Look, I'm an atheist. I reject all the religions I mentioned, and every other one. In fact, if it makes you feel better, I'd prefer transhumanism over all of them it those were my choices. Mormonism (to continue my example) to a Mormon means alot more then transhumanism to a transhumanist (with the possible exception of you). Mormonism is a belief system; Transhumanism is a theory and ideology. I'd call that a good thing, really. Furthermore, religions are actually about alot more than their supposed beliefs. Religions represent their culture, their way of life. If transhumanists become an oppressed minority, that's one thing. But right now it's a happy little nutball theory that has no relevance to the modern world. Nothing wrong with that.
You go out and kill people as violently as you can because you score more points.
It's easy to tell when a person talking about video games has no idea what they're talking about. They talk about "scoring points." The 1980's called. They want their game and joke format back.
I wonder what membership fee we pay a year just to be called an American?
I'm sorry, but that tax troll is so bad I have to refute it: "You can just call yourself an American for free from anywhere in the World."
But by paying your US membership dues, you get things like parks and police and zoning laws and corporate handouts and the satisfaction of knowing you helped blow up someone's house in Iraq.
I said I should be condemned, just like you're doing now, if I didn't appreciate it. Maybe I don't. In that case, wow, you sure just did me a favor. But as before before, calling me a hypocrite still isn't an argument. I mean, at least others in this thread managed to yell "socialism is a false cause!" I'm not going to give up the cause of a better world because understanding this one means seeing that I have something in common with the extremely oppressed, and because that sounds... uh, "pompous."
Now, if I wanted to do something to make me feel better, that's immediately gratifying, that won't ultimately change anything, I can spend my time with a charity.
But I don't think I can talk my way out of this one. I mean, it's not exactly what I say, it's the pompous attitude behind it, right?
Is it comfy believing that your're getting all you deserve and that you can do your part to make a better world by giving to a soup kitchen?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Wow, are you a veteran of the debate over the nature of authority between Marxist socialism and anarchist socialism? Probably not, but I like that sig anyway for that reson.;)
In fact, to follow the "think of the children" idea, I believe that such a database would lead with more CP production, as you would have to "replace" the material censored (assuming this measure would be efficient) leading to profits for pornographer producer.
Funny, I was thinking no one would have the courage to make that argument. I know I wouldn't have. Even if it's wrong, it needs to be made. So I commend you, for creative, independant thinking and courage.
So, the next task is to think of reasons it's wrong. The obvious argument is the "violent games lead to violence" argument, which I personally wholly reject. What else? Ah, how about this: it may lead to a decrease in the creation of child pornography, but it would greatly increase its consumption. But it's the creation that's harmful, not the consumption, right? I strongly believe that if it doesn't cause harm, it can't be wrong. But it does cause harm: having a recording of your rape as a child be seen by more and more people is more and more hurtful. You didn't give these people permission to view those recordings of you and you sure as hell wouldn't. I imagine it would be like being raped over and over and over.
Yet, I have this painful need to be logical. Is that continued harm less than the harm avoided by decreasing the creation of new child porn? Logic makes me want to say yes, and I don't like that. Perhaps it's good that the Internet allows people to consume child porn for free but in secret. At least then, it's less known to the victim. I would suggest the authorities never completely shutdown people's abilities to find free child porn online, for the good of many future potential victims. At least leave it safer to get it online for free than to buy it.
And to someone living in a tin shack in a ghetto in Brazil you are obscenely rich.
Capitalist exploitation is through recieving less in a day than the value of your labor-time. On a related note, capitalist profit comes from paying workers less than the value they create. Capitalist profit, therefore, is capitalist exploitation. The difference between myself and a sweatshop worker in Brazil is only the degree of that exploitation. I of course should be condemned if I don't appreciate my relative privilage, but his/her struggle is my struggle. And anyhow, calling me a hypocrite isn't an argument against my point.
First, rewarding "effort" is meaningless--I can try as hard as I want, but if I can't add 2 and 2 together, I shouldn't be a math teacher. It's an unfortunate fact of life that effort, while noteworthy, is ultimately inconsequential--results are what matter.
