Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person

jones_supa writes "Bill Gates is once again the world's richest person. He recaptured the title from Mexican investor Carlos Slim, as Microsoft hit a five-year high. It is the first time Gates has held the mantle since 2007. His fortune is valued at $72.7 billion, up 16 percent year-to-date. At the same time, Mr. Slim's América Móvil, the largest mobile-phone operator in the Americas, has dropped 14 percent this year after Mexico's Congress passed a bill that could quash the billionaire's market dominance. That's helped erase more than $3 billion from the tycoon's net worth. What comes to Bill Gates, most of his fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC, a holding entity through which he owns stakes in more than a dozen publicly traded companies and several closely held operations. He has donated $28 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

Comments

Something is wrong

[Krneki]

When the system allows a single individual to amass such wealth into his own hands something is wrong with the system. I have nothing against the rich or Bill Gates and I do think that more capable people should have a reward, but this is going beyond good taste.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new, and plays out again and again throughout human history. My greater disappointment is that we're *still* dealing with this after all these years. But unless BG starts taking over countries, or allowing his sex slaves to escape unharmed, live with it.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The system should never allow a single individual to create a product that touches hundreds of millions of people daily. We should never allow economy of scale or efficiency in that scale. They're both shitbags as people go, but they've done incredible things to move the world forward. Imagine if we were all still trying to use C/PM or if hundreds of millions of poor people in central america didn't have access to an affordable cellphone.

You're a selfish douche.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Who gets to decide how much is too much? The problem isn't that some people are too rich, the problem is that way too many people are incredibly poor, which is most people outside of developed countries. This isn't a problem that can be fixed by arbitrarily picking a number and confiscating any wealth above that, it's a problem that gets fixed by people in those countries getting rid of their corrupt politicians and levying taxes on their own wealthy. Not to say each country is a discrete unit of course, we can help them in many ways, but ultimately the decisions need to be made domestically.

Re:Something is wrong

[chromas]

Not only are we unharmed, he even lets us post to /. from our Windows 9 phones while on the job.

Re:Something is wrong

[Twanfox]

Who gets to decide how much is too much? ... people in those countries getting rid of their corrupt politicians and levying taxes on their own wealthy.

Something tells me you answered your own question just there. And if it is 'the people in those countries' deciding when too much is too much, then the GP poster commenting he feels Gates has too much is certainly within his rights to say.

Saying that the problem isn't that some people are too rich, it's that some are too poor is trying to make excuses why being overly successful (in some cases, abusively successful) is desirable and 'them good for nuthin' lazy poor folk' are in the wrong for not being successful enough. The whole game is set up so that a few accumulate a lot that could otherwise be feeding the many. The phrase 'you have to have money to make money' didn't come about because it's a cute saying. I can't imagine that anyone that's rich now continued to slog away on the assembly line until they were rich. At some point they stopped doing manual labor and let their funds work for them through investments. Even still, SOMEONE needs to slog away on that assembly line, don't they? Why can't they be paid commiserate with the total value their work brings in, just like those awesome investors that ponied up a little dough but didn't otherwise put forth ANY effort for their return? It'd certainly keep them unsuccessful poor from being so poor, wouldn't it?

The simple fact is that people are greedy assholes no matter which end of the 'rich' spectrum you're on. It's just that those that have (money, skills, power), they get to flex their greed more strongly than the rest. If everyone played fair on their own, sought balance instead of their own aggrandizement, we wouldn't feel the need to put in such silly things like regulations and limits and 'how much is too rich' and such because you just wouldn't have that problem anymore.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Linux still runs more servers, am I right? Whats more influential? Windows is simply more visible and the defacto OEM standard, through syndication, not competition.

Bill Gates has a monopoly on low level DoD informations systems, and business culture. That is all.

I would be interested to know what some of his closely held holdings are. But I'm sure the money trail around those disastrous African drug trials is nice and loose.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Well the difference is when the few decide what is to much vs the many. Thats democracy, or rule by majority. For the distribution of wealth and power, majority rule is fine by me.

For other things concerning race or beliefs rule by majority is terrible.

Our system does not currently make much of a distinction. And is run mostly by the wealthy.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

No, you're making the same mistake as the OP, treating all places as if they were the same. The bottom line is that even the poorest in developed countries have a standard of living far beyond most of the rest of the world mostly due to open and clear political systems and more importantly taxation.

There are two sentiments at work here, a kind of moralising piety that tut tuts at Bill sitting on his pile of cash as people in poor countries starve, and an attitude that really wants to see the lot of poor people get better and understands how to do so. Yours and the OPs are the former.

Re:Something is wrong

[aaaaaaargh!]

Just to let you know you're not the only one, I absolutely agree with you and anyone I've ever spoken to about this also agrees (parents, partner, friends, colleagues). The accumulation of wealth ought to be limited, nobody with a discrete income of over a million dollars a year can honestly say he needs more money. The ironic thing is that classic economic theory supports this view as well by presuming the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility - which in case of money has been confirmed well empirically.

However, just forget about making such heretical remarks on /. You'll be modded flamebait or troll and can expect an extreme amount of irrational hate. (I don't know why, perhaps the majority of people on /. are super-rich? Then there are also some US Americans who think that every political position they don't know and don't agree with must be socialism or communism without having the slightest clue what they talk about.)

Re:Something is wrong

[chrismcb]

Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

Extremely rich people are a threat to democracy. If you don't take action they become richer and richer, faster and faster and end up controlling your nation. The risk would be greatly mitigated with a cap on inheritance for instance.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

It's when that better then everyone else is by an arbitrarily decided amount. Mostly due to politics, economic trends, luck, and fiat currency over other factors. Such as actual contribution to the "tribal" group. National group. Persons colloquial fellows who helped that one individual get there.

If it were not for us all contributing to the society we have now. There would be no pile to be on top of.

Bill Gates by that logic owes his countrymen a great deal.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

If extremely rich people are buying politicians or something then I would suggest the problem again lies with your political system and a lack of serious consequences for corruption. Although I do agree that inheritances should be heavily taxed, in fact I think they already are in many places.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Specifically his achievements were in owning and selling the right things at the right times. Not even actively inventing them. You can maybe attribute some minor refinements to preexisting ideas to him.

Re:Something is wrong

[Rockoon]

Another mistake they are making is not distinguishing between wealth and income. Taxing wealth amounts to punishment for not spending, and it can only be done once.

96.9% of the people in India (1.18 billion people) live on less than $5 per day (adjusted for purchasing power.) Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

The upshot of realizing these things is that you see that wealth disparity is a pretend problem, and the closest thing it is to a real problem is the fact that so many people can be so easily fooled into droning on about it like it actually was a problem.

At the end of the day no matter how the handful of people like Bill Gates became so rich, neither their wealth nor their income holds a candle to what governments throw around on a daily basis. The frustrating part is that those than drone on about wealth disparity were basically handed marching orders to drone on about it by members of the very governments that so easily throw around much larger sums of money. It only takes a week for the U.S. Federal government (responsible for only about half of all government spending in the United States) to spend more than Bill Gates entire net worth.

The problem in India is mainly rooted in the lack of the sufficient capitol base necessary for the percentile growth of the economy to keep up with western nations. The problem in America is too many people don't realize that the government already spends more than enough, and because of that they even the worst off of us already have it better than the average man ever had it ever in the history of the world.

Re:Something is wrong

[Rockoon]

The risk would be greatly mitigated with a cap on inheritance for instance.

The U.S. Federal government grabs 40% of any substantial inheritance. What the fuck are you smoking?

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

even the worst off of us already have it better than the average man ever had it ever in the history of the world.

This is the only thing I take issue with. I am sure I could probably find an example of people in dire need in this country in recent times. I'm thinking the end result of Katrina. Or generally frozen and starved homeless people. Or people subject to gang violence. The fact is even in this "utopia" people still starve to death. Some earn that starvation, others don't really. I suppose in a 3rd world country people would have just been left to riot for themselves vs loose their homes due to insurance fraud. But you probably can still find frozen homeless people all over. How about some of those floods in the Midwest and southern U.S. due to poor urban planning because of corrupt politics. These are small abuses adding up to create horror that the majority is over looking.

If I were to loose what little support I have now from my family, I would be out of luck. I would most likely have to submit myself to our countries prison system. At that point what you say holds true again, our prisoners are pretty well taken care of. But might as well be a legitimate and civil means of going into posh slavery.

I suppose if life was great for poor and poverty stricken people they wouldn't resort to doing things that got them incarcerated for prolonged periods of times. They wouldn't kill their own children and commit suicide. They would look after themselves at least. We would see less domestic violence. Drug addiction. etc... But that isn't the case as again I would like to point out our wonderfully unique prison system.

I don't know if you can convince me that the worst of us live like Arabian kings or even Mongol lords.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Well heck. If you take the average, it's probably a neolithic subsistence culture. And they had more freedom then some of our richest do. Shorter life spans. But hey quality of life is highly subjective.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large. Suppose you built tens of billions of dollars worth of hospitals, which is a lot of hospitals by any measure, as well as the infrastructure to set up medical schools. Suddenly you've not only created a promising new career avenue, you've also made the nation healthier and, as a consequence, more productive, and as a consequence, raised their incomes.

