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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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You don't just get to be a billionaire and then donate BILLIONS at the end of your life to wash away your indiscretions. Fuck him and every other billionaire.
It matters because we are no longer alone. We are not some small collective of 50 people in a rural town with no access to the outside world. We must act as one. Pretending like one person can go off and do whatever they want and it won't effect the whole is how we get people like Trump. We must all act for the greater benefit of humanity, and if you aren't praising efforts that help achieve that goal, I have to wonder why.
You aren't wrong, but it doesn't matter now, does it? Work on tax codes if that is your passion, but maligning the mistakes of previous generations and hindering current efforts doesn't help anyone. The money is gone. It isn't coming back. It may as well go to a good cause while we try to find a way to make sure it doesn't continue to happen.
Hating someone because they are a billionaire is the same as loving one for being a billionaire. It doesn't matter how much money a person has or doesn't have. What matters is their actions. I'll be the first to put an oligarch against the wall, but I don't need it to be a billionaire. I just need them to be harming the world. I will concede that there are very few (read: nearly none) with that much money that do anything proper with it. Its pretty much all bad. But, in this case, we have on that is giving a portion away that can truly make a beneficial difference, and we should praise efforts like that so that they might continue. What's the next billionaire gonna do when they try to give their money away and see that "All Gates got was vitriol and death wishes." We don't have to praise the billionaire directly, but I think we should agree that the money finally leaving the 1% to help the remaining 99% is a good step.
I get that the point you're trying to make is something about unity, but it's weird to say that. That's a weird thing to say.
This is my exact argument against billionaires. They are acting alone, making these sweeping decisions by themselves.
Disagree. It's never too late to get the money back, you just need politicians that are willing to take the initiative to go after it. Currently I don't see any, so I continue to say things that I hope will help focus people and bring attention to continue advocating for these policies.
K. Why we arguing? No good billionaires.
Charity is not something you do for praise. I'm sorry the billionaires are so thin-skinned my insults would hurt them.
If I meet you on the street and beat you up and steal your wallet, then donate it to a local homeless shelter, are you gonna be mad at me? It was a good cause, bro, why you mad? It's in the hands of people who need it more now. I admit the analogy is a bit strained, but that's only because the means by which the billionaire class have gotten and maintained their wealth is more obtuse. Obscuring those means is how they continue to operate as they do.
I don't want to argue with you, I feel like your heart is in the right place and you are coming from a place of unity. But billionaires stand so far outside any sort of class consciousness with the likes of us. There is no point, no good that comes from defending billionaires for anything they do, they should not exist and the longer they continue to the more of a blight on the rest of humanity and the literal ecosystem of the world is at risk.
See so many other responses in this topic about how this is just PR, the money is being used to push AI solutions, the amount of wealth spent not really leaving Gates' control because it's being shuffled through different orgs, etc.
It shouldn't be. It should be the rallying cry of the last 50 years. It's like you are saying that water tastes funny.
Yeah, I know, but telling them to stop when they do something good isn't going to stop them from doing something bad. We have to make the best out of a bad situation until we can make the bad situation better.
I'm all for updating policies and making sure the future is brighter than the past, but there is a statute of limitations. We can't just reach back as far as we want in time and start prosecuting based on what we hope will be future regulations. The money is gone. Don't worry, they keep printing more of it, though.
Billionaires and celebrities almost all have some form of narcism. They love the attention. Again, we have to make the best of a bad situation. Stroke their ego for doing good, and maybe they'll do more of it. If every time a billionaire did something shitty we just kept it out of the papers and lets the courts handle it, but then flooded the papers when a billionaire did something positive, I bet we'd see a change. Granted, I think thats a terrible idea, and the public should be made aware of the issues when they are relevant, but I also think we go a bit too far in over-publicizing the bad and under-publicizing the good.
If you beat me up and took my wallet 30 years ago, and then I saw you in Africa doing humanitarian work, yeah, I wouldn't be mad. I'd say, "damn, it looks like they got it together. Good work." I might even go over and make an act of forgiveness. I have a very hard time believing people can change, so when I see it, I do try to acknowledge it.
This is a big thing on many fronts. We let perfect be the enemy of good and ultimately we end up with a movement that is not serious.
Or if they change for the wrong reason , or have ulterior motives which gates has in all his charity work