If you can't add 2 and 2 together, you shouldn't be a math teacher. Ah, I just notice that that's exactly what you said.;) A person should be paid for how much work they do, but they should of course only do work they're competent at. The notion that some jobs contribute more than others is nonesense when nothing gets done unless all jobs are done.
'm all for paying people what they're worth; I'm personally offended when someone dumber than me, or less capable than me, makes more money than I do.
That statement isn't very nice. You're saying nothing more than that you deserve a better life because you're more intelligent. In fact, that's repulsive. That's the logic of a pack of animals, not a civilized human being.
You operate under the fundamentally flawed assumption that any supervisory role entails exploiting others. It does not.
An interesting thing to bring up. Supervising is a necessary job. A supervisor is a worker like any other worker. If we can agree on that, I'll be happy.
I am not exploiting someone if they agree to do a particular job for me for a salary.
Ah, the mythical obsession with free agency. Choosing to enter into an exploitative contract doesn't make it not exploitative. Or does it, because they could try and enter a better exploitative relationship? I don't think that hurts my position any. Or because they can go off and start their OWN enterprise? An absurd capitalist fantasy: a world where everyone is a capitalist, no one is a worker.
If I, as a supervisor, am unwilling or incapable of rewarding talent, then my business will fail.
It's amazing how out of touch programmers can be with the rest of the world. But you're not totally wrong. But again, that does nothing to change the nature of exploitation.
Any employer who refuses to pay his employees what their work merits will find himself without capable employees.
The value of what their "work merits" is defined in capitalist ideology as whatever needs to be paid to hire them to do that work. By that definition, the above is redundant.
If Nike goes in and establishes a sweat shop in rural China, that is worker exploitation and it is wrong, because they have nowhere else to go. But then there's not a free market, and the basis of capitalism rests on the idea of a free market. You can't denounce capitalism when it's employed outside of its own necessary conditions
Because it's hard to find a job there, unlike here? Not a free market? Have you been to China recently (which I mean sarcastically)? And the exact role capitalism is made for is industrialization. That's why China's economy is booming under capitalism today.
By the way, being smugly arrogant is also obnoxious. At least I did the favor of calling your assumption idiotic, and not you.
Ohh, my mistake. You're right, you weren't being an asshole.
f you do great things, you are amply rewarded--and if you are not, you go elsewhere and another company will pay you amply to try and get you to do great things for them. That is how I doubled my salary in nine months--I worked my ass off, my company didn't pay me well enough, so I found another job for twice as much.
I'm very happy for you, but surely you don't think that's how is normally works for people. It cannot be denied: there are a certain number of really hard workers in any income bracket.
So if I go out, invent a fantastic product, market it, and I hire you to schedule shipments, I don't deserve more of the profits than you do? Please tell me you're not serious.
You deserve an ammount of the profits proportionally to the effort involved on your end, and the same goes for me. Or will people getting paid for the work they do slow down the economy?
You are a through-and-through communist. Do you have a job yet? If so, please tell me that you think every person you work with deserves the same pay as you. I want to see you take your idiotic assumption of the evil of wealth and the egalitarianism of society to the bitter end.
You'll note that a division of pay based on the level of eduction involved has been part of every socialist economy. You show a total lack of effort to even try to understand what I wrote. Anyway, I'm gonna do the idiot thing and not continue reading your rant on what great people those at the top are since I've already argued enough with people less obnoxious than you in this thread. Oh, and working to attain a position where you can exploit others does not mean you've earned it - because you can't.
has it truly never occured to you that the world as a whole is incredibly much richer now than at any point in history?
Oh yes. Capitalism is amazing stuff (no sarcasm intended). It brought us out of the dark ages. Capitalism is basically a system designed to carry out the industrial revolution.
I would have to think that this is because some people actually created wealth.
Exactly.
And I also think that not everyone created equally much wealth.