Bootstrapping, essentially.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

With all respect, this is not a cap. Let's do some maths here.
If your stockpile of dollars increase by 5% a year, which is very conservative when you have billions of dollars, even when inflation is considered. Let's say a generation lasts 20 years. After 20 years, your extremely rich has 265% of the money he inherited, minus what they spent, which is negligible for the extremely rich. You tax it 40%. The next generation will be left with 160% of the money left by the grand father. This is very conservative. Anyway, the family (or should we call it a dynasty?) will still multiply its wealth forever, faster and faster.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

If your definition of "any substantial inheritance" is $1,000,000+, sure, Mr. Ten Thousand Dollars Doesn't Mean Anything To Me.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Bah I don't like the idea of "land ownership per see" because that is very draconian way of looking at things.... You might as well go back to feudalism. Clearly land ownership is not the most ideal solution. It's just what were using right now. It changes as sovereignty changes.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

You are assuming the politicians have the power, which is debatable. The too rich people actually end up with more power than the politician. He controls the industry more than the politician does. He can set the direction of the economy. He can hire or fire people. He can relocate factories, he can remove a city from the map and build it elsewhere with his money. This is not about buying politicians, it's about where the real power lies. If you let the extremely rich people get too rich, they become kings. Their power exceeds the one of the elected politicians. They are a threat to democracy.

Re:Something is wrong

[ChunderDownunder]

In 'legacy' software, sure.

But isn't that one of the selling points of Win8 apps that they'll run independent of resolution on phones, Win RT tablets and desktops?

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read what President Roosevelt did (which you will never learn in any history class) before the 2nd WW
to save this country from its impending loss of democracy. It will sicken you how that has been, little by little,
systematically undone by the Republicans to the point that the wealthy pay virtually no tax at all.

The Borg tries to appear repentive, but point of fact is that he has done very little in this country and has not "given"
much away at all.

CAPTCHA = 'positive', yup - I try to be as much as possible.

Re:Something is wrong

[peragrin]

Put this into perspective. In 1970 a man earning $35,000 a year could afford to own a home, a car, and afford to have his wife stay at home to raise the kids. If the wife worked too then they probably had a second summer cabin somewhere.

in 2010 a man earning $35,000 is barely living above the poverty line.(depending on location) you can't support a wife to raise the kids, let alone anything else.

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

In 1970 the average CEO earned $500,000
in 2010 the average CEO earned $5,000,000

Now tell me what is wrong with that picture? Circuit city is my favorite example. in 2008 after a year of bad sales the CEO of circuit city came up with a plan to save $10 million over 3 years. He fired the top 3,000 highest paid non mangers and rehired new people in their place earning minimum wage. Wall street was happy, and he and the board paid themselves $5 million in bonuses immediately.

With in a year Circuit city was gone completely. why? because he fired the top 3000 sales people. He could have saved $10 million dollars immediately that year by cutting his and the rest of the executive boards salaries. They weren't doing anything anyways.

executive and upper level bonuses have gone out of control. Goldman Sachs had to borrow money from he US Government so it could pay bonuses. I always thought that if the company did poorly bonuses were to be cut first not last, but for the rich they payout bonuses and then close the company down.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, without Microsoft, the rise and commoditization of x86 would have never happened (this started in the XENIX days, when they were the single largest Unix vendor), which set the stage for essentially creating the home computer market as we know it today. Of cours, it existed before MS got involved, but it wasn't Texas-Instruments, Atari, Apple or Commodore/Amiga/Commodore-Amiga who put a PC in practically every household.

It stands to reason that had Ms not, via their partnerships with Intel and IBM, commoditized the personal computer in the way that they did, the internet probably wouldn't have left academia and become what it is today. The DTP revolution would have still happened (it was born on the Mac, after all) but also wouldn't have grown into what it is today without the accessibility of having Windows, and by extension cheap PCs everywhere. Same goes for gaming and multimedia (previously the barrier to entry for the latter, was being able to afford SGI gear, though Atari introduced it to consumers).

And your gripe is screen resolution? Based on Android devices which xist in a market Microsoft was never at any point a major player in. Never mind that Apple was debatably first to market with that, and was first to market for "traditional" devices with their retina displays. I'd venture that it having took so long is due to the cost of producing the hardware has dropped to where it's affordable only now.

I do, however agree with the conclusion. life before "tech everywhere all the time for everything" was probably better.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Also what happens when there are no more empires to build? Or empire building is not sustainable for the greater good?

If the very rich and powerful were investing madly in Aerospace to the point the common man was getting a chance at the stars and we were seeing the whole Dune golden path thing play out that would be fine.

But I think we might have stalled out somewhere after Apollo. Which was mostly funded by everyone and not just a few people. However I might be able to believe some very rich intellectuals greatly influenced it, possibly in a good direction.

Re:Something is wrong

[hairyfeet]

The problem with your argument is thus: You can move a billion dollars around the planet in seconds. this means that you would have to fix EVERY country and ALL the politicians on the entire planet to do anything about the problem of too much wealth giving too much power, and that simply isn't realistic.

Just look at T. Boone Pickens who has said on several occasions he intends to own every drop of water in the United States, even if YOUR state refuses to sell to him all he has to do is find one upstream who will, now picture that on a global scale because that is what we are talking about here.

The simple fact is money is power and power corrupts, end of story. With the ability to move wealth at a push of a button the ability to just "fix politics" just doesn't exist because the wealthy can use the fact that they can move billions in a second to turn nation against nation.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sique]

It has nothing to do with Microsoft and the commodization of the PC. There were home computers in many households before, and most of them were able to work with the Internet before Microsoft enabled Internet out of the box on their OS offerings.

For a long time, Microsoft tried to use their own LANmanager (based on DEC's Pathworks) or its later incarnation as NetBEUI/NetBIOS as the local networking stack, and IP had to be added via Trumpet Winsock or similar third party applications. The Internet Providers thus were giving out installation media to install IP functionality together with the Internet access.

Internet was in many households long before Microsoft implemented it on the "commodized PC platform".

Re:Something is wrong

[MMC Monster]

Who gets to decide how much is too much? ... people in those countries getting rid of their corrupt politicians and levying taxes on their own wealthy.

Something tells me you answered your own question just there. And if it is 'the people in those countries' deciding when too much is too much, then the GP poster commenting he feels Gates has too much is certainly within his rights to say.

And that's what the tax code is supposed to settle.

In a capitalistic society there is a need for some individuals to have excess capitol/money to invest in new ideas/companies. Gates just seems to be the richest.

And you know what? It has to be someone. Why not him. At least he seems to make an effort to give away some of the money towards his charity.

Do I like what he did with the Microsoft OS monopoly? Of course not. But what he's done with the money isn't as disgusting as just putting it into big oil or buying his own island or something like that.

Re:Something is wrong

[I'm New Around Here]

Of course, without Microsoft, the rise and commoditization of x86 would have never happened (this started in the XENIX days, when they were the single largest Unix vendor),

I used to work on those systems back in the military in the mid 1990s. But I think SCO (the original SCO, mind you) was the maker of XENIX at the time. Fond memories.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The bottom line is that even the poorest in developed countries have a standard of living far beyond most of the rest of the world mostly due to open and clear political systems and more importantly taxation.

I see this trotted out in nearly 'rich vs poor' thread. Why? Are you proud of this standard? Here in the US we still have homelessness. A good friend of mine is a public defender in a mid-size city; she just lost a client to cancer because he couldn't get chemo due to lack of health insurance (an no, the ER doesn't do chemo) and he fucking DIED. We've got food deserts in major cities where you cannot buy fresh vegetables and fruit; only prepackaged preprocessed shit masquerading as food. You want third world? Take a look a the pollution in East St Louis.

I've got some very good friends in Australia and Chile, and they mock us. Get back to me with our poorest having a decent standard of living when we have real safety nets for when the bankers fleece us and the economy tanks again.

Re:Something is wrong

[iZC]

you cannot make the weak strong by making the strong weak.

Re:Something is wrong

[gatkinso]

Something is wrong indeed.... with your reasoning. There is no "system." Indded - the lack thereof defines capitalism.

Re:Something is wrong

[Krneki]

In theory yes, in practice once you got enough money you dodge the tax system through offshore accounts.

Re:Something is wrong

[superdude72]

Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.

But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted. The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity. We need government to intervene in the economy so that the distribution is more even, if not completely equal. A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.

Re:Something is wrong

[drinkypoo]

Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?

That is not the bar and even suggesting that it might be is disingenuous prevarication. The bar is that there is something wrong with the system when one person has more than they could ever spend while others are starving in the dirt.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

Regarding inflation, you're just emphasising his point. If a worker's wage has only gained in fifty cents since the '70s, then that worker is, in real terms, being paid much, much less. Which is why the average worker can no longer afford to have a house and a family. Meanwhile the average CEO wage has not just kept up with inflation, but doubled.

James Marcum received $150K in compensation in 2011, not $50K. His current income is not indicated.

Re:Something is wrong

[FirephoxRising]

Nah, I don't care if you made it this year or already had billions. No one needs personal billions. Spend it and get it back into circulation or have it taxed back to get it into circulation. The 1% don't need 99% of the wealth and the other 99% certainly need it. "even the worst of use have it better than the average man"--Crap. In living memory society and people were better off and then what you are saying was closer to being true. Now it's getting worse each year for the "average man" and better for the 1%. This is not desirable for the majority and I don't believe it to be sustainable. The wealthy want to pay crap but demand high prices. Banks like their own employees to be casual with crap conditions and security, but they want to lend to permanent full time workers. You cant have it both ways forever.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

The floor should be linked to the cap. Make the cap being 100 times the floor. That was the rich can get ever richer, but he has to make the poor richer too.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

You say that like they just happened to have 86-DOS lying around when IBM happened to ask them for a disk OS. The fact that they kind of bluffed their way into market dominance, without even having to develop a new piece of software, displays a certain amount of cunning. They knew what they were doing.

Business intelligence and not computer intelligence, mind you.

