxes.
I’m convinced no one on Lemmy or Reddit knows what a tax break actually is or that YOU DON’T MAKE MONEY FROM THEM!
The above post seemed to be saying that:
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Bill Gates pays less taxes as he donates to a charity
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Bill Gates runs that charity
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Bill Gates then gets to decide how that charity spends his donated money
This then means that he can use what should have been tax to:
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Pay himself with the charities money, as he is an employee of the charity
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Lobby politicians using the charity’s money
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Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests
Which part are you disagreeing with? I guess he doesn’t “make money” in the strictest sense, but it sure seems like he’s exploiting the system to keep more of it
Pay himself with the charities money, as he is an employee of the charity
Why does Bill Gates earn nothing through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
Lobby politicians using the charity’s money
A 501©(3) organization is subject to heightened restrictions on lobbying activities, A 501©(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status. Lobbying may not constitute a “substantial part” of the activities of the 501©(3) organization. [1]
Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests
I guess you can argue that eliminating malaria is in his best interests, but it’s pretty reaching. I guess nobody should do anything good if it might indirectly benefit themselves.
Fair, in this example Bill Gates isn’t exactly the best one to pick. And the clarification on the lobbying rules is definitely a valuable bit of information, so thank you for adding that.
I was more trying to point out that the original comment wasn’t saying that the tax break “made money”. It’s all about shuffling it around to avoid taxes.
At the end of the day, it allows Bill Gates (or other billionaires) to spend otherwise taxable income on whatever they deem important. Whether or not you agree with how they’re spending their money is irrelevant
to spend otherwise taxable income on whatever they deem important
Yes, that’s absolutely true, but the language hides the truth a bit. People don’t get the nuance of what “taxable income” is.
If Bill donates a thousand dollars to charity, he saves ~$370 in taxes. That means he’s still losing $630 on the deal. The government gets to effectively triple their money by allowing you to decide where it goes.
There may also be a limit of 60% of your AGI? I’m not sure how this works with billionaires.
The part where he “gets to keep more of it.”
$1 in charitable contributions does not lower your tax burden by $1, and certainly not more than $1.
If that dollar would have been taxed as capital gains, assuming 20% capital gains and 3.8% NII tax, it saves 23.8 cents meaning the $1 donation costs 76.2 cents.
If that dollar would have been taxed as normal income, assuming a marginal tax rate of 37%, it saves 37 cents meaning the $1 donation costs 63 cents.
(These two examples are not intended to be an exhaustive list.)
Charitable contributions cost money, just not as much money as they would if there wasn’t a tax deduction.
Issue is if he’s paying himself with the charity’s money he’d have to pay tax on that, and if he wrote that off with a donation and paid himself again then it’d reset the loop - there’s no loophole there, literally, as it’d be an endless closed loop of transferring money.
Given the best interests of the US government are destabilising other countries and supporting unfair healthcare companies, given what is known about Bill Gates’ charity spending I think a higher proportion actually goes to the betterment of society than would if it went to the US government
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I’ve come to the same conclusion. Every time there’s a corporation or billionaire either scrapping something or giving something away, then it’s “for the tax breaks”.
You’re not wrong.
Check out the Behind the Bastards episodes on him to see how his charitable efforts often end up more destructive than not.
Isn’t he the sole reason that the covid vaccine (that was funded by 97% publlic funding) was sold for a profit?
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See also early-1900s philanthropists who felt there was no point having a lot of money if you did not intend to spend every last cent. Liquor was illegal and the blowjob hadn’t been invented yet, so hell, why not build a bunch of pools and libraries?
Human beings can be complex enough to acquire money through evil means and still want to do good things with it. Sometimes even for good reasons! They’re not robots and they’re not monsters. They’re just assholes.
I don’t think it took tens of thousands of years of human evolution to learn that mouth on penis feels good. My dogs figured that one out entirely on their own.
Now, it may have seen renewed popularity with modern hygiene practices, but that’s a different topic.
So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?
