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Bill Gates Is More Admired Than the Pope
walterbyrd writes "Americans admire Bill Gates more than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and even Glenn Beck. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist was named the fifth most admired man of 2010, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll."
the fact that Glenn Beck and Billy Graham are even on this list makes me want to vomit.
How do you know that? Maybe many people admire him for building such a towering business as Microsoft. Besides, take a look at the full poll (Gates comes in at position 5). Obama is at the top and I can tell you more about what Bill Gates did to get there than I can Barak Obama. And if you object to that, note that George W. Bush is in at position #2. Should either of these people be held more highly than the scientists and engineers who contribute to the knowledge of the nation, or the entrepreneurs who bring in vast amounts of wealth to it through innovative products?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The man gave billions of his personal fortune to help make real change possible. Tangible things that save lives. The Pope may have done some great things too--but his biggest accomplishment is being politically successful in the church. That may require a higher level of personal generosity than does Bill Gates' decision to give billions away once he had them. But the church would have done good with a different pope. And most billionaires don't give so much of their fortune away.
Part of it may also be the institutional problem--people think of leaders as the individual doing something great more than of the individual making slight political changes to a major established institution.
A lot of it will also be the money. A lot of Americans have problems in their life that money can solve. Spiritual guidance may help them be content with their lot in life, and make them happier--but it doesn't solve the fact that you're out of work while your spouse has cancer and needs the insurance, or that your son or daughter needs money for college, or for legal bills about one really stupid thing they did. Money makes these things easier. It doesn't always make them easy, but it makes them easier.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Flamebait? It has been proven that the current pope personally acted to relocate molesters and hide the evidence of their misdeeds. If not a child molester himself, he is directly responsible for child molestation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas. Slowly. And always with claiming its Gods will and its always been that way. But by no means the same codebase. Things like no married priests and stealing all the pagan holidays for themselves (christmas, etc) are much more recent than 2000 years. Think "GNU hurd" speed not "Linux" speed. Cathedral vs bazzar, literally.
Now if you want programming analogies, try codebase forks like the protestant revolution and holy wars like vi vs emacs.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Many people simply assume that he has to be smart in order to have created Microsoft and made so much money. In a way, they are correct, but it doesn't necessarily mean he was the smartest technically, which is what also many assume.
I think if you got together many of the technical thinkers of our time and asked them who the 20 best computer innovators were, Gates would have a hard time on that list (as well as Jobs) and it would be filled with people whom the average guy would never have heard of. Gates' real accomplishment is being able to take other people's ideas, dumb them down, and give people a wink and a nod to make people think they are his without really lying.
Lots of drug lords donate enormous amounts of money to their cities neighborhoods. Go look in Columbia. It is one of the reasons they are adored in their own hometowns. Doesn't change the fact that they are drug lords and will kill people to make a profit.
So, perhaps we should look at the TOTALITY of Bill Gates career, rather than just what he did with the money after he got more than he could ever spend.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
People are distrustful of religion in general, and the Pope in particular. Bill Gates comes with none of that baggage. Aside from a few of us /. geeks, Bill Gates' reputation as both a philanthropist and entrepreneur is pretty much spotless among the general public. And, among much of the American public, Companies like MS and Apple are also seen as some of the few bright spots in an economy that has seen American manufacturing going into the shitter for the last 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me if Steve Jobs beat the Pope too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You know, I can't shake the feeling that I've read that kind of argumentation before. Is it ok to do something evil, just because then you'll use (some of) the ill gotten gains to do something good? Oh, right, that's Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment".
Turns out that in America you can actually be admired for being a modern day Raskolnikov.
It also turns out that you don't even have to do all that soul-searching and all, either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Lots of drug lords donate enormous amounts of money to their cities neighborhoods. Go look in Columbia. It is one of the reasons they are adored in their own hometowns. Doesn't change the fact that they are drug lords and will kill people to make a profit.
So, perhaps we should look at the TOTALITY of Bill Gates career, rather than just what he did with the money after he got more than he could ever spend.
Yeah, then everyone can see just how stupid it is to compare him with a drug lord.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
With one important difference: Jean Valjean's fortune isn't a direct result of his crimes. He doesn't get to be the good guy by robbing Paul to give to Peter, no matter how far apart the two events are. Whereas Gates is getting to be the public philantropist hero with money made by breaking the antitrust laws in the '90's.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Not only that, but Obama is so far ahead in this poll that the others are all just a bunch of no account losers in comparison; Gates included. The message of this poll is not that Gates comes in ahead of the Pope; it's that Obama overshadows all the others put together.
You're trivializing what the cartels have done to those countries and the people who live within them by comparing Microsoft's relatively benign practices to the murders, rapes, enslavement and atrocities committed by the cartels.
Yes, Microsoft lead by Gates (and he was not the ONLY player there) has done some bad stuff. So had Oracle, so has Apple, so has *insert name of ANY corporation* - it's part of the whole corporate concept. Corporations are, by design, essentially sociopathic entities bent on profit at all costs.
But the fact of the matter is, there are lots of extremely wealthy people out there - people who, in many cases have made their fortunes in FAR more "evil" fashions than Gates, who have been responsible for killing hundreds or thousands of people and poisoned huge swaths of the Earth - who do exactly fuckall for anyone but themselves.
Looking at the ENTIRETY of Gates' career and comparing it to most other people - yes, Gates has done some rather admirable things and a few things that, since you decided to start comparing him and his organization to other groups - barely even rate on the scale of evil that corporations perpetrate every single day.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Bill Gates is very intelligent. He wrote significant parts of Microsoft first set of products, he can code (or at least he could in the early 80s). In business he was a deceitful backstabbing manipulative bastard. And now his is spending billions on his philanthropy. I won't dismiss that Gates is/was an ass, but he does deserve some credit.
Saying or doing something different from what someone else said or did is not hypocrisy. Thus, "hypocrisy" is not a word you would ever use to describe Slashdot (or any other collective group of people) if you understand what the word actually means. When the actions of Slashdot users are inconsistent with the actions of Slashdot users, this isn't hypocrisy, it's a demonstration of the mythological status of the "group think" you speak of. It's not that there aren't Slashdot users who hold all the views and display all the actions you cite, it's just there's also ones who display the opposite, and there's nothing even slightly odd, inconsistent, or hypocritical about that.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."