Re:Something is wrong

[TheRaven64]

If the problem is wealth inequality, then you don't make it an explicit cap, you make it a ratio. Say, no person should be able to control more wealth than 100 times the median. That would mean, today, that a wealthy person would be in a position to live comfortably and never have to work again, which sounds like it's sufficient incentive for the people whose only motivation for doing things that benefit society is collecting personal wealth (I've never met any such people, but according to posts above they exist). And, if someone really wants more, then the incentives are set up so that they can get a lot more by increasing the median wealth a small amount...

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

Capitalism is a "system", duh!

Re:Something is wrong

[MickyTheIdiot]

"I don't understand how businesses work!"
Please note that the CEO of Circuit City (or any corporation, typically) has vested interest. This is so that they don't get rewarded for destroying the company. You point out a person who ran a business, made mistakes running this business, and destroyed it. Please note that Circuit City went out of business, and no longer has a CEO position (he's fired!). Please note that the CEO in question is James Marcum, who now makes $50K/year, according to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/profile/james-marcum/). Your point of a single technology company which bankrupted itself is not supportive evidence of the point that "CEOs make too much money!". It is especially invalid when your example CEO now makes 10% higher than the national average salary (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html).

This is either an extremely naive CEO apology or you've drunk the kool-aid. A CEO losing a job is no where NEAR equivalent to a regular worker losing a job. Sure he went to $50 a year, but read the previous post... just the bonus they paid themselves is $5 million! JUST THE BONUS. Anybody with a little sense can invest that and live of that bonus itself! And I have no idea what he was paid previously, but I am guessing millions. Also not listed is what golden parachute he got at then end of his job... another advantage a CEO has over your regular joe worker. Do you really think that's a bad consequence for him personal? It's not like he's starting from ground zero and has to LIVE on $50k a year. If Marcum is not rich now then he WAS truly an idiot. This is really a high-order false equivalency.

Re:Something is wrong

[bondsbw]

[citation needed]

Meanwhile, I found data that completely reverses your assertion.

Average Wage in US:
Dec. 1970 = $3.70
Dec. 2010 = $19.24

Are you sure your source wasn't already inflation adjusted?

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend it and get it back into circulation or have it taxed back to get it into circulation. The 1% don't need 99% of the wealth and the other 99% certainly need it.

I get the feeling that people learned economics from duck tales and think that Bill Gates has a vault of gold somewhere.
Most of his money is in assets. Hard to get those back in circulation.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The bit about being late to the Internet party is accurate, but Microsoft was a major player in the commoditization of the PC market.

A (good enough) operating system you could dump on any IBM compatible was key, and provided a kind of inexpensive, universal operating system that anyone could make use of.

Re:Something is wrong

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> When the system allows a single individual to amass such
> wealth into his own hands something is wrong with the system.Â

We have tons of evidence that forbidding this leads to measurable declines in the health and wealth of the average eystem. I's been tried and found mass murderous in its application.

Your feeling is abused by the same people you rage against -- the powerful -- to get you behind them in their bid to take power from other people.

If you were brighter, you'd realize this instead of being a meme-driven cog in their power hunger, which, as noted, leads to measurably worse outcomes for the "common man" you purport to care for.

Re:Something is wrong

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I don't know how my phone thought a misspelling of "person" should be corrected into esystem. I'm turning spell correction off now.

Re:Something is wrong

[JackieBrown]

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

The average worker's wage was under 10,000 in 1970.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median%20Household%20Income.pdf
http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

Re:Something is wrong

[ndavis]

Put this into perspective. In 1970 a man earning $35,000 a year could afford to own a home, a car, and afford to have his wife stay at home to raise the kids. If the wife worked too then they probably had a second summer cabin somewhere.

in 2010 a man earning $35,000 is barely living above the poverty line.(depending on location) you can't support a wife to raise the kids, let alone anything else.

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20 In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

In 1970 the average CEO earned $500,000 in 2010 the average CEO earned $5,000,000

Now tell me what is wrong with that picture? Circuit city is my favorite example. in 2008 after a year of bad sales the CEO of circuit city came up with a plan to save $10 million over 3 years. He fired the top 3,000 highest paid non mangers and rehired new people in their place earning minimum wage. Wall street was happy, and he and the board paid themselves $5 million in bonuses immediately.

With in a year Circuit city was gone completely. why? because he fired the top 3000 sales people. He could have saved $10 million dollars immediately that year by cutting his and the rest of the executive boards salaries. They weren't doing anything anyways.

executive and upper level bonuses have gone out of control. Goldman Sachs had to borrow money from he US Government so it could pay bonuses. I always thought that if the company did poorly bonuses were to be cut first not last, but for the rich they payout bonuses and then close the company down.

While this is exaggerated quite a bit it does still have one major point that I see. The people at the bottom that spend all their income and save very little because they can't afford to are being squeezed whereas the people at the top who don't spend all of their income get to save even more. While saving money is good in general this is not true for an economy based on consumption as someone at the bottom will spend the money so another person/company will benefit.

The wealthy take the extra money and while some spend it on lavish things such as houses, cars, Yachts, many invest it and this is the big change that has happened since the 70s, the internet has made it where a wealthy person does not need to pay huge fees anymore for investing in the market. In the past some fees were as high as 15% for investing large amounts of money in the market but in today’s internet they tend to have a fixed low cost. This has made the one fee the wealthy paid (and kept low earners out of the market) disappear. So you have rising incomes at the top with less expenses for investing not to mention less taxes on those investments.

Last point I'll make is that I don't see an issue with high CEO pay but the market has forced CEOs to look at short term gains (month to month) instead of long term gains 5-10 years down the road and this has caused the issues we are seeing today when someone has no real interest in the long term growth of a company but instead focuses on short term gains it can cause a person to do really well at first but implode over the long run.

Re:Something is wrong

[gtall]

" Suppose you built tens of billions of dollars worth of hospitals, which is a lot of hospitals by any measure, as well as the infrastructure to set up medical schools. Suddenly you've not only created a promising new career avenue, you've also made the nation healthier and, as a consequence, more productive, and as a consequence, raised their incomes."

Not really. If you have no demand for all those extra hospitals, then you have essentially wasted capital. And if people went to med school to work in those hospitals, they are SOL because there will be no jobs waiting for them.

China is suffering from this same sort of mentality. They built all kinds of infrastructure that only managed to give them a housing boom and now it is busting. A similar thing happened in the U.S. when demand was artificially created, couldn't be maintained, crashed, and almost took out the entire U.S. economy in the process.

I'm not against public investment, it is necessary. However, it cannot be done without an eye on a return on that investment. Otherwise, it is just warping the economy and creates bigger problems than it was intended to solve.

Re:Something is wrong

[gtall]

Just to be fair, that wasn't only the bankers. That was the real estate agents, the builders, Wall Street, government agencies, credit rating agencies, house appraisers, and last but not least, the sainted American People who mortgaged second houses, flipped houses, signed on the dotted line for adjustable rate mortgages because they were too stupid to relax, read, and live within their means.

Re:Something is wrong

[jellomizer]

For these uber rich people, it is not like the fantasy Scrooge McDuck idea, Of a guy with a vault just filled with money. It is spread across many different things and is working for him, moving from hand to hand and barely ever actually reaching Bill Gates. Unless Bill decides to sell it all at once.

Re:Something is wrong

[bws111]

Where did you get those bullshit numbers? In 1970 the average worker earned $19.20 (I guess that is per hour). Well, according to the SSA the US average income in 1970 was $6,186.24 (in 2011 it was $42,979.61). So, if the average worker was making $19.20 in 1970, they were only working 322 hours per year, which is of course nonsense. In reality, the actual average earner was making about $3/hour in 1970.

As for your idiotic example of Circuit City, do you have the slightest bit of evidence that retaining the 3000 fired people would have made any difference to the longevity of the company? No, you do not. Circuit City did not die because they replaced those workers, it died because people no longer went to the stores, they purchased online. And you can't compete with price online when you are paying 3000 people who aren't resulting in any sales.

Re:Something is wrong

[ZiakII]

He was saying with inflation. as $3.70 is equivalent to $22.17. Although he is cherry picking data and only applying inflation to the worker and not the CEO. As a CEO making $500,000 in 1970 would be about 3.2 million in 2012.

Re:Something is wrong

[bws111]

Of course in reality the average worker's wage did not only increase fifty cents, those were complete bullshit numbers he made up. In reality, in 1970 the average income was $6186 (about $3/hour) and in 2011 it was $42976 (about $21/hour).

Re:Something is wrong

[aaaaaaargh!]

He's given back more than a third of his money to charity... Something is wrong because someone succeeded?

Success is not measured in terms of money.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I live in Europe.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

And yet most developed countries are functioning fairly well. Certainly compared to poorer countries.

Re:Something is wrong

[gatkinso]

Confusion of laws with political construct. Stealing is illegal in socialist and communist nations the last time I checked.

Re:Something is wrong

[gatkinso]

If you agree with Marx it is.

Re:Something is wrong

[westlake]

Internet was in many households long before Microsoft implemented it on the "commodized PC platform".

The numbers aren't there to support such a claim. In fact, they prove just the opposite. The US Census figures are particularly striking and persuasive.

Households With a Computer and Internet Access 1984 to 2003

Internet Adoption 1995-2011

In 1990 the Internet had existed for only 7 years; just 3 million people had access to it worldwide. 73% of these people were living in the United States, 15% were in Western Europe.

Internet Users 1990

Re:Something is wrong

[csubi]

Of course, without Microsoft, the rise and commoditization of x86 would have never happened

Lets not make such strong statements in retrospective. The succession of events leading to the widespread use of PCs might seem logical an inevitable when looking back a couple decades, but it might have happened in a completely different way. We will certainly never know.

What we know is that Bill Gates amassed this fortune by making pushing an inferior product on masses that defines the user experience of most PC users.

