image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
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It’s nice to appreciate people who do good things, but keep in mind that the only way people become billionaires is by exploiting people. So I would not want any of these people to be billionaires because it would mean they got that wealth not by doing good things, but by owning ridiculous amounts of capital and exploiting people.
Rant over, sorry.
it’s alright mate. your rant helped me see things in a different light. so thank you.
Well said. Thinking billionaires are assholes because they’re naturally shitty is like thinking they got rich by being naturally hard working.
Take landlords for example. You can be the nicest person in the world. The kind of person who makes friends with the tenant. What do you think happens to you after you’ve evicted a few of your friends?
Systems are a bitch.
Landlords are parasites in any case
I could see someone making something useful and selling it to billions of people at a fair price not being exploitative and also being a billionaire.
I think it’s rare to the point of maybe happening once ever, but I’m not super upset about the behavior of the guy currently bankrolling the signal foundation.
The problem is if you aren’t exploitative then you aren’t being as “efficient” (in a capitalist sense) so you’ll be out-competed. The system is designed to incentivize exploitation. It’s mis-aligned to do anything else.
Oh, the system is totally pushing everyone to try to be the worst person possible.
However, they might not actually be out competed if they’re not being as exploitative as possible. If they’re not charging as much as the market will tolerate they’re being inefficient but in the way costs profit but attracts consumers.
I literally only have one billionaire who might not be a problem, but that’s what they did. $1 for a year of access sold to a few billion people, with something like 50 employees.It’s why the billionaires who shaft consumers and their workers are so gross. Reducing profit margins doesn’t impact efficiency, it only impacts money in their already overstuffed pockets.
I choose to see this question as “If you could magically just make someone a billionaire, who deserves it,” or more specifically “who would actually do good things with the money if they had a billion dollars.”
As you said, the reason these people aren’t billionaires already is because they haven’t been exploiting others. That being said, there are likely a few people that would use the money to better support a lot of great causes, like the Free Software Foundation, medical research, or climate change action
Ok, so who did Taylor Swift exploit? She literally is just a singer and the whole thing is odd, but it’s more she’s a billionaire because the currency is worthless.
Her ex-boyfriends.
oh no. they had to fuck taylor swift. boo fucking hoo
her little private jet already put out more CO^2 this year alone than everyone on lemmy combined
billionaires are shitty people, period.
She didn’t (maybe). Record labels did.
Paul McCartney is a billionaire. What people did he exploit?
I think Taylor Swift is now worth a billion dollars, despite being the exploited
Simply by having a billion dollars means they have decided to hoard that wealth. They could give away 90% of it, leaving them with $100 million, it wouldn’t impact their quality of life in any way, and still leave them with more wealth than 99.9% of the planet. Imagine the good that $900 million could do if it was put to good use rather than sitting in a bank account as a status symbol - having the capability to do that good with no impact on yourself or your family and choosing not to makes you an immoral person.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. At all.
I doubt any billionaires have that much money “sitting in a bank”.
Most wealth is non-liquid. For example, if you found a company that becomes massive, and you maintain a controlling share, then you could be a billionaire on paper while having no real money to spend – the only way to turn that into “real” money would be to sell shares in the company, and thus lose control of it. If the company is doing good work, it could be better to retain control and act through the company, by ensuring that it pays employees good wages to do good work for the benefit of society. This is not completely incompatible with profit in theory, though in practice…yeah. I’m not sure if there are any such billionaires in the world today.
The real problem is more fundamental to the economy, in that it fairly consistently rewards bad behavior.
Larry Page basically became a billionaire overnight when Google went public. I don’t recall Page or Google doing anything especially evil or exploitative before that, though their success was certainly built in an unsustainable economic bubble.
If Amazon didn’t treat its employees like shit and poison the entire economy, then Bezos could probably still be a billionaire and I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against him.
“Have” vs “control”
This is bullshit
While I agree with your sentiment, the truth is, none of those billionaires have their billions sitting on their bank account, like I have my couple hundred dollars.
How much money should a person be allowed to have?
I don’t know, but there probably should be a line somewhere. More wealth than 99.9% of the rest of the planet sounds like a good place to start
A lot less than a billion. The exact amount is negotiable.
10 Million. Rising in pace with minimum wage
Let’s reformulate. No single individual gets to a billion dollars of net worth without someone getting fucked over in the process. The very concept of any one individual having a net worth of hundreds of times the one of the next 99.9% is fucking absurd, regardless of what they did. Nobody “deserves” multiple lifetimes worth of wealth while half of the world’s population is living with dollars a day. It would take collectively for this world’s billlionaires, the equivalent of us foregoing buying a gaming PC (in relative terms) to get rid of world hunger, yet they choose not to. So, yes, they are actively fucking people over by having so much wealth in the first place.
How much money should someone be allowed to have?
Do I need an answer to this specific question for “a couple thousand people shouldn’t hold more money than the bottom half of the whole planet” to make any sense? You also completely sidestepped the very point.
But hey, I’ll entertain answering your question regardless of what I think of its legitimacy. I’d guess the answer would lie somewhere between a livable wage and the literal $35k/day a hypothetical person holding a billion dollars at birth would have until their statistical death at 80.
Fucking hell, one could be doing literal miracles, would they really deserve more than the next thousand people’s yearly wage in less than a couple of days? More than they’ll ever see in a lifetime of savings and careful investments, in less than a couple months? How in hell this became anywhere remotely controversial will always elude me. Who has anything to gain from holding this position, outside those couple thousand people holding those oversized purses?
