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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."
Most people admire his money, not his work, or the individual himself. I bet he also makes the "most loathed" list as well (along with the Pope)!
There are only 68 million Catholics in the US according to wikipedia. How many Windows users are there?
the fact that Glenn Beck and Billy Graham are even on this list makes me want to vomit.
that America's true religion is money.
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I'm assuming most people voted for him because of his philanthropy.
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.'"
Also Nolan Bushnell. Most people have never heard of these guys, due to MS and Apple becoming dominant and rewriting history, but these guys were the True pioneers. Nolan Bushnell created the first successful videogames company. Atari was dominant from circa 1972 to 1984.
Commodore's Jack Tramiel had a "business is war" philosophy that put 30 million ~$200 computers in people's homes, and forced the competitors to drop their prices too (from the previous ~$3000 standard).
And Jay Miner practically invented the multimedia computer. First with the 128 color Atari video chip, then the more-advanced 128 color ANTIC used in the 400/800 computers, and eventually the 4000+ color GPU inside the Amiga. He also pioneered music-quality sound with his Paula device, and multitaking for home computers. It took the Mac/PC world ten years to catch-up.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Some one had to say it.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Philanthropy and the fact that Gates didn't run an organization which hid and shuffled its pedophiles around the world.
Trolling is a art,
What a horrible poll.
The sample size quoted was 1019. At 95% confidence level, the simple statistical error is about 3%. That puts basically everyone from 2-9 at the same amount of admiration...
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!
It's okay. Moderation is just a number.
Someone felt that my post that is critical of the pope was designed to draw flames. Should I hold my tongue because I fear the censorship of small minded people with power?
What exactly did Windows do for our society? When last I checked, it was the Internet that really changed things, and the Internet was not built using Windows. The only reason people admire Bill Gates is his philanthropy, and to be honest, although I strongly disagree with a lot of Microsoft's tactics under Gates' leadership, I am glad to see that he is willing to give so much to charity.
Palm trees and 8
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.
>Neither of the former faced true adversity like Nelson Mandela.
Yep, none of them were married to Winnie Madela
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Pope Benedict XVI
Most admired men, Top 3: Obama, Bush, Clinton.
Most admired women, Top 3: Clinton, Palin, Oprah.
So the top 3 admired men are the 3 most recent presidents (in order of forgetting). The top 3 women are two loudmouths and a dimwit. Pick yourself who is what.
I refuse to believe that this survey is representative for the US population. I know too many US people to simply assume that this is what Americans admire.
I'd rather have the gut feeling that this is what could be reached at home during daytime, i.e. when people who have a job go to work...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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'
That rich entrepreneurs should just do like Steve Jobs and keep it all for themsevles? Or are you arguing that no one should be allowed to be a rich entrepreneur?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Any harm Bill Gates has done has been mostly to other businesses, and people who aren't gong to suffer unduly as a result. His charitable endeavours have very likely saved thousands of lives, and improved the quality of life of more than enough people to more than make up for any of the harm MS has done. He is inoffensive and doesn't poublicly judge others. All in all, whether he believes in God or not, he has many of the attributes a good Christian should admire.
Pope Benedict has actively campaigned against measures to reduce AIDS in Africa. He's helped cover up hideous sexual offences. He's highly judgemental, and regularly blames those not of his faith for the problems of the world. All in all, he has few of the attributes a good Christian should admire.
Quite honestly, I'm surprised Bill Gates didn't rank higher.
I'd have to take Gates from those four as well.
Gates is monopolistic businessman, who has got out of that business now and is doing something worthwhile with the ill gotten gains.
Beck is either insane or an entertainer playing with fire.
The Pope and the Dalai Lama are both actively evil.
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.
Why would you assume this? If one was to only read Slashdot they would think Bill Gates is an evil borg that has caused untold misery on millions and millions of people because of his monopolistic ways. Fact is non techs admire him because he lived/lives the dream. They see him as the ultimate success and what is possible in America. Americans like to live large, and what better example of excess can you find then Bill Gates? Also the TFA shows 2% or respondents so its not like a bursting dam of love.
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.
Nevertheless, he manages it. Humans aren't exactly know for their long memories or logical consistency.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that he as the "classical robber baron" thing going on, in an age where that is largely extinct. Back in the robber baron days, you had highly recognizable individuals who piled up huge fortunes by dubiously ethical/legal means(monopoly power on a scale that actually made the Sherman antitrust act popular, shooting strikers, that sort of thing); but then spent a pretty substantial chunk of it on pieces of civic infrastructure with their name on them.
Today, when so many fortunes are either in the hands of people who have nothing more than their yacht named after them, or in the hands of largely opaque capital management groups that studiously avoid having any recognizable personalities whatsoever, classical robber-baronism is practically charming...
I don't like Catholics, however even I know John Paul II was a much better person than Gates. The Current Pope just seems like he doesn't care.
So we do need to quantify which Pope. The Pope that is or the one that was while Bill Gates was in office.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
... Windows is a bigger religion.
(Ducking and running)
Have gnu, will travel.