Re:Something is wrong

[JackieBrown]

Not directed at you, but leaving out inflation kind of defeats his whole point. The way he wrote it made it sound like people made the same as before but have less buying power.

Re:Something is wrong

[Opportunist]

Punishing "not spending" sounds about right in this economy where our problem is pretty much that people stopped spending.

Re:Something is wrong

[BradleyAndersen]

It is estimated that Rockefeller's peak was something like $400 to $700 billion in today's money. Gates is a pauper compared to Rockefeller.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

If you agree with the dictionary, it is still a system. The lack of system can be called lawlessness, chaos, anarchy, randomness, whatever but not capitalism, duh! Capitalism is an economic system, by any standard. Even hard line laissez-faire capitalists call it an economic system. If you don't have ownership, you can't have capitalism. And if you have ownership, you have a system duh!

Re:Something is wrong

[Opportunist]

The idea itself is correct, though. It worked in the 30s with the Hoover Dam, which was of course a project to produce electricity and regulate the Colorado to avoid droughts and floods, but it also created an incredible amount of jobs during a time when jobs were sorely needed. Pretty much like today.

I could well see another, similar project, maybe in the south east of the US to protect it from Hurricane floods. There are many projects you could create that don't lead to an overabundance of certain infrastructural systems that lead to more problems. We could actually use that time (and money) to solve problems we have, create jobs at the same time and in the end create better living conditions in the long run.

Re:Something is wrong

[Opportunist]

It's more likely to be invested somewhere, somehow. But that doesn't solve the economy problem, it adds to it. We don't need money on the supply side, we need money on the demand side of economy. That's the problem our economy is facing, a lack of demand. Look around you, does it seem like there is any shortage of any goods? Or any kind of service? The problem is that the stockpiles are full but there's nobody who could still buy the crap we produce, or request and pay for the service offered. That is the economy problem today.

We don't need more investment money. We need more spending money. Our economy needs consumers who want to and who can consume. That's a given. Now, our products are good enough that the consumers would want to consume, what's lacking is their ability to do it.

We need money on the demand side to restart our economy into its former strength. We need to SELL, people!

Re:Something is wrong

[Opportunist]

So do I, and I was appalled when I went to the US for a few months. This was the big role model for economy, of growth and progress? The electric infrastructure (in California, not backwater hicksville) reminded me of our countryside in the late 1960s, and I found hemp isolation on the wires in the buildings. I was kinda wary to use the tap water for anything but washing hands, I didn't consider it impossible that they used lead pipes, too.

Fuck, I've seen better infrastructure in the former East Bloc, and those of you who've been to countryside Romania know what THAT means!

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

Hospitals were a crude example. My point is that humanitarian efforts of any sort are poorly approximated by deciding how much money you are giving each person. And of course there's the issue of whether taxation or personal charitable efforts are the correct approach, or what the right balance between them is; that's a bigger issue than I feel confident in addressing.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

Outstanding, thanks.

Re:Something is wrong

[poity]

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html

1970.....6,186.24

correct, mod up

Re:Something is wrong

[defaria]

WFT?!? How can you say that with a straight face? You say you have nothing against the rich except of course that they make to much money. You bestow upon something that doesn't exist and that you don't identify ("the system") as if it has bestowed wealth onto an individual and has agency. Nothing could be further from the truth. People make money because they produce value, value that other people gladly part with their wealth to attain. Nobody's holding guns to anybody's heads and forcing them to part with their hard earned cash. Everybody purchases *willingly*.

And you provide absolutely no fucking evidence nor reason why it should be anything else other than presumably you just don't like it. Well who the fuck are you? Obviously somebody who has failed in his own wealth creating efforts.

Re:Something is wrong

[Steve Hamlin]

"Are you sure your source wasn't already inflation adjusted?"

It was, and his point stands.

40 years of productivity growth and technological advancement, with the average worker no better off financially (fn1).

fn1: at least per CPI/PCE deflators; there is some debate about the impact of BLS's hedonic adjustments and how the value of technological progress is included in inflation metrics.

Re:Something is wrong

[Nimey]

FWIW adjusting for inflation (and why didn't you?) means your 1970 person would make $35336.47/yr or ~$17/hr today, giving an inflation-corrected increase of $4/hr.

source: westegg.com

Re:Something is wrong

[Nimey]

Per Westegg's inflation calculator, $3.70 in 1970 would be worth $20.54 in 2010.

Re:Something is wrong

[csubi]

This good enough for you?

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

At the end of the day no matter how the handful of people like Bill Gates became so rich, neither their wealth nor their income holds a candle to what governments throw around on a daily basis.

And yet those super rich manage to control everything, including our government. That's reason enough to prohibit extreme wealth. It's nothing but corrupting.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

Yes it was inflation adjusted. So what? The actual wages the average person takes home hasn't increased in 40 years, despite dramatic increases in both worker productivity and executive pay. How is that defensible?

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

In reality, inflation matters. If you try to compare wages between historical periods without adjusting for inflation you are a liar. The inflation adjusted median wage hasn't appreciably changed in 40 years. This is indefensible.

Re:Something is wrong

[Atrox Canis]

I lived in Germany for three years from 1985 to 1988. I lived in Honduras for 6 months and on an island off the coast of Sai Pan for 8 months and I lived in two different countries in Africa. I've lived in California, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, Washington, Alaska and Texas. And when I say I lived there, I mean I owned or rented property there, I registered to drive where that was possible. I immersed myself in the economy. I've also spent considerable time in a number of other European, Asian and Middle Eastern locations but only as a short term visitor. And I call bullshit on your claim that the infrastructure here in America is not as good as what you would find in the countryside of Romania. If there are structures here that still have lead water pipes, it is an aberration, not the norm. You sir are full of shit.

Re:Something is wrong

[Whorhay]

I'd love to see a nationwide push to bury power and phone lines. That would save a lot of money in the long run from storm damage and while we were at it we could lay municipal owned fiber optic lines.

Re:Something is wrong

[ranton]

And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large.

It is true that there are ways governments could spend the money in a way that each citizen would gain more than $61.61 in wealth. But most studies I have been able to find in a 10 minute Google search show the effect to be closer to $1 of infrastructure spending boosting economic output by $2. Here is one example I found on my search.

So even if taking all of Bill Gate's money would give $123.22 to each Indian, that would still not have some huge impact.

Re:Something is wrong

[bws111]

So an infalation adjusted house cost $35K in 1970? No, it did not. This is called lying - using inflation adjusted wages, but not inflation adjusted prices.

OK, so the inflation adjusted wage has not changed, neither has the inflation adjusted price. Why is that 'indefensible'? What more are people doing today than they were in 1970 that would justify them being able to have more purchase power? In 1970, a person doing an average job could by certain items. Same today.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

What more are people doing today than they were in 1970 that would justify them being able to have more purchase power?

We're almost twice as productive, that's what. Notice how productivity tracked with income until the 1970s? Now the rich steal all of that.

Re:Something is wrong

[ranton]

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

If you look at only take home pay you are correct that wages have not gone up when adjusted for inflation. But wages are not the only factor in employee compensation.

First off, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by employers have gone up since 1970. All employees have gotten an inflation adjusted 2.7% raise since 1970 based purely on this.

Second, health care premiums paid by employers have been going up significantly in the past 40 years. Currently the average employer pays $2.12 per hour for employee health benefits (source), which is about 10% of their earnings. I couldn't find exact statistics on 1970, but based on trends for the past 10 years and total health expenditure increases over the past 40 years, it was probably closer to 3-4% of earnings in 1970. So just health benefits have given average workers an estimated 6.3% inflation adjusted raise since 1970.

So if wages have stayed constant over the past 40 years, total compensation for the median worker has actually risen by about 9%. This is pretty impressive since it is very hard for median wages to ever outpace inflation (since when everyone makes more money, prices of most things go up to match). That makes your numbers more like this:

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $21.43

I would agree that we have a problem with what people spend their money on in 2013 compared to what it was spent on in 1970. And those decisions are making us struggle more than the last couple generations. But that is a different discussion.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

I hate replying twice, but i have to point out that:
"neither has the inflation adjusted price."
is simply not true. House prices have consistently outpaced inflation for decades, until the 2008 financial crisis. But prices still haven't returned to historical norms. And if it did, it wouldn't matter because the only people experiencing a "recovery" are the super rich.

So inflation adjusted wages haven't changed. Inflation adjusted prices are higher than they were in the past. And inflation adjusted executive compensation has increased over 100x in the same period. How is this defensible?

Re:Something is wrong

[Custard Horse]

It is arguable whether Windows was inferior or not. It had 'something' that gave it mass appeal. Take Windows out of the picture and something would have taken its place but would it have been so successful and would it have appeared/developed in the same relatively short timescale? I doubt it.

Lots of inferior (by comparison) products succeed but this is not a bad thing. Ultimately the dominance of a product makes competition really hone its own product in order to steal a market share. I'm not an Apple fan but you cannot help admire their products and the niche that has been carved. And the open source community has produced viable alternatives which, by some miracle, are free and fairly easy to use.

Windows is easy to use and easy to get hold of. It is feature rich and despite the annoying difficulties with it, it works most of the time and does a pretty good job.

As for 'pushing an inferior product on the masses' I cannot recall a user-friendly GUI based alternative to Windows, Outlook and Word when I started working in an office in 1993. Perhaps I was just blind, ignorant or representative of Joe Public which I suspect is the case.

However, you cannot expect those users to 'just drop' Windows when a semi-viable alternative arrives particularly when the software industry has been slow to build releases for platforms other than Windows. People are reactionary - they don't like change.

