• MindTraveller
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    6 months ago

    Bill Gates shot down the UN proposal to make patenting covid vaccines illegal. That caused the pandemic to go on for longer, and that gave me long covid. If Bill Gates weren’t a billionaire, I wouldn’t have these long covid problems.

        • photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          Fucking hell, isn’t his goal to rid the world of preventable diseases? Giving everyone the knowledge to make their own medicine is very clearly a good thing!

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Don’t expect any “charitable organization” run by billionaires, they’re basically all there the funnel money from a billionaire to themselves in a way that lets them lower their tax burden and try to control public policy to further enrich themselves.

            Keeping to that shithead gates, he pushed common core, admitted it was a failure, and kept pushing it. Billionaires are a pox*, and deserve to get the ol’ French aristocrat treatment.

            • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Okay I hate Bill Gates as much as anybody because he is a greedy scum sucking billionaire with extreme self-interest, but common core didn’t fail because it was a bad idea. Setting a common standard for all of education is not a bad thing. The problem was that it was introduced during the Obama administration and the conservative think tanks went to work immediately to put out propaganda trying to make it into yet another culture war prerogative. It’s been most recently tied to critical race theory even though CRT isn’t taught in anything but collage law classes.

              In fact, the one that pisses me off most is how they’ve demonized the new math curriculum simply because it doesn’t jive with how it was taught in the past. But the way it was taught before was thought up by 1800’s school marms and the new math standards were developed by actual mathematicians who knows how math works far better than a 19th century school teacher. Kids who are taught the new math standards will be capable of more advanced math far sooner than their parents and grandparents ever were.

          • MindTraveller
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            6 months ago

            Bill Gates has stock in Pfizer which would be devalued if the company didn’t have exclusive right to produce vaccines according to its patented method. He’s a billionaire, and that means he only cares about money. That’s the only way to become a billionaire in the first place. He’s simply treating medicine the same way he treated Microsoft for decades.

          • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            You sweet summer child, Bill Gates has ALWAYS been a sociopath interested in only money and power.

            His retirement and donating all his money to “charity” was only a smoke screen to preserve his wealth. He created his own charity (this is wealth preservation tactic used by ultra rich). And while it does some good, it’s main purpose is to preserve his horde and whitewash his past so he’s remembered as a good guy.

            • Lumidaub@feddit.de
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              6 months ago

              his own charity (this is wealth preservation tactic used by ultra rich).

              I’ve never understood how this is supposed to work. If his money goes into the charity, it’s not his anymore. Seriously, someone please explain?

              • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                6 months ago

                The things they do daily (food, travel, clothes, haircuts, etc) are expenses of the charity because they work for them and are the “image” of it

                Dump their money tax-free into a charity and then use it to fund themselves anyway

                  • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    6 months ago

                    Sorta, it’s more like having your rich parents pay for everything but the “rich parents” is your employer, which is just the corporation you set up to run everything. They usually use a company credit card as their daily use card and leave it to AP to manage

                    The exact details are of course prickly as fuck but that’s a really basic overview of the idea

              • exanime@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Think of it this way…

                You take all your money and you have a lawyer form a charity (no tax) that you control. The charity rakes in even more money and all they make (via investment) is tax free (or practically so)

                Meanwhile, since you are employed by that charity, it pays for your mansions, trips, fancy foods, vacations, yachts, whatever you want… Basically it is like having a rich daddy that buys everything for you and you never have to worry about money

            • MindTraveller
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              6 months ago

              Calling someone a sociopath is an action that ought to be kind. It ought to engender sympathy and a desire to help. I don’t want you to be kind to Bill Gates. He sucks, he doesn’t deserve your kindness. Sociopath is Greek for “socially ill person”. Bill Gates doesn’t struggle with navigating society, he controls much of society. He’s the opposite of socially ill. He inflicts social illness on other people. I want you to save the word sociopath for nice people who deserve kindness and sympathy. Bill Gates is an asshole.

            • ameancow@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Seems like every billionaire has all these lofty goals and huge dreams to make the world better… but only if they get statues erected of them personally.

              So yes, we are not a mature enough species to handle power and wealth, we can’t even take care of our planet and all we had to do there was not pump poison into the air and we couldn’t even pull that off. Lets cap wealth at a hundred million bucks, tops, and then forcibly take away their money and build houses and gardens and water purifiers all over the developing world. There are probably fucking genius savant children being born who could solve all our problems, out of 8 billion people the odds only increase, but if the majority of these potential world-changing children die from dysentery and other diseases in vast numbers every day, then we’re losing talent constantly.

              If anyone was running the world like a business, they would need to get called in for a performance review, asap.

              • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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                6 months ago

                Please note that I semi like bill gates as I agree with you, he is one of the better ones.

                But having said that, there is no such thing as a good billionaire. My comment was more about how all their actions are for self benefit.

                I believe he has stake in Pfizer hence his stance in this post.

          • (⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            6 months ago

            he needs to make money off of it so he can fund future research! don’t question why our global economic model relies on made up numbers being met before actual life saving work is done! or why the numbers need to be in the hands of a dozen guys in the first place

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        No source needed; literally everything Gates does is for one reason: Profit.

        Behind the Bastards (podcast) has a good episode on how he operates.