Bill Gates and Pablo Escobar are a pretty poor comparison. Gates never put bounties on the heads of policeman as far as I can recall. And running a software company is not the same as slinging dope. Your comparison is just absurd. Pablo was adored by the poor of Medellin because he actually did something for community that the government would not. His legacy lived on because he was actually behind Alvaro Uribe(funded the majority of public works in Medellin that the former president got credit for and which later enabled him to become president). He also offered to quit the business and pay the national debt of the country for amnesty. He was a murderer but he did care about his home town. However, I do not recall much adoration for him throughout the country during his reign, except in the super poor barrios of Medallo. And I was living here during those dark days. Our civil was with Farc and other paramilitary groups has always been facilitated by the United Fruit Company(Chiquita) to keep Colombians down on the farm. All for fucking bananas. The Cali cartel(Guiterrez brothers) took over and were much more ruthless, and that is why Cali today is one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America. Medellin, on the other hand has become absolutely amazing. Textile factories, tourism, an average temp around 70 year around, not to mention prettier girls than most places in the world. No one here really admires any drug lord. However, when you are living hard scrabble poverty, and your only way out to a decent life is to get into the business, You do what you have to do.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
That is a truly troubling thought.
You don't know that. Maybe Microsoft is just **WAY BETTER** at hiding and shuffling pedophiles around the world than the Catholic Church is?
Outside of Catholic bashing by competing denominations, why should someone admire the Pope, either the office itself or Benedict personally? Aside from the extremely mixed record of the Catholic Church, Benedict was personally involved in covering up sex abuse scandals in Europe. When he wasn't doing that, he was pushing a conservative brand of Catholicism that rejected both abortion and birth control, and is rigidly anti-gay. He's not a moral exemplar, he hasn't accomplished great works of charity or mercy, and he's generally a force for nothing but the preservation of a worldwide institution's survival and autonomy.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Even put more true to how things are...
Bill Gates:
Represents a callous sociopathic corporation who used embrace-extend-extinguish business tactics to gain it's position, then utilized shear political, corporate, and economic brute force to eradicate competition when possible.
The Pope:
Represents a callous sociopathic corporation who internally uses passive agressive business tactics, and externally utilizing an embrace-extend-extinguish business model to gain it's position, utilizing physical warfare tactics to eradicate competition when possible.
Even when stretched to full description, it's still the same... wow...
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That's got yet another significant difference, though.
The likes of Robin Hood and later Dick Turpin were lionized precisely because of a rise in popular sentiment against the era's equivalent of Bill Gates. Especially in the 18'th and 19'th centuries, as the slow rise of industrialism created a class of people even poorer and more exploited than even the medieval serfs had ever been.
And we're also talking an age when child labour rose to the extent of deliberately planning some mine shafts so they could only fit a child crawling to pull a cart of coal, because, you know, fuck you, it would be too expensive to do that for/with adults. It was an age when the parliament ruled that setting a house on fire with people still in, as a way to kick out them and make room for more pasture land where the hose was, is perfectly within the rights of the owner and in fact it would be a violation of their property rights if you told them not to. (A bit later they relented and did stipulate that you must give them 24 hour notice before doing that, which just drives home the point that before that just showing up with a torch was perfectly ok.)
It was an age where it was ok to "adopt" or even just kidnap a small army of orphans and use them as basically slave labour (no law said you had to pay your children, after all.) Including for some jobs like cleaning under mechanical looms while they're still running, and routinely mangled or scalped one of those children. (Having hair and crawling under fast spinning wheels and shafts kinda produced the results you'd expect.) Or for such delightful jobs as chimney sweep... and just light a fire under them if they don't want to go up the chimney. Etc.
The class who made vast fortunes at the expense of others, and then made public displays of piety and charity with those money, wasn't loved at all by the poor and even middle class.
Any criminal who robbed from the rich -- also giving to the poor was just icing on the cake, rather than a necessary ingredient -- was an instant darling of that mass of discontent poor. And I mean, seriously, forget Robin Hood, they lionized the likes of Dick Turpin which was as base and vile a criminal as it gets. Even with the spiral to the bottom in Hollywood, it's not the kind of guy you'd call even an anti-hero these days, and certainly not the Han Solo kind of lovable rogue. But he robbed from the rich and that was enough.
So that nowdays someone like Bill Gates could pass for a Robin Hood, rather than the villain... is... proof that times have changed a lot, to say the least.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hell, I admire Bill Gates more than Glenn Beck too.
I barely feel like punching Bill Gates in the face a tenth as much as I want to punch Glenn Beck.
Wow even more than Glenn Beck? Why even throw his name in the mix? Did he do something worthy of admiration?
The Dalai Lama is actively evil? Perhaps I am not up with recent news but I never heard that opinion before. Perhaps you could furnish us with some links (preferably not originating from the Chinese government)
Again, half the crowd on /. likes to intentionally misunderstand in order to karma whore.
To those that really misunderstand: It is a worst case comparison. If you can see why someone as offensive as a drug lord can be adored, then it explains why someone less offensive (yet offensive) like Bill Gates can be adored. You still look at the damage he has done over the years to smaller businesses, which is not trivial.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I should sure as hell hope Bill Gates is more admired than Glenn Beck.