Re:Something is wrong

[somersault]

I would have thought single people to be the most likely to invent new ways of touching themselves

Re:Something is wrong

[bitt3n]

His point is that such a 100% tax would barely bump the needle of government spending, whether you use the money for handouts or infrastructure. Meanwhile, the good this additional spending would do must be balanced against the disincentive to create wealth any such additional tax would effect.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

Meanwhile the average CEO wage has not just kept up with inflation, but doubled.

Doubled?

From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.

Source: Economic Policy Institute

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

if wages have stayed constant over the past 40 years, total compensation for the median worker has actually risen by about 9%.

Over the same period, worker productivity doubled and CEO compensation increased 700 times.

Re:Something is wrong

[kbolino]

Who the hell thinks making 5% over inflation every year for 20 years is "very conservative"? That is quite a successful investment plan! Also, it only takes one of those heirs being profligate to destroy all of your "math". Moreover, real wealth cannot "multiply forever, faster and faster" unless economic activity as a whole does likewise. In other words, for every fat cat sitting in his mansion, somebody (most likely, many somebodies) had to be doing something useful with that money.

Re:Something is wrong

[Opportunist]

Again, simple job creation isn't going to cut it, but there are quite a few things that could be improved in the country that requires workforce AND would improve the infrastructure and standard of living of many people.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

Taxing wealth amounts to punishment for not spending

In an economy that depends on the velocity of money, you should be punished for not spending. Especially if you have already saved enough to live on for thousands of years.

Money is a resource. Do something with it, or let someone else use that resource. Hoarding isn't good for anyone.

Re:Something is wrong

[Jeremy Erwin]

Yeah! It cost 5.6 million dollars just to bury Margaret Thatcher.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

because they were too stupid

Stupid? Or just misinformed by the financial professionals they trusted? People aren't born understanding mortgages, bankers are the ones who have the training to make responsible choices. When the FBI sent warning letters to banks that 90% of stated income loans were fraudulent, do you know how the banks responded? The *increased* the number of stated income loans they issued. Are you really going to blame the average person for that?

Re:Something is wrong

[ranton]

Over the same period, worker productivity doubled and CEO compensation increased 700 times.

But why did productivity double? Productivity and wages rose together until the 70s because the productivity gains came from the effort of workers. Increased education was the primary contributing factor.

In the past few decades, however, the productivity gains are not coming from the average worker. They are coming from the elite expertise of the upper middle class and the investments made by the wealthy. A secretary in the 70s was much better at her job than a secretary in the 30s because she was probably much more educated. A secretary today is not more productive than a secretary in the 70s because she is so much better at her job. She is more productive because her boss invested in better CRM software. Therefore the financial gains are rightfully going to the business owner who paid for the software and the software developers who wrote the software, not to the secretary.

We definitely need to improve the level of wealth distribution in this society because too much disparity is harmful. But don't confuse this with a desire to be fair, because an argument can easily be made that it is more fair for the wealthy to keep their money.

Re:Something is wrong

[csubi]

Bundling the OS to the PC what gave a lot of mass appeal. See first sentence at 1990:Breakup.

The cost of Windows is still hidden on pre-installed machines. I doubt you pay the >$100 like for an OEM version when building our PC yourself. This was even better in the early days - when a PC was sold for thousands of dollars, a couple hundred bucks for the OS were not a big deal.

As for changing platforms : most people would not notice that they are using a popular Linux distro if they have a start menu with programs. Compatibility is an issue : I can't watch Netflix on Linux ( but can buy a set-top box for $100, running linux?!), I can't submit a CV (in most cases) in .pdf or .odf because recruiters want .docx, tc, etc. My wife was using windows, she had no trouble switching to Linux as a regular user. But she cannot vote for the french legislative elections from a Linux machine. Could continue...

So Windows became widespread because they had a very good business plan, and a functioning product "good enough" to establish a monopoly. But you cannot claim, in retrospective, that nothing better would have come up within a reasonable timeframe (5 years?), and neither will we know what personal computing could have been during the 1990s and 2000s had MS not succeeded securing their 90%+ market share with PCs early on.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate's distribution of long straws is wildly capricious."

-Warren Buffett

Re:Something is wrong

[tompaulco]

When the system allows a single individual to amass such wealth into his own hands something is wrong with the system.

When the system prevents a single individual from amassing such wealth into his own hands then something is wrong with the system.

Re:Something is wrong

[Scot Seese]

Bill Gate's wealth does not exist in a vacuum. He did not win the galactic lottery. The vast majority of it came from stock in the company he founded. That company employees over 135,000 people in 139 countries, as of 2010. The vast majority of those jobs pay competitive living salaries. The company pays billions of dollars in taxes into the coffers of the countries they do business in. Bill Gates has also paid billions of dollars in personal income tax, capitol gains taxes, property taxes and sales taxes over his lifetime. While he is but one man, he has paid more into personal taxes than tens of thousands of school teachers, firefighters, cops, plumbers and other middle-income individuals who will, at nearly every given opportunity, trumpet loudly that wealthy high achievers need to pay their "fair share." You will not pay as much money into your country's tax system if you lived one thousand years.

The products his company makes, for better or worse, forever changed the world.

It is a very dangerous thing to remove incentives for success, demonize personal accomplishment and pride of achievement, for when the knife-point of intellect, drive and ambition has been blunted you are left with stagnation and mediocrity - whether as an individual, or a society.

Re:Something is wrong

[Alastor187]

Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.

Sweet deal? You do know that inheritance involves someone dying, often a close family member. Also, do you realize that the deceased person already payed tax on the sum of money, so it not exactly tax free?

As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted.

Not it doesn't, only certain types of labor become less profitable, others become more profitable. I think this would be a good place for a 'horse and buggy' analogy from an RIAA related story?

The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity.

What does dignity have to do with anything? There is no economic system that protects dignity, dignity is a personal choice, and only in a economic system that protects personal choice can one choose how to live with dignity (if they even care about it).

A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.

Who decides what the upper and lower limits will be? How do they ensure that beneficial activities such at spending $28 billion in charitable contribution is persevered? How do they know that once the current upper limit economic activities have been eliminated there will remain enough economic activity to support those who cannot or choose not to be productive? How do they wade there the infinite number of needs and wants with the unlimited number of outcomes to determine what economic activities people can or cannot undertake?

Re:Something is wrong

[happyhamster]

This is a very childish, trollish way to ask a serious philosophical question about how human society should be organized. "better", really? That's a simplistic, meaningless qualification. Let me guess, you are twelve years old and read some Ayn Rand. 5, insightful?

Re:Something is wrong

[Sique]

Hm. The numbers actually say something else. In June 1995, there was Internet already in 14% of all households in the US, and Microsoft didn't start to bundle an IP-stack with Windows before Win95 SP1 (which came out in November 1995). So I would rather take this statistics to prove my point: Internet as a wide spread phenomenon was existant before Microsoft enabled it, and the bundling of an IP-stack was a result of consumers asking for Internet features before buying a new computer. So it was consumers who drove Microsoft to Internet, and not Microsoft driving the Internet to consumers.

Re:Something is wrong

[tendrousbeastie]

And used car salesman are basically the experts when it comes to the sale and purchase of used cars. But you wouldn't trust them would you.

If someone trust a 'professional' so blindly with a huge amount of their own resources without stopping to think about the conflicts of interest that professional is subject to, then yes, they are behaving stupidly.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

She is more productive because her boss invested in better CRM software.

Notice how the boss didn't write the software. He didn't do anything of value besides provide the funds. The people actually responsible for the increase in productivity are the workers who created the tools that cause the increase in productivity. Deciding to use the tools that are availble is not such a difficult task that it should win you the lions share of what is produced with those tools. It's the design and production of those tools that is valuable, and that's done by ordinary workers.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

And? So? Responsible people who want good policy take human stupidity in to account. It's not their fault that they are stupid, it's human nature. It's the bankers who knowingly take advantage of that stupidity who are at fault. They know enough to know better.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

We're not talking about your little thousand dollars investment. We are talking billions here. 5% is really conservative when you have billions, because you don't just gamble in the market, you manipulate it and cash in the gambles of other small investors. That is how the market work. You take your thousand bucks to the bank and ask to invest it. They'll make 10% on it and give you like 2 to 3% return on your thousand dollars. If you bring 1 billion, you buy the bank. If you invest a thousand buck on the stock market, the company may give you some dividends if they succeed. If you invest one billion on the stock market, you control the company and tell it what to do. You buy and merge the competitors, split it up, you can buy the suppliers, etc...
In other words, 5% is really very conservative.

Re:Something is wrong

[HornWumpus]

Yes, when 90% of a group of people lied about their stated income, I blame them when they lose their homes.

Buying a home/getting a mortgage is not for children. If some adult 'children' signed things they didn't understand they will serve as a warning to others: 'Don't do what they did or you will end up in a similar position!'

BTW the required 'fair lending disclosure' reads at about a 6th grade English/math level.

Re:Something is wrong

[schlachter]

The problem is when one person does better than everyone else at the detriment to society as a whole. Corporations and individuals should be socially responsible with their immense wealth, or risk losing it.

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

That's correct, but even split that money is still in the hand of a few. It's not a king but a small class of oligarchs that collectively is richer and richer.

Re:Something is wrong

[HornWumpus]

Stealing is at the heart of socialist and communist nations. Just it's only the government allowed to steal (they call it expropriation).

Re:Something is wrong

[HornWumpus]

Hitler was the richest person in the 20th century.

That's right, the leader of a socialist nation, who never produced anything tangible except a book, was the richest person in the century.

Think about that before you go handing the government more power.

Re:Something is wrong

[ranton]

Notice how the boss didn't write the software. He didn't do anything of value besides provide the funds.