Certainly not. Some are lazy bastards spending some time in board rooms and the rest of their time rolling in their private pool filled with money.
I , finally, think that people who achieve better results in creating wealth deserve more of that wealth than those who create less.
An argument I've never really understood on a moral basis, but let's put that aside. Does the lowly programmer at Microsoft get paid a tiny fraction of the top few at the company because his work is less valuable? Is their work more valuable, or is it just work that doesn't need masses of workers? I mean, we all hate beurocracy, right? If some genius programmer invented something that made the company huge profits, would he then be intitled to Gates' share of the money?
No? Why not? Because Gates started Microsoft? Ah, you make making my point too easy for me. This has nothing to do with the value of one's labor, it has to do with capital. It has to do with gaining control of the means of production (and a software company is itself a means of production) so that you can lay claim to whatever it produces. "I own this land, therefore I'm more responsible for the corn produced than those who grew it."
I do realize that makes me a bad communist.
Yes, but at least it's from a twisted idea of what it means to earn something rather than pure selfishness.
Removing their "obscene luxury" does nothing to raise the standards of living. The amount of wealth they devote to personal pursuits is trivial when amortized over the population as a whole.
Depending on who you ask, 20% to 5% of the population own 80% of the wealth. That pretty much blows what you just said out of the water.
And here's the point people like you regularly miss: Doing so also does absolutely nothing to stop thugs from ruling everything.
That's a horribly cynical argument. You could make the same conclusions about democracy. Heck, our "democracy" is already ruled by corporations, why not just make it official?
Now you've got a "country" with nothing but a bunch of thugs in power, with no way to actually get anything done without the permission of a thug, often a local thug.
Ah yes, because our "thugs" don't make our decisions today.
Last century saw hundreds of such "experiments" that all pointed to the same result: lower quality of life.
That's really a horribly shallow interpretation of the 20th century. The Soviet Union's economy was devestated by beaurocratization, true. But the Soviet Union's development given its many, many tough situations (for example, WW2 and the US economic strangulation plan known as the Cold War) was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
It's strange that these are viewed as "experiments", too.
You may not have noticed, but the phrase "communist experiment" has only been used by anti-communists.
Political science is the only "science" that finds it ethical to experiment on unwilling subjects.
Political scientists don't run tests. That's probably the main argument for rejecting them as a "science."
I wasn't trying to be rude. When I first wrote it, I worried that it might sound rude so I rewrote it how it is, which apparently wasn't any better. Forgive me.
As for a reply to your other points, look at my other responses to other people's responses. I've already repeated myself at least four times there.;)
Surely you naysayers are joking. A regular man creates possibly the most important industry in our history
That's giving Microsoft too much credit, though it certainly deserves alot of that credit. But I have a more important correction: Bill Gates didn't do that building of the industry, he and every other employee at Microsoft did. You're confusing doing the work a company did with taking most of its money.
and donates nearly all the profit he makes
Again, he didn't make that profit, he and all others at Microsoft did. He's just the one that took it.
You're angry that he didn't take all directions in computing you wish he did? You're fucking insane.
Wha'? When did I ever say anything about the directions Microsoft took? I believe I was talking about the obscenely rich and philanthropy. It's not like Steve Jobs or [insert favorite hip capitalist here] is any better.
When you buy a Microsoft product, you are supporting advances in technology, jobs for thousands of people, and the well being of mankind.
Again, this has nothing to do with Microsoft's "directions."
I can think of no other human being who has/is going to change the world in such a positive way as Bill Gates.
I hate to be repetitive, but it bares repeating: He doesn't deserve credit for what Microsoft did, he and all other employees of Microsoft do.
Now, suck it up...if they do a HUGE amount of good with their ill gotten gains, can it outweigh the evil they have done?
But the point is that they stole that wealth from those who worked to generate it in the first place. Whatever good they do with it is still AFTER a life of obscene luxury. If society didn't have most of it's wealth horded by a few parisites, we'd have all that money to pay high wages AND fund research.
People GIVE their money to microsoft, no ones putting a gun to your head.
