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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."
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.
Hey, never underestimate the power of "Has never covered up a massive multinational paedophilia ring" on your CV...
I'm assuming most people voted for him because of his philanthropy.
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.'"
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
Philanthropy and the fact that Gates didn't run an organization which hid and shuffled its pedophiles around the world.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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!
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.
But Gates can make money out of feces!
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
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.
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.
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
One also needs to consider the competition. George the Clueless, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Clintons (both of them!!). With about three exceptions you could distill all the moral courage, integrity, and good sense of the folks on that list into a droplet about the size of an undernourished bacteria.
Upon reviewing the list, I think there is only one conclusion. We're doomed.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
It's not as bad as people make it out to be, watch the video before making a judgement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppDWD3VwxVg Video Bill Gates/mosquitoes @ TED (unedited point segment) ~ 2-4-09
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."