Providing the funds is the most important part of the transaction. I can easily find programmers to write a website, but finding someone willing to pay these programmers is much more difficult. From what I can tell it is far more common for people think about now instead of the future, which makes those who invest very valuable. Some people invest by starting their own company, some people invest in themselves by growing their skillsets, and some people invest in companies started by others (in fact many people do all three).

These investments are what raise someone's worth, not hard work by itself. And all of these activities will significantly raise your worth unless done poorly (investing in a poor company, investing in a degree in basket weaving, etc.). The work you do from 9-5 is not going to increase your worth much unless you are actively investing in yourself by learning new skills and taking jobs that provide valuable experience. Your worth is most likely going to go up by investing some of your wages. That is as true today as it was 50 years ago.

I have worked at start up companies and have done consulting for small companies, and I have never even seen a small company that was a success because of some random employee doing an outstanding job. It was the vision and execution of the business owner, or a select few treasured employees with their own stake in the company, that made it a success. The rest of the employees just filled the seats and did about the same work that anyone else in their salary range would do. There are most certainly exceptions, but I doubt there are many.

Re:Something is wrong

[ranton]

The inflation adjusted median wage hasn't appreciably changed in 40 years. This is indefensible.

Actually it has. When you account for the increases in payroll taxes paid for by employers and increases to other benefits like health insurance, employees make about 10% more than they did in 1970. And any gains for median wages against inflation are outstanding, since prices for any product that doesn't have unlimited supply is likely to raise along with any income gains by median wage workers.

Re:Something is wrong

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 was pretty decent. as was a Mac. Or Amiga. They all had decent software stacks. Microsoft did the best job selling to businesses as well as consumers. But when there was competition, I often chose non Microsoft stuff.

Also, You were not using outlook in 1993. It didn't exist back then. The first versions came out around 96 or so. It was only bundled with the rest of office in Office 97, before that it came with MS Exchange.

Re:Something is wrong

[Xcott Craver]

Is it really appropriate to use average wages, instead of median wages? The average wage doesn't change if everyone takes a huge pay cut while a CEO ends up giving himself a 1000-percent raise.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

10% more, while productivity has doubled and executive pay has increased by orders of magnitude.

Re:Something is wrong

[sciencewhiz]

If it was as easy as you make it sound, the Forbes 400 would be full of the 5th and 6th generations of 19th century industrialists.

There are 0 Carnegies, 0 Crockers, 0 Flaglers, 0 Morgans, 0 Stanfords, and 0 Vanderbilts. There is 1 Rockefeller.

There are a few 1st generations of mid 20th century industrialists, like Waltons, but history shows they won't be on the list in 100 years.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Mind if I ask what you did, how you did it? I feel trapped here in the state, city, town that I am in (leaving them un-named) because the general public does not have a need to know.

I would love to see the world. Even if it was high risk, or as near-slave.

Re:Something is wrong

[Hatta]

Providing the funds is the most important part of the transaction.

No, doing the work is the most important part of the transaction. Only in the perverted mind of a capitalist is working less important than not working. The difficulty in finding funds to pay those who work is an artifact of captialism where resources are hoarded for the benefit of a few instead of distributed for the benefit of the many.

These investments are what raise someone's worth, not hard work by itself.

And that's exactly what's wrong with capitalism. It's not what you are able to do that matters, it's how much you own.

Re:Something is wrong

[dgatwood]

96.9% of the people in India (1.18 billion people) live on less than $5 per day (adjusted for purchasing power.) Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

The upshot of realizing these things is that you see that wealth disparity is a pretend problem, and the closest thing it is to a real problem is the fact that so many people can be so easily fooled into droning on about it like it actually was a problem.

That's specious reasoning for two reasons.

First, the only useful measure of wealth is a local one, because most commerce occurs locally. The people in India don't pay American prices for food, shelter, clothing, etc., so Bill Gates being rich doesn't affect them significantly. The more interesting question is what his wealth would do if redistributed to the poorest people in his own country, where there are a quarter as many people, and where only about 15% of those are living in poverty relative to the rest of Bill Gates's home country.

Second, your argument assumes only a single ultra-wealthy person. When you actually look at real numbers instead of your strawman assumptions, the reality is very different from what you're presenting. Here are the cold, hard facts:

• If you took away all the wealth of just the Forbes 400 (the richest 400 people in the U.S.) and redistributed it, you could give $35,000 apiece to every single American living below the poverty line. That's enough to wipe out their debt entirely and put them on the road to financial recovery.
• If you extend that to the top 1% of Americans, you would have enough to give every American currently living below the poverty line nearly a million dollars apiece—enough for them to retire right now and live off the interest for the rest of their lives while still making about as much per year as they currently do!

Frankly, wealth is even more unequally distributed in the U.S. today than it was in the days leading up to the French Revolution. The only reasons things aren't as bad as they were then are because we have a middle class, we allow people other than the top couple of percent to own land, and we are geographically large enough to be resistant to local droughts that would cause famine in a country as small as France. Those differences make the wealth disparity no less real, though.

I'm not suggesting that it's time to behead the top 1% and redistribute their wealth, but clearly we cannot afford to ignore the problem indefinitely.

Re:Something is wrong

[ed1park]

Ever heard of trusts? Tax shelters? There is a whole industry devoted to getting around these laws.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Have you ever used Medicare? So they wage slave gets taxed more for this crazy system that is constantly a point of contention and failing in government. While the upper class can just drop a few million on whatever health care procedures they feel like?

Lets not even get into the pigeonhole that mental health is in this country. And pharmaceuticals. We create crazy people with this shenanigans and then medicate them with shit that makes them sick. Then they loose it after the medication becomes normative for them.

All that wonderful extra taxation to the lower classes is creating a huge drain on society. People making below 10$ an hour should get a fucking free ride. And not all area's of the country are the same. Some places are insane to work in. Try being a grocery clerk in DC. You require external non-government support systems in friends, family, ethnicity, and clique. This is good because those are far more reliable then social welfare. But they are not good safety nets.

Re:Something is wrong

[ed1park]

"At the end of the day no matter how the handful of people like Bill Gates became so rich, neither their wealth nor their income holds a candle to what governments throw around on a daily basis"

Warren Buffett seems to think differently. And he has some numbers to back it up.

" The Forbes 400, the wealthiest individuals in America, hit a new group record for wealth this year: $1.7 trillion... ...A huge tail wind from tax cuts has pushed us along. In 1992, the tax paid by the 400 highest incomes in the United States (a different universe from the Forbes list) averaged 26.4 percent of adjusted gross income. In 2009, the most recent year reported, the rate was 19.9 percent. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

The group’s average income in 2009 was $202 million — which works out to a “wage” of $97,000 per hour, based on a 40-hour workweek. (I’m assuming they’re paid during lunch hours.) Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15 percent of their take in combined federal income and payroll taxes. Half of this crew paid less than 20 percent. And — brace yourself — a few actually paid nothing.

This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers..."

A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy - 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a-minimum-tax-for-the-wealthy.html?_r=0

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

Thats great. But does that really warrant being number one financially. His empire is fine even perhaps. But maybe corporations should be limited too.

Real life is not like a game of eve (or maybe it is unfortunately). And the indirect casualties of building those empires are real. A lot of skills people use in eve translate to real life and vice-versa.

But morally. Can we justify elevating one man over all other men. Because of his good business sense.

Unfortunately money is what our society uses for "value" in this regard. People even expect him to be a philanthropic leader. These empire builders shouldn't have to be.

I can say should all I want though and that will not make it so.

Re:Something is wrong

[hairyfeet]

Functioning fairly well? Compared to what, WWII? The EU has several countries about to go under, everyone is just waiting for Germany to say fuck it and pull out for the whole thing to collapse, and the USA has had 98% of the value of the dollar burned away by having the printing press cranking 24/7 and if it wasn't for the USA making damned sure the petrodollar stays the money would be worth less than Zimbabwe.

Go look up the real numbers, not the song and dance the government feeds you, and you'll see the whole thing is a fucking trainwreck.

Re:Something is wrong

[sjames]

Without Microsoft, we would have comoditized PCs running DOS86 or CP/M. Then Linux would have taken over.

Re:Something is wrong

[NewYork]

https://goo.gl/LKYtv
A currency with an automatic devaluation _if_ not spent within a month or so.

Re:Something is wrong

[Douglas Goodall]

Very true. Digital Research Inc was there in spades with a massive suite of languages and operating systems targeting a haf dozen hardware platforms. They had networking. The common back-end languages were very advanced for their time. Concurrent DOS for the low end and FLexOS for the high end protected mode systems. IBM didn't choose DOS because it was better. They chose it because they could buy a CP/M-86 knock off cheaper from Bill Gates who bought it down the street for a song. Then his predatory marketing of DOS, requiring OEM's to bundle only MS-DOS or else... gave him the monopoly lock on the DOS platform. But DR-DOS was very capable, and could have run beneath Windows if Microsoft hadn't locked it out (proven in court). I believe we could have gone the distance quite nicely with Digital Research instead of Microsoft.

Re:Something is wrong

[NewYork]

Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

So buy working in the Armed forces protecting your legal means of making yourself rich. By allowing your country to have sovereignty. By providing roads for your goods to be transported on. By helping your employees have clean water and utilities.

We didn't do anything.

You were not out sitting in the woods by yourself when you made that software. You had all of us behind you. If you want to delude yourself to that fact then, by all means, go on out into the woods and see how easy it is to program or sell computer disks for a living.

Oh and lets not even mention patents and copyrights. Which ARE AT THE VERY FUCKING FOUNDATION of Microsofts business model. Without them they would have been a blip in history while humanity progressed further on.

No I actually think congress should dissolve all this good stuff that helped get us here. We should definitely go back to rubbing sticks together.