Hasn’t Gates already pledged pretty much his entire fortune to charity after he dies?
I guess the Devil’s advocate argument here is would you rather trust Bill Gate’s charity to spend the money or the US Government? Because from what I’ve seen, any time there is excess money in the US government it is not spent on social programs but on enriching government contractors and tax breaks for the wealthy.
So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?
I’d say the answer to that, is that they should simply give significantly more than what they’re currently giving. We’re talking of people who could easily give away 99% of their wealth with 0 personal sacrifices. If they’re giving less than 0.1%¹ instead, I just want to know why?
I found this webpage extremely helpful for putting into perspective just how much good they could be doing: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
¹) That number probably needs to be a lot smaller, but I don’t want to make any claims.
They could use their money and influence to lobby the government in a positive direction, such as making sure taxes go toward social programs instead of killing brown people, and then simultaneously help fund that by filing their taxes fairly and paying their intended share rather than do this arcane skullfuckery to pay as little as possible. A great next step would be to lobby for reforming tax code so other, less charitably minded billionaires start doing the same whether they want to or not.
Let you explain? That’s literally not how taxes work. Who falls for this shit?
I’m not sure what you mean, since money you donate to charity is exempt from income tax. The taxes you would otherwise pay on income that you donate is refunded to you.
So you think that donating a dollar to get 37 cents back is better than keeping that dollar because what?
People who look at a billionaire and think “I need to kill him”. Anything anyone with that kind of money does, is treated as the greatest evil in the entire world.
I would like to kill a billionaire. Just once, as a treat.
The number of people who don’t understand the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit is too damn high.
It’s also an index of the health of society, if you think about it, and as you’ve noticed, society is pretty near dead.
Sharpen your pitchforks.
None of that makes sense with how taxes actually work. For every $1 donated to charity, the maximum you’re getting back is 0.37 from the tax deduction. That’s assuming you’re in the max tax bracket. The higher your tax bracket, the cheaper it is to give to charity, but it’s never better than keeping the money yourself.
There are games that can be played with charitable donations, but cash to a foundation is not really the way. The real games are played around with hard to value assets like art/jewelry where massively inflated values and weird lease terms can lead to some really questionable outcomes. For example “loaning” art to a museum and writing off the “rent” after having it appraised for some insane value.
The 0.37 you get back is the tax you paid on the income. The exercise is more about controlling where your money goes and what it goes to.
Instead of giving the money to the government, who you may not agree with, you’re giving it to a cause that either directly or indirectly can benefit you, whether that cause is a direct benefit in the form of helping with a problem that is causing you trouble, or simply as a good PR move.
You spend money to get there, but now often than not you’re getting a benefit from the transaction.
Billionaires and their mentality and interests are fairly well known, for the most part. Bill is a co-chair of the foundation and likely recieves many benefits from holding that position, including a salary. He can also, as chair, influence who is hired, providing stable employment for people who are in his favor, while also getting a massive boost to his public image, all while paying himself a salary. He can also direct the funds that would normally go to the government as tax, who may spend it on things he doesn’t want to happen, and redirect those funds to something he would like to see happen, such as R&D into technologies (which is a nontrivial part of what the foundation funds).
For Bill, the charitable foundation is a win all the way around, except to his billion dollar bank account, which I’m certain is providing plenty of income on its own.
Quite literally he’s taking money out of the hands of the government and making sure money is being funneled into things that he thinks should happen. It looks very selfless on the surface but gates is a business man, this is just his most recent endeavor.
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nah, he took LSD, quit microsoft and started philanthropy…
“Charity is the drowning of justice in the craphole of mercy.”
Bill’s income is near zero, his personal tax burden is probably less than yours. This charitable giving isn’t offsetting his tax liability; it’s a hobby.
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Just listened to Behind the Bastards on Gates… Gates Foundation is all about drumming up capitalism in other countries. Worth a listen I assure you.
The poor also experience gun violence in Minecraft
I hate mosquitos. All my homies hate mosquitos.
Mosquitos, flies, roaches. I could do with them all gone.