I was speaking in the most general terms, not about Bill Gates in particular. He didn't steal from consumers (for the most part). He took from the common employees money that they all helped generate. He stole the wealth generated in common (let's call that production "socialized") at Microsoft and, along with a few other thieves, kept most of it for himself. Socialized production, private accumulation. Oh, the wonderful results of private capital!
That wealth is stolen by the rich to begin with - from everyone else involved in making that wealth. I thought I made that point clear in my original post.
Hell if they pull it off I might actually stop putting pins in my Bill Gates voodoo doll.
The obscenely rich don't deserve credit for philanthropy. Don't forget that it's the rest of society they took such huge masses of wealth from in the first place.
The obscenely rich sometimes get old and feel a little guilty for living so well when so many live so poorly. So they buy an indulgence to be forgiven for their sins by returning much of their wealth to society - when they're done with it, of course.
And all of the great musical advances and inventions of the 60s - aside from those of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis - were accomplished by people in their twenties
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be implying that that didn't continue to be true. I disagree. In fact, one of the most depressing things to me is how musicians grow up and never do anything substantially different than what they'd always done (or, perhaps, gone on to explore the roots of what they'd always done). I truly loath the day when I won't get new music. "Everything on the radio these days is shit!" Everything on the radio has always been shit.
You obviously have never watched any daytime television. Any given commercial break has a few ambulance chasers asking if you've been hit by an 18-wheeler, or hit by a drunk, or took Fen-fen, or got injured on the job.
You're saying there's too many suits for medical malpractice and job injuries? Are you saying only SOME people who have those things happen to them should recieve compensation? I'm confused.
(PS: the selfishness of those who put out those adds isn't a factor in the "too many lawsuits" question)
Slashdot Mirror
The point of your parent post flew miles above your head, didn't it?
;-)
No offense.
Look, I'm an atheist. I reject all the religions I mentioned, and every other one. In fact, if it makes you feel better, I'd prefer transhumanism over all of them it those were my choices. Mormonism (to continue my example) to a Mormon means alot more then transhumanism to a transhumanist (with the possible exception of you). Mormonism is a belief system; Transhumanism is a theory and ideology. I'd call that a good thing, really. Furthermore, religions are actually about alot more than their supposed beliefs. Religions represent their culture, their way of life. If transhumanists become an oppressed minority, that's one thing. But right now it's a happy little nutball theory that has no relevance to the modern world. Nothing wrong with that.
Dude. Relax. Ever heard of humor? You're equating the importance of transhumanism to a transhumanist to the, say, importance of Mormonism to a Mormon?
You go out and kill people as violently as you can because you score more points.
It's easy to tell when a person talking about video games has no idea what they're talking about. They talk about "scoring points." The 1980's called. They want their game and joke format back.
I wonder what membership fee we pay a year just to be called an American?
I'm sorry, but that tax troll is so bad I have to refute it: "You can just call yourself an American for free from anywhere in the World."
But by paying your US membership dues, you get things like parks and police and zoning laws and corporate handouts and the satisfaction of knowing you helped blow up someone's house in Iraq.
*yell**curse**indignation*
I said I should be condemned, just like you're doing now, if I didn't appreciate it. Maybe I don't. In that case, wow, you sure just did me a favor. But as before before, calling me a hypocrite still isn't an argument. I mean, at least others in this thread managed to yell "socialism is a false cause!" I'm not going to give up the cause of a better world because understanding this one means seeing that I have something in common with the extremely oppressed, and because that sounds... uh, "pompous."
Now, if I wanted to do something to make me feel better, that's immediately gratifying, that won't ultimately change anything, I can spend my time with a charity.
But I don't think I can talk my way out of this one. I mean, it's not exactly what I say, it's the pompous attitude behind it, right?
Is it comfy believing that your're getting all you deserve and that you can do your part to make a better world by giving to a soup kitchen?
Huh? Isn't that just plain common sense?