Re:Something is wrong

[flayzernax]

*by, not buy

Re:Something is wrong

[sjames]

Actually, no, it doesn't have to be anyone, it just always seems to be. There is no reason a group of people with a litle disposable income ech can't come togetrher for things that need doing. In fact, markets only work properly when the economic power of buyers and sellers is nearly equal. About the tine you start seeing 'producers' and 'consumers', markets fail.

Honestly, it's no better than the old Feudalism where someone gets enough money and power and calls himself King. Then he makes up a bunch of BS about how God wanted it that way. (Or about how some watery tart threw a sword at him).

Re:Something is wrong

[sjames]

Part of it seems to be the same statistical blindness that drives the lotto. They imagine they will one day be amongst the super-rich even though statistics say otherwise.

Re:Something is wrong

[sjames]

Yes, the same sort of cunning any con man has. There was a big pile of luck to go with it.

Re:Something is wrong

[Custard Horse]

Also, You were not using outlook in 1993. It didn't exist back then

Quite so - we all called it "inbox" back then. But it was an early version of outlook whatever you might wish to call it.

Re: Something is wrong

[crdotson]

We still used Windows, we just used an add-on TCP/IP stack (trumpet winsock).

Re:Something is wrong

[Atrox Canis]

I was a civil engineer with a background in practical Engineering. In other words, I studied construction principles in unimproved areas and I also learned how to operate heavy equipment.

Re:Something is wrong

[Twanfox]

While your ideas are interesting, the point I was making is that wealth need not be THE defining criteria for success. Other elements such as dominance in a market and ability to deliver what your customers want every time can be a measure of success as well. In some cases, this can actually be seen in the current marketplace. The point you quote is well visualized in a news article by ABC concerning companies that do NOT treat their employees like slaves, yet still somehow turn out successful.

However, just because there are some examples of companies that do right by their employees, there are many more examples of those that do not. In those cases, there tends to be a huge disparity between the pay at the top and the pay of the workers earning that money. Among the employees of those companies, only those at the top, those that have money or skill or power, really get to set the levels of compensation and define who gets to be greedy, which is kind of the point I was making. If someone at the bottom attempted that, they'd be kicked out in a heartbeat for someone else willing to slave away for a pittance.

The Rothchilds never make the list

[Neo-Rio-101]

Even still he'll never be as rich as the Rothchilds... who for some reason never grace the inside of Forbes top #100 rich people
  (maybe because they own the magazine and don't want to draw attention to themselves...., just a guess)

Re:The Rothchilds never make the list

[_Shad0w_]

Probably not, they have dynastic wealth, rather than individual wealth. Individually they're still wealthy, but not on the scale as individuals like Bill Gates.

Re:The Rothchilds never make the list

[Sockatume]

If you're going to do that, why not allow religions into the list, or corporations?

Re:The Rothchilds never make the list

[Sockatume]

Precisely. I'm not sure that having $100 Bn tied up in one person is really all that different than having it tied up in some other monolithic entity which can be expected to direct all its resources in the same direction.

Re:The Rothchilds never make the list

[_Shad0w_]

I suspect there's already a list for companies, it's almost certainly dominated by banks and other financial institutions (HSBC has over $100 Trillion in assets, for example). The Vatican Bank is probably near the top of the list, if you figure out how much money it actually controls (it's a private institution, so its records aren't public).

yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to see Gates back on top. As a philanthropist he rocks.

Re:yeah!

[WGFCrafty]

I have to agree. I can't for the life of me understand why people are so against what Bill Gates did, has done and will do. I would have done exactly the same at the time.

Bill?

Re:yeah!

[drinkypoo]

I'm glad to see Gates back on top. As a philanthropist he rocks.

If by "rocks" you mean "is amazingly good at setting up nations for future fleecing", that's a proven fact. You don't get vaccinations from the gates foundation unless you adopt strong (Western-style) IP protection for Big Pharma — so strong that the IMF and World Bank will wind up owning your country if you should dare to produce medications to save the lives of your citizenry because the price Big Pharma is asking for AIDS medication (or whatever) is above your people's means to pay.

Bill Gates has not wiped out any diseases and will not wipe out any diseases because of this restriction; their "gifts" come with a price tag that some are unwilling to pay. Would you give up your right to health care in the future for some health care now? Because that is what the Gates Foundation offers.

Re:yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

No he doesn't. His philanthropy is all about marketing. I've seen the books his organization "doanted" in India and it's full of praise for Microsoft and Windows.

And all the shills praising his philanthropy on the Internet are probably paid for by his organization too.

The best philanthropists do. They don't talk as much as bill seems to be doing.

Re:yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?

Re:yeah!

[drinkypoo]

Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?

0) Who the fuck are you to ask me? You don't even have a mother.

1) Conspiracies are the norm. Any time two people get together secretly to bone a third, it is a conspiracy. The only overarching conspiracy of which I'm aware is that to deprecate the word "conspiracy". Those involved thank you for doing your part as a useful idiot.

2) If you actually wanted a citation, you would already have found one with google. But you don't actually want a citation, you just want to make me look bad so that people won't believe what I'm saying. For example:

However, Microsoft lobbied vociferously for the World Trade Organizationâ(TM)s TRIPS agreement (the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property), which obliges member countries to defend patents for a minimum of 20 years after the filing date. As recently as 2007, Microsoft was lobbying the G8 to tighten global intellectual property (IP) protection, a move that would, Oxfam said, âworsen the health crisis in developing countriesâ(TM).[1]

Or perhaps you would prefer it to come straight from the horse's mouth, where their primary IP lawyer places "respect" of IP laws and markets above saving lives, by making it the primary consideration? He includes a lot of weaselly speak about protecting access, of course, but what he focuses on is the law — which the Gates foundation is promoting.

There are no shortage of similar references, and if you are unaware of them it is because you are willfully ignorant.

[1] The flip side to Bill Gatesâ(TM) charity billions. Bowman, Andrew. New Internationalist Magazine, April 2012. ( )

Re:yeah!

[drinkypoo]

So you're complaining that Western companies aren't willing to pursue an unsustainable level of altruism by destroying their themselves to help African countries.

Unsustainable? [citation needed] Big Pharma spends more on advertising than on R&D and most drugs are cheap and easy to produce. Not all drugs, mind you, just most drugs.

The profit motive is what is wrong with medicine today. Much of the research is actually done at public universities, partly with our tax money! I, for one, would like that investment to make the world a better place, and not just to pay for yachts for people who already have yachts.

C'mon, Slashdot

[vikingpower]

"News for nerds, stuff that matters". Is this news ? Does this stuff matter ? Just askin'....

Re:C'mon, Slashdot

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

This is rather interesting I'd say: considering that BG has vowed to give away 95% of his wealth to charities, and already does give away a shitload of money every year, I find it interesting that his net worth should increase rather than decrease.

Me, when I give money to a charity, I find myself poorer afterward. Not him. That seems like a nerdy enough phenomenon to be worth mentioning.

Re:C'mon, Slashdot

[Kawahee]

"News for nerds, stuff that matters". Is this news ? Does this stuff matter ? Just askin'....

Where are these words from? Last time I checked, Slashdot described itself as Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service.

Re:C'mon, Slashdot

[_Shad0w_]

They dropped that epithet ages ago.

Re:C'mon, Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely - from the source code of the front page:

<title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>

Its hard to notice since the javascript changes it fairly quickly, but it is still there.

Re:C'mon, Slashdot

[Sockatume]

Given that the news stories are picked by either the Slashdot editors directly or the Slashdot readership by the Firehose, it's safe to assume that some proportion of nerds consider this news and/or something that matters.

Re:first

[vikingpower]

Something is wrong with either your cardinals or with your ordinals.

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[_Shad0w_]

Combined, he and his wife have given away nearly $30bn to charity, how in the hell is that not working? They've also stated that they intend to donate at least 95% of their wealth by the time they die.

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail at reading comprehension. (They laid the trap and you walked right into it...)

What it says is Billy G has given 30B to the Billy G foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_foundation#Criticism

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[Sockatume]

You're hopelessly naive about how much a cure for HIV is going to cost to develop. The resources involved in performing medical research make Gates' entire business empire seem like a child setting up a lemonade stand.

He gave away $28 billion

[Spy Handler]

and he STILL has enough to be the richest?

Maybe he should give away some more.

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[WGFCrafty]

and he STILL has enough to be the richest?

Maybe he should give away some more.

I think him and Warren Buffet are doing it more slowly. Non profits are required to spend a certain part of their endowment yearly - by holding on to it and investing it and donating a trickle (a billion dollar trickle... he made several billion in one year just from having money) which could last indefinitely. I think they pledged to give much more upon their death.

I wonder why they don't set up some kind of non-profit investment group where all proceeds yearly would then fund a charity. One big donation could do $70 billion of good once, or $3-7 billion dollars of good yearly, forever..

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[drinkypoo]

I wonder why they don't set up some kind of non-profit investment group where all proceeds yearly would then fund a charity.

Because the Gates Foundation is a legal dodge. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abuse of monopoly position under Bill Gates, which means he's personally responsible — in fact, it was actually explicitly shown in court that Bill Gates was personally involved in most of the illegal actions of Microsoft, as the primary decision-maker. There's a hot, smoking paper trail. But by creating this foundation, Gates has not just dodged paying taxes on the money invested, but also dodged any future repercussions from Microsoft's malfeasance. (The DoJ could reopen their investigation under a future administration, if there were some money in it.) Because you see, now Bill Gates is apparently above reproach, with the same people who were harmed by him (you know, everyone on earth?) cheering him on today. But you don't get vaccinations from the Gates Foundation without providing strong IP protection to Big Pharma which might result in your people dying by the score (and then some) in the future.