You probably couldn’t as the ecosystem is linking into each other
Idk man, unless someone can prove their vitality to the ecosystem I say we kill them and see where the chips fall.
I’d take 1 global apocalypse for having all those suckers die. Thank you.
Well, too bad. We’ve got several already.
I don’t know man… So many species died out naturally and unnaturally and things moved along. I’d guess wager we can do without them 😝
Typical human.
And you’re not?
I sure am. Maybe just not as nonchalant about the whole “meh, so we killed off species” part
One of the reasons mosquito populations are out of control is that we’ve killed off a lot of their predators. No mosquito anywhere is a keystone species, and you would only need to wipe out the vector species. Other, less harmful species of mosquito would fill in nicely with less competition.
At least, that’s the theory. Previous theories included introducing mosquitofish to eat the larvae, but that backfired because the moquitofish are aggressive and don’t eat as many mosquitos as local predators driven off by the mosquitofish.
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Bats eat tbem, but they won’t go extinct without mosquitos as food. There also aren’t enough bats currently to keep the mosquito populations under control due to other factors preventing abat population boom.
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Mosquitoes are pollinators…
There are 3,500 different species of mosquito, and like 10 that are responsible for most disease transmissions.
Good bit.
You should see what he released on Epstein’s island
We joke, but Epstein masqueraded as a wealthy investor/entrepreneur for like two or three decades before he was caught, so him merely having some one’s contact written down doesn’t mean much. In fact, Bill Gates has never been shown to have visited the island at any point, and Epstein was very invested in the Gates Foundation charity work such as loaning his plane for high profile individuals to fly to charity sites across Africa.
Gates met with him after 2006, where Epstein was inidicted for prostitution of a minor. It was known he was a POS.
The fact that Melinda immediately filed for divorce after the news came out is pretty damning to me.
Thought it was because his office behavior was sus.
I always thought it was more to do with the fact that their youngest son had just turned 18. So he was probably moving out of the house to college. There is a big culture here in the US to “stick it out for the kids until they move out” mentality. So I just thought that is what they were doing.
While I thought the same at the time, since then I’ve adopted a more nuanced view. My guess is that she was planning to divorce him for a while and just used an opportune moment to actually do it. Some rumors that can be explained away are not something that would end a healthy marriage.
Some rumors that can be explained away are not something that would end a healthy marriage.
I agree. My theory is he came clean with her, because he assumed it was going to come out anyway, and that what he told her was really bad.
There’s evidence that Gates knew what was going on at Epstein’s parties, didn’t participate, but still choose to stay silent. Gates had enough power and wealth that he didn’t need to worry about retaliation either.
Does any of this “evidence” exist in a tangible way, or is it all hearsay?
It’s listed in Wikipedia and they have three sources listed for it.
Link?
“There’s no reason only consenting adults should have the experience.”
He also held on to that COVID vaccine
Anyone doubting this claim should read this article: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969
Gives a really good breakdown of the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had in the global pandemic response and how they donated more money to the WHO during that time than any member country. How they have close ties to the WHO and how they hoarded the IP rights to the COVID vaccine resulting in lower income countries not having access to the vaccine.
It wasn’t “lower income countries not having access to the vaccine”. It was just preventing them from making it. They can have subsidized access to high quality vaccines.
India wanted to manufacturer the vaccine in less than ideal factories. That would have hurt or killed some of the people who took it, and the vaccine would have been blamed. This is the literal reason why they said “no”. They fucking invented the vaccine. They would know.
He fucking did! Why the downvotes? He personally lobbied governments to make sure nobody released the patents to allow cheap vaccinations in developing countries
I guess it doesn’t fit the good billionaire narrative
Gates got a bunch of defenders for some reason
some people like to join the winning team. It makes them feel like winnners themselves.
He was on the right side of the mask debate, right wingers were shitting on him, and the internet knows no nuance so he’s the good guy and if you criticize him that means you like trump.
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Really? Cause I didn’t really hear his name a lot before covid, and now I hear it a lot, and people always have really strong opinions about him.