Well... yes. Anarchists are pretty silly.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
;)
Wow, are you a veteran of the debate over the nature of authority between Marxist socialism and anarchist socialism? Probably not, but I like that sig anyway for that reson.
I know, I know... off-topic.
In fact, to follow the "think of the children" idea, I believe that such a database would lead with more CP production, as you would have to "replace" the material censored (assuming this measure would be efficient) leading to profits for pornographer producer.
Funny, I was thinking no one would have the courage to make that argument. I know I wouldn't have. Even if it's wrong, it needs to be made. So I commend you, for creative, independant thinking and courage.
So, the next task is to think of reasons it's wrong. The obvious argument is the "violent games lead to violence" argument, which I personally wholly reject. What else? Ah, how about this: it may lead to a decrease in the creation of child pornography, but it would greatly increase its consumption. But it's the creation that's harmful, not the consumption, right? I strongly believe that if it doesn't cause harm, it can't be wrong. But it does cause harm: having a recording of your rape as a child be seen by more and more people is more and more hurtful. You didn't give these people permission to view those recordings of you and you sure as hell wouldn't. I imagine it would be like being raped over and over and over.
Yet, I have this painful need to be logical. Is that continued harm less than the harm avoided by decreasing the creation of new child porn? Logic makes me want to say yes, and I don't like that. Perhaps it's good that the Internet allows people to consume child porn for free but in secret. At least then, it's less known to the victim. I would suggest the authorities never completely shutdown people's abilities to find free child porn online, for the good of many future potential victims. At least leave it safer to get it online for free than to buy it.
And to someone living in a tin shack in a ghetto in Brazil you are obscenely rich.
Capitalist exploitation is through recieving less in a day than the value of your labor-time. On a related note, capitalist profit comes from paying workers less than the value they create. Capitalist profit, therefore, is capitalist exploitation. The difference between myself and a sweatshop worker in Brazil is only the degree of that exploitation. I of course should be condemned if I don't appreciate my relative privilage, but his/her struggle is my struggle. And anyhow, calling me a hypocrite isn't an argument against my point.
God I hope you're right. But the System needs its hip, charismatic, self-made capitalists to give all capitalists a good image.
First, rewarding "effort" is meaningless--I can try as hard as I want, but if I can't add 2 and 2 together, I shouldn't be a math teacher. It's an unfortunate fact of life that effort, while noteworthy, is ultimately inconsequential--results are what matter.
;) A person should be paid for how much work they do, but they should of course only do work they're competent at. The notion that some jobs contribute more than others is nonesense when nothing gets done unless all jobs are done.
If you can't add 2 and 2 together, you shouldn't be a math teacher. Ah, I just notice that that's exactly what you said.
'm all for paying people what they're worth; I'm personally offended when someone dumber than me, or less capable than me, makes more money than I do.
That statement isn't very nice. You're saying nothing more than that you deserve a better life because you're more intelligent. In fact, that's repulsive. That's the logic of a pack of animals, not a civilized human being.
You operate under the fundamentally flawed assumption that any supervisory role entails exploiting others. It does not.
An interesting thing to bring up. Supervising is a necessary job. A supervisor is a worker like any other worker. If we can agree on that, I'll be happy.
I am not exploiting someone if they agree to do a particular job for me for a salary.
Ah, the mythical obsession with free agency. Choosing to enter into an exploitative contract doesn't make it not exploitative. Or does it, because they could try and enter a better exploitative relationship? I don't think that hurts my position any. Or because they can go off and start their OWN enterprise? An absurd capitalist fantasy: a world where everyone is a capitalist, no one is a worker.
If I, as a supervisor, am unwilling or incapable of rewarding talent, then my business will fail.
It's amazing how out of touch programmers can be with the rest of the world. But you're not totally wrong. But again, that does nothing to change the nature of exploitation.
Any employer who refuses to pay his employees what their work merits will find himself without capable employees.
The value of what their "work merits" is defined in capitalist ideology as whatever needs to be paid to hire them to do that work. By that definition, the above is redundant.