As has been said before, all he's wanting is a persian cat and a monocle.

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[Typical Slashdotter]

In addition to any desire to spend the money slowly, there are problems with giving away billions of dollars that don't show up when donating smaller amounts. If Bill Gates wants to, say, improve healthcare in Africa, he can't just hand over $20 billion, he needs to actually figure out what the problems are and how best to address them.

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[tompaulco]

and he STILL has enough to be the richest?

Maybe he should give away some more.

One definition of a poor person is: "A person who cannot give."

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[ed1park]

That's what the BIill and Melinda Gates Foundation is. Warren Buffett invests and grows the money (in the case with Berkshire Hathaway Shares), and they get billions for as long as the company exists which is probably as close as forever as you may get. Blowing it all in shot would be pretty wasteful when considering the compounding returns over a long period.

Taking Buffett's billions (the greatest investor and philanthropist of all time), and giving it to some non profit investment group would be retarded.

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[WGFCrafty]

I meant a non-profit group controlled by them.

Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work...

[Bearhouse]

Well, he gets a lot of stick here for the "evil empire" he created, but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.

He gamed the system for all it was worth, in a very smart manner, and pretty much stuck to the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
Along the way, DOS & Windows, with Intel, became the foundation of the "open" PC marketplace that radically transformed the computing marketplace.

So, kudos to him, especially if he dumps a few more $Bn into his foundation.
(I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)

Re:Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work...

[WGFCrafty]

(I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)

I would buy a bunch of 747s and run them between major international airports around the world - with no one on them. It would be an kinetic art project about unsustainability.

Note: Mr. Gates is worth about 2.1 times more than the endowment of the school he dropped out of (Harvard).

Re:Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work...

[delt0r]

He doesn't have $76B. That is his net "worth", which is a useless measure really. He can't dump all his MS shares without that net worth going down far faster than he could ever liquidate for example.

Re:Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work...

[femtobyte]

but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.

You mean, he started out as the kid of a highly paid and highly placed IBM executive. His programming skills were presumably decent, but there's no evidence he ever did anything groundbreaking for the era himself --- his big bucks started from leveraging corporate connections through mom to undercut real programming competitors to get the contract for providing DOS on IBM's personal computers. Gates isn't a "rags to riches" story --- only "riches and inside connections to mega super riches".

Re:Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work...

[GodfatherofSoul]

There's a difference between obeying the letter of the law and defrauding companies too small to ever fight back.

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[neverwhere9]

...Which is a charity, despite what you believe. It's done far less harm than most aid charities, and has done quite a bit of good. And some of those criticisms, specifically those under "Education," are fairly subjective. Personally, as far as HIV/AIDs goes, I'd be more likely to donate to Elton John's foundation, which gives money to local projects that need it. It seems more "grassroots." But it isn't like shit isn't getting done at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[Sockatume]

What exactly is it that you don't trust him about? That he'll actually donate that amount, or that he won't blow it all on some ridiculous supervillain scheme to steal the moon?

"Anonymous" money?

[Errol backfiring]

Given the fact that microsecond trading data centres are mostly anonymous (you will have a hard time finding out who they belong to, who is doing such trading and those firms want to keep it that way), this must be a tip of a snowflake, not even a minor iceberg. While this is an insane amount of money, the real richest people probably own a Godzillion more, but have "structured it away" to keep it secret.

Hello, Editors

[Raenex]

What comes to Bill Gates, most of his fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC

That should read, "When it comes to Bill Gates..."

Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working...

[Sockatume]

You still don't explain what kind of trust you're talking about though. I trust my chair to support my weight, but I don't trust it to pay my rent. It's not even a sensible question in that context.

So, what sort of trust are we talking about here?

He trashed good code for his ladder to the top

[WillAdams]

I really wish I'd pirated a copy of MacBasic instead of buying Microsoft's lame BASIC for Macintosh ( http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt ).

Every time I pick up my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, I wish it were running Go Corp.'s PenPoint ( http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314 http://www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-Different-J-Gerry-Purdy/dp/0672317567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368791379&sr=1-1&keywords=thinkpad )

It kills me that I can't buy Creaturehouse Expression for a new version of Mac OS X ( http://www.creativemac.com/article/Microsoft-Buys-Creature-House-Assets-21443 )

Or that I can't upgrade my copy of Altamira Composer or that the plug got pulled on Altsys Virtuoso for Windows NT.

&c.

Not Giving Enough Away

[sudon't]

Clearly he's not giving enough of his money away.

77 billion is a lot of money, but...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Adjusted for inflation, or seen as a percentage of GDP, or as a multiple of median income of the country etc, Bill Gates fortune is dwarfed by the rich men of early 1900s. I think Andrew Carnegie, when he sold USSteel for some 450 million dollars in 190X, he got 2% of the GDP of the country or something. John D Rockefeller became richer, but the country also grew faster than his personal fortune and he did not top that percentage, if my memory serves me right.

There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth, and it might even serve as a motivation for lots of people. But the society has to be on guard. But SCOTUS has ruled money is speech and rich people can out shout poor people, that would be damaging to free exchange of ideas. Even if the top rich men did not care, they have many hangers on, suck ups and brown nosers. They might get the confidence of these rich people, do enormous collateral damage to the society in their quest to peel of a measly million or two from these billionaires.

Many of our academic institutions are actually running on very little money comparatively, newspapers and other such institutions are struggling. So some rich dude dropping a million dollars a year could corrupt and poison such foundations of democracy easily, sometimes without even meaning to.

Re:77 billion is a lot of money, but...

[BradleyAndersen]

yep

Re:77 billion is a lot of money, but...

[Hatta]

There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth

Yes, yes there is. You cannot earn that much with your own labor. You can only aquire that much by confiscating the labor of others.

Re:Just sayin'

[EmagGeek]

Don't you mean:

C     SENT FROM MY IPHONE

??

The problem is....

[Pyrotech7]

The problem is not that we have the extraordinarily wealthy among us, it is that there are not more of them. Increase incentives and benefits of accumulating wealth and you might find more more people become wealthy. Relief given to the poor often as not helps perpetuate the lifestyle. This is the opposite of communism, where everyone is poor equally. Let there be the rich, and let them keep their riches. More of us will want to become wealthy.

Re:The problem is....

[Overzeetop]

I call you the mother of all Tea Party trolls, but most trolls post as ACs.

The problem with your posit is that there is a (nominally) fixed amount of wealth to be distributed - we are in a closed system. We can change the values of certain things and scale the numbers, but the net effect is that for more people to be rich, the richest must either get less-rich, or the poor become more-poor.

Re:The problem is....

[iggymanz]

the ultra rich have governments in their pocket and make war, famine and disease for profit. get a clue.

Re:The problem is....

[iggymanz]

not quite true, wealth can be created. however, the ultra wealthy build systems to identify, control, suppress, and confiscate from those who try.

Re:The problem is....

[Pyrotech7]

That is a common misunderstanding amongst liberal socialists. I never can understand a person that thinks there is only so much wealth to go around and some have an unfair share. Wealth is created, and in ever increasing amounts, at least in a growing economy. If I buy something wholesale, and sell it at retail and make some wealth in the process, how does that take away wealth from anyone else?

What matters

[justthinkit]

What matters is that almost no one, (only a handful of mentions of Windows, none of Windows 8, in the first 100 comments I read), is crediting Windows 8 for Microsoft stock being at an all time high.

Is he happy?

[gatkinso]

He seems to be.

wrong perspective

[froth-bite]

instead of targetting the richest person on earth, why not have competition for the poorest? human nature being what it is, I'm sure the results would be fascinating :)

Puts his philanthropy in a new perspective

[GodfatherofSoul]

It's great that he's given so much to charities, but if he's still pushing to the top of the list, that should tell us all he's not giving away relatively much of his fortune.

bring back the hereditary git tax

[epine]

Who gets to decide how much is too much?

Point me to any country where you can identity any small group with sole authority for this kind of decision, and I'll wager they mainly discuss among themselves the problem of too much being not enough. In societies where decisions are reached by a process (in which many people can participate and where chance also plays a significant role) there's at least some potential for antitrust legislation to pass which enacts a ceiling low enough to echo-locate.

Really, America had it right before they repealed the estate tax. It should have been called the hereditary git tax, to remind Americans of what their forefathers were so intent on escaping in the first place. Since when did it become an American value for the children of privilege to cruise through life on daddy's deep pockets without earning it themselves, generation upon generation? Just wondering.

Re:bring back the hereditary git tax

[HornWumpus]

America never repealed the estate tax. They increased the non-taxable amount and changed the rate.

Invest

[[000000]]

I do hope that he can invest a lot into helping the planet (renewable power) planting new forests, investing in new cleaner transportation. He alone with that money CAN change the world.

C: Prompt

[jfdavis668]

Became the richest man in the world with it http://cheezburger.com/4353678848

troll?

[drinkypoo]

Please do mod me troll, when I provide citations. That's the best kind of trollmod, the kind that's probably metamodded against your favor. It also handily vindicates my statements. Are you getting paid for this moderation, or are you providing it as a free service?

How about Microsoft?

[unixisc]

Well, while he's back at the top, his company has been flagging, now w/ Windows 8. Their opportunities for a captive market are fast diminishing, and soon, Microsoft will be in the red even while Gates Foundation continues to flaunt their billions.

You just don't see the contradiction, do ya?

[Hentes]

I'm curious how Bill managed to get back on top after distributing half of his wealth among the poor.

The US debt..

[doccus]

The 1000 richest americans could together wipe out the american debt of some 16 trilion dollars. That is scary rich..

Re:Richest of those with known wealth, maybe

[doccus]

this is why the economy of the world is collapsing..