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Civil society organizations active in poorer nations, including Doctors Without Borders, expressed discomfort with the notion that Western-dominated groups, staffed by elite teams of experts, would be helping guide life-and-death decisions affecting people in poorer nations. Those tensions only increased when the Gates Foundation opposed efforts to waive intellectual property rights, a move that critics saw as protecting the interests of pharmaceutical giants over people living poorer nations
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandemic-response-bill-gates-partners-00053969
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i remember hearing, that their argument was, that a strong profit-incentive would motive the manufacturer to increase production as well as quality. I also remember that the debate around that topic was drowned out by some weirder theories. E.g. during that time q-anon was on the rise, and some people argued, that the gates foundation was using covid to implant microchips into people or something like that
source: my memory from a couple years back
A not insignificant line of reasoning (though probably less important to people in power than the profit incentive) was also to keep the secrets of making the vaccine from bring revealed to other countries, which would apparently erode the USA’s pharmaceutical research advantage. An interesting article about this from the former director of NIST is here but I don’t necessarily agree with the reasoning.
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One of the few good billionaires (lol maybe he is the only one ).
only a forcibly expropriated billionaire is a good billionaire
Even with issues like polio where he’s supposedly doing good, he does lots of harm from my understanding. Probably not though malice, but being a know-it-all who uses their money to shape policy, the end result is still the same. Having a tech billionaire in charge of medical policy has caused many more people to suffer from polio as a result than would have without his meddling. And that’s the problem with billionaire: even if they try to be good, they’re no dieties and giving that much power to unaccountable individuals means they can accidentally cause lots of harm. And often the have perverse incentives (see Bill Gates and all he’s done to hurt education in the US, for example).
Sauce or it didn’t happen .
Or what didn’t happen? That the public didn’t get a chance to vote on how Bill Gates spends his money?
Source: Trust me, bro.
The best source now i have to believe it the power of the brohood compells me.
He helped championed one of the Covid vaccines, but also forced the private ownership and profit of it. Something the scientists working on it didn’t want to do. This in an stark contrast to the polio vaccine, which was free and who’s lead scientist referred the idea as “trying to own sunlight”.
This is true. It was said by Jonas Salk, who was attributed with the creation of the injectable vaccine in the 1950s that was greenlit for widespread use.
The injectable vaccine is a non-sterilizing vaccine (meaning you still get the disease, but your body can fight it off effectively - which is most vaccines). The injection vaccine was replaced by a sterilizing vaccine (where your bodily systems can kill the virus before you become contagious, and in many cases, before symptoms). The sterilizing vaccine, used to this day, is basically a magic potion that you drink. It looks the polio virus in your gut, which is the ingress method for polio.
From what I’ve seen, Salk didn’t live to see the success of his vaccine; but he’s a hero in my mind.
My late father was a polio survivor. He was permanently disabled as a result of the disease. He lost something like 70% of the use of his right (?) leg (could have been his left). He was still ambulatory, and could walk, but often needed to use his stronger leg when climbing stairs because his disabled leg was too weak to lift him up the stairs. He walked with a limp… And he was lucky. Post-polio survivors frequently had much more severe disabilities. I saw him struggle with the effects of it my entire life, and given he only had a relatively mild disability, I consider anyone who developed a poliovirus vaccine to be a hero of humanity, and anyone who refuses that vaccine to be an ignorant fool.
Salk’s comments are just icing on that hero status for me.
Don’t be a fool, get vaccinated.
More specifically it was Jonas Salk, and what he said was “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” and then laughed at the thought.
Video of him saying it here:
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Huh thanks that seems nice of him
- There’s no good billionaires
- Bill Gates is not any kind of exception
- Even in comparison to other living billionaires
We can say Bill Gates is the best billionaire without accepting that there are any good billionaires.
He doesn’t realise best of shit is still shit. Like talking about “the best rapist”, haiyaaaaa
I don’t think we can say that.