If Nike goes in and establishes a sweat shop in rural China, that is worker exploitation and it is wrong, because they have nowhere else to go. But then there's not a free market, and the basis of capitalism rests on the idea of a free market. You can't denounce capitalism when it's employed outside of its own necessary conditions
Because it's hard to find a job there, unlike here? Not a free market? Have you been to China recently (which I mean sarcastically)? And the exact role capitalism is made for is industrialization. That's why China's economy is booming under capitalism today.
By the way, being smugly arrogant is also obnoxious. At least I did the favor of calling your assumption idiotic, and not you.
Ohh, my mistake. You're right, you weren't being an asshole.
f you do great things, you are amply rewarded--and if you are not, you go elsewhere and another company will pay you amply to try and get you to do great things for them. That is how I doubled my salary in nine months--I worked my ass off, my company didn't pay me well enough, so I found another job for twice as much.
I'm very happy for you, but surely you don't think that's how is normally works for people. It cannot be denied: there are a certain number of really hard workers in any income bracket.
So if I go out, invent a fantastic product, market it, and I hire you to schedule shipments, I don't deserve more of the profits than you do? Please tell me you're not serious.
You deserve an ammount of the profits proportionally to the effort involved on your end, and the same goes for me. Or will people getting paid for the work they do slow down the economy?
You are a through-and-through communist. Do you have a job yet? If so, please tell me that you think every person you work with deserves the same pay as you. I want to see you take your idiotic assumption of the evil of wealth and the egalitarianism of society to the bitter end.
You'll note that a division of pay based on the level of eduction involved has been part of every socialist economy. You show a total lack of effort to even try to understand what I wrote. Anyway, I'm gonna do the idiot thing and not continue reading your rant on what great people those at the top are since I've already argued enough with people less obnoxious than you in this thread. Oh, and working to attain a position where you can exploit others does not mean you've earned it - because you can't.
has it truly never occured to you that the world as a whole is incredibly much richer now than at any point in history?
Oh yes. Capitalism is amazing stuff (no sarcasm intended). It brought us out of the dark ages. Capitalism is basically a system designed to carry out the industrial revolution.
I would have to think that this is because some people actually created wealth.
Exactly.
And I also think that not everyone created equally much wealth.
Certainly not. Some are lazy bastards spending some time in board rooms and the rest of their time rolling in their private pool filled with money.
I , finally, think that people who achieve better results in creating wealth deserve more of that wealth than those who create less.
An argument I've never really understood on a moral basis, but let's put that aside. Does the lowly programmer at Microsoft get paid a tiny fraction of the top few at the company because his work is less valuable? Is their work more valuable, or is it just work that doesn't need masses of workers? I mean, we all hate beurocracy, right? If some genius programmer invented something that made the company huge profits, would he then be intitled to Gates' share of the money?
No? Why not? Because Gates started Microsoft? Ah, you make making my point too easy for me. This has nothing to do with the value of one's labor, it has to do with capital. It has to do with gaining control of the means of production (and a software company is itself a means of production) so that you can lay claim to whatever it produces. "I own this land, therefore I'm more responsible for the corn produced than those who grew it."
I do realize that makes me a bad communist.
Yes, but at least it's from a twisted idea of what it means to earn something rather than pure selfishness.
Removing their "obscene luxury" does nothing to raise the standards of living. The amount of wealth they devote to personal pursuits is trivial when amortized over the population as a whole.
Depending on who you ask, 20% to 5% of the population own 80% of the wealth. That pretty much blows what you just said out of the water.
And here's the point people like you regularly miss: Doing so also does absolutely nothing to stop thugs from ruling everything.
That's a horribly cynical argument. You could make the same conclusions about democracy. Heck, our "democracy" is already ruled by corporations, why not just make it official?
Now you've got a "country" with nothing but a bunch of thugs in power, with no way to actually get anything done without the permission of a thug, often a local thug.
Ah yes, because our "thugs" don't make our decisions today.
Last century saw hundreds of such "experiments" that all pointed to the same result: lower quality of life.
That's really a horribly shallow interpretation of the 20th century. The Soviet Union's economy was devestated by beaurocratization, true. But the Soviet Union's development given its many, many tough situations (for example, WW2 and the US economic strangulation plan known as the Cold War) was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
It's strange that these are viewed as "experiments", too.
You may not have noticed, but the phrase "communist experiment" has only been used by anti-communists.
Political science is the only "science" that finds it ethical to experiment on unwilling subjects.
Political scientists don't run tests. That's probably the main argument for rejecting them as a "science."
Being rude does you no favours
;)
I wasn't trying to be rude. When I first wrote it, I worried that it might sound rude so I rewrote it how it is, which apparently wasn't any better. Forgive me.
As for a reply to your other points, look at my other responses to other people's responses. I've already repeated myself at least four times there.
Surely you naysayers are joking. A regular man creates possibly the most important industry in our history
That's giving Microsoft too much credit, though it certainly deserves alot of that credit. But I have a more important correction: Bill Gates didn't do that building of the industry, he and every other employee at Microsoft did. You're confusing doing the work a company did with taking most of its money.
and donates nearly all the profit he makes
Again, he didn't make that profit, he and all others at Microsoft did. He's just the one that took it.
You're angry that he didn't take all directions in computing you wish he did? You're fucking insane.
Wha'? When did I ever say anything about the directions Microsoft took? I believe I was talking about the obscenely rich and philanthropy. It's not like Steve Jobs or [insert favorite hip capitalist here] is any better.
When you buy a Microsoft product, you are supporting advances in technology, jobs for thousands of people, and the well being of mankind.
Again, this has nothing to do with Microsoft's "directions."
I can think of no other human being who has/is going to change the world in such a positive way as Bill Gates.
I hate to be repetitive, but it bares repeating: He doesn't deserve credit for what Microsoft did, he and all other employees of Microsoft do.
Now, suck it up...if they do a HUGE amount of good with their ill gotten gains, can it outweigh the evil they have done?
But the point is that they stole that wealth from those who worked to generate it in the first place. Whatever good they do with it is still AFTER a life of obscene luxury. If society didn't have most of it's wealth horded by a few parisites, we'd have all that money to pay high wages AND fund research.
People GIVE their money to microsoft, no ones putting a gun to your head.
I was speaking in the most general terms, not about Bill Gates in particular. He didn't steal from consumers (for the most part). He took from the common employees money that they all helped generate. He stole the wealth generated in common (let's call that production "socialized") at Microsoft and, along with a few other thieves, kept most of it for himself. Socialized production, private accumulation. Oh, the wonderful results of private capital!
Steal from the rich, give to the poor?
That wealth is stolen by the rich to begin with - from everyone else involved in making that wealth. I thought I made that point clear in my original post.
Hell if they pull it off I might actually stop putting pins in my Bill Gates voodoo doll.
The obscenely rich don't deserve credit for philanthropy. Don't forget that it's the rest of society they took such huge masses of wealth from in the first place.
The obscenely rich sometimes get old and feel a little guilty for living so well when so many live so poorly. So they buy an indulgence to be forgiven for their sins by returning much of their wealth to society - when they're done with it, of course.
And all of the great musical advances and inventions of the 60s - aside from those of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis - were accomplished by people in their twenties
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be implying that that didn't continue to be true. I disagree. In fact, one of the most depressing things to me is how musicians grow up and never do anything substantially different than what they'd always done (or, perhaps, gone on to explore the roots of what they'd always done). I truly loath the day when I won't get new music. "Everything on the radio these days is shit!" Everything on the radio has always been shit.
You obviously have never watched any daytime television. Any given commercial break has a few ambulance chasers asking if you've been hit by an 18-wheeler, or hit by a drunk, or took Fen-fen, or got injured on the job.
You're saying there's too many suits for medical malpractice and job injuries? Are you saying only SOME people who have those things happen to them should recieve compensation? I'm confused.
(PS: the selfishness of those who put out those adds isn't a factor in the "too many lawsuits" question)