He’s not even better than Taylor Swift IMO
He’s not even better than his ex-wife
He’s pretty terrible. I don’t know whether or not all of the other billionaires are worse.
Lives have been saved through his funding . Can you see elon or zuck doing that ? Ever ? So in comparison i do consider him good but i could be wrong.
Who gives a fuck whether some other rich sociopath would’ve done better?
What you should be asking is why important shit like this should be left to the whims of a single private citizen with too much power instead of handled by government. The notion that Bill fucking Gates is some kind of savior übermensch who somehow knows better than the entire voting public how to spend the money is fucking ludicrous.
Black or white. Gray doesn’t exist. Like at all. I get angry when people say it does.
His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel
Charity is the oligarchy picking the winners.
So the only way bill gates can set himself apart as a billionaire is by destroying capitalism singlehandedly?
Humanity is fucked by these idiotic binary ways of thinking.
No, he can be taxed to millionaire status. Then we can democratically decide who the money is used to help. He no doubt got to where he is because he benefitted from the help of the US.
Who gives a shit about whether “Bill Gates can set himself apart as a billionaire?” That’s a moot point because he shouldn’t have become a billionaire to begin with.
Of course you’ll claim I’m sucking off billionaires when the reality is all I’m saying is a very simple and undeniable truth. You can’t think clearly when you have to categorize everything as good or evil.
It literally doesn’t matter to you that bill gates has saved thousands of lives because he’s also been shitty. That’s fucked up.
I care that moronic ways of thinking discount the good done with billionaire money.
It doesn’t matter that you ignore it, it does happen occasionally. It makes no sense to evaluate the world only as it should be, and ignore how it is
I’m just saying, the Native Americans didn’t have highways before the settlers, so even though there was a lot of bad, there was also some good.
Maybe, but that’s clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was criticized for suggesting that pharmaceutical companies should hold onto patents for COVID-19 vaccines. The criticism came due to the possibility of this preventing poorer nations from obtaining adequate vaccines. Tara Van Ho of the University of Essex stated, “Gates speaks as if all the lives being lost in India are inevitable but eventually the West will help when in reality the US & UK are holding their feet on the neck of developing states by refusing to break [intellectual property rights] protections. It’s disgusting.”
Gates is opposed to the TRIPS waiver. Bloomberg News reported him as saying he argued that Oxford University should not give away the rights to its COVID-19 information, as it had announced, but instead sell it to a single industry partner, as it did. His views on the value of legal monopolies in medicine have been linked to his views on legal monopolies in software
Hmm you do make a compelling argument
It’s easier to just assume all billionaires are evil. The chances of it being wrong is about the same as for any good person to become a billionaire
That is true maybe there were some exploits done by them here and there but everything is gray there are no black and white.
No, it’s pretty black and white with Billionaires. None of them have changed the world NEARLY as much as literally any figure from history. At all.
No billionaire has earned their billions for the simple fact that a person cannot produce that much wealth on their own. They MUST steal from others to get that rich. It literally HAS to be the case, because there is no physical way they generated that wealth themselves.
Yeah obviously. I’m not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can’t call Hitler a good person because of that one thing
Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.
That’s one stupid argument backed with made up numbers there
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it’s a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation… yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn’t justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
Some people would say that he has given negative 130 billion, or whatever his net worth is right now
I wouldn’t go that extreme, but still think he has had net negative effect in the world
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.
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.
Lol shows how much you know
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.
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.
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
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.
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
THE TERM “exploitation” often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a “fair wage day’s wage for a fair day’s work”–the supposedly “normal” situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a “middle class” standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.
Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.
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
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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Gonna take a few downvotes and agree with you. Dude donates so much to the world health organization he beats all other COUNTRIES except for the US. If all billionaires were like him, the world would be a much better place.
Wrong. Gabe Newell is the only good billionaire.
You are unfortunately mistaken. Maybe in comparison better than others but that does not mean good.
I don’t have any links ready to prove that though, so I understand if you disregard that.
Of course i meant by comparison and no need for links i have heard some shit