McCartney and Swift ‘exploit’ tons of people as well. They might flagship their music artist operation themselves and kind of ‘be’ the product (or rather the brand), but there are lots and lots of people involved to make tours and shows possible, recording, production and especially distribution of music and merch involves labour as well.
In addition to that: I don’t think they store all that money on a nice little heap in their backyard. It usually gets invested into some sorts of corporations, be it through the stock market, where it will accrue revenue, that comes as the result of more exploitation.
That being said: the term ‘exploitation’ carries a much more negative connotation than would be beneficial for the conversation. It’s concept of marxist economics, and the term ‘Ausbeutung’ = exploitation was used by Marx himself to describe how capitalists benefit from the surplus that workers produce. I like the term ‘reaping the surplus’ better because it doesn’t carry as much of a negative connotation. The criticism of capitalism shouldn’t barely rely on the fact that surplus is being taken away from the workers, but from the consequences to society and the political system that inevitably follow when that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority.
no one should be billionaires.
None of them. I don’t care who they are, nobody should be a billionaire.
The point is, I think, if they were to become billionaires (say Bll Gtes leaves it to them in his will), then they wouldn’t be billionaires for long – their moral compasses (given they’ve spent their lives on non-profit causes) dictate that they’d likely put the money into other non-profit ventures.
Thats a fair point, but money changes people. That kind of money is obscene because it effectively puts you above most laws. I, too, would like to believe that the folks on this list would do only good with the money; but the longer the list, the more likely you witness the “Bad Change!” At the end of the day, most folks have families and other concerns outside of their public pursuits. That kind of money, while bringing its own problems, can get rid of just about any “normal people” worries (obviously not something like inoperable cancer)!
I would use [it] from a desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine
- Gandalf, to Frodo, saying why he should not be given the one ring.
I thought the same exact thing lol
I think they aren’t billionaires precisely because they worked for the good of the internet/knowledge.
If they indeed became billionaires that would imply that how they conduct themselves had completely been altered along with their core beliefs.
You literally can’t be a billionaire without exploiting people. If you’re not sharing profits equitably, you’re exploiting your work force; if you ARE sharing profits, then there’s no way you’ll become a billionaire.
I heard of a shorter way of saying that: There is no ethical billion dollars.
None of these people could ever be billionaires. Only a sociopathic, narcissistic mind could ever do what it takes to hoard a billion dollars. Capitalism rewards having a lack of empathy for other people.
Reminds me of this tweet from Merman_Melville: “Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it’s probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day” The experience itself is probably harmful and changes the person.
Studies have shown that people change at a certain amount of money, like they cross a line in the sand. When you can buy anything everything just becomes yours by default in your mind. And anyone who can’t do that are basically sheep dogs - useful but not worth your time. These studies were done in the twenty-tens and the number then was between 20 and 30 million for most people. Imagine your view on the world if you have 100 times that amount.
Whew! Dodged that bullet.
Lucky you!
Imagine 5 thousand times that amount, like bezos or musk
You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire.
You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire
And to STAY a billionaire. If you have immense power to do good, and every single morning you wake and choose not to, you are an evil ghoul driven by greed, period.
I love how so many of them demand love and acclaim for claiming they will give their money away… when they die.
You want me to sing your praises because you won’t use the money you made exploiting countless laborers and lobbying government to benefit yourself above society to anoint a handful of nepo babies to wield that power after you as some part of a new nepo dynasty? Gee thanks?
Its like a serial killer promising not to train his children in the family business. Its not doing good, just doing slightly less bad. Except billionaires cause damage on a far greater scale.
You need to be a horrible person to become a billionaire.
Jeffrey Epstein supporter and pedophile Richard Stallman would qualify then?
Hoooo boy people here get angry when you remind them of Stallman being outspokenly pro-paedophilia.
All libertarians start and end at the same place.
At least Stallman championed other liberties, too.
Probably the same people who claim that Threads is going to be toxic for the fediverse…
If he’s willing to trample all over people, exploit them, and have them die for his sake, then absolutely.
Billionaires don’t care about people. They don’t view others as human. To them workers are robots, a statistical means to an end. Who cares if someone dies in some factory/warehouse somewhere? There’ll be another to replace them before the end of the day.
A billionaire gladly takes the effort of others and claims it as their own. They go out of their way to do it.
That’s not to say that every evil person acting like this will automatically become a billionaire, but you need to be OK with doing these things in order to get there. A billion USD is such an insane sum you cannot legitimately accumulate that without hurting people in the process. Like there’s no logical way of actually earning that amount of money. That’s money you take.
Billionaires don’t care about people. They don’t view others as human.
Whereas peophiles and forces sex labor apologists are super empathetic.
Guillotine for the lot, I say.
Or divorcing Jeff Bezos.
Joke aside, apparently she has a hard time spending enough money to lower her net worth (currently at $40B). Which is an absolutely bonkers amount of money, no one ever should have that much.
As if a good person would’ve married him in the first place.
She married him in 1993 way before Amazon happened, maybe he wasn’t a gigantic ass back then. I don’t know much about her, but she seems decent from what I can see, she has donated massive amounts of money to charitable causes.
If they were billionaires, they likely wouldn’t be the people they are today.
I meant billionaires for their actions and creations, and not by birth like most techbros are.
That’s worse. You see how that is worse right?
yeah, now I do see that.
That seems worse because it means they went out of the way to get so rich, rather than just having it handed to them.
I was thinking more along the lines of “if they had that much money, their projects could’ve received more impact.”
like if free software would become mainstream.though now I realise that’s an idealistic view and with money, people will become corrupt.
If they received a lot of money from their work and they used it to increase the impact of their projects, they wouldn’t be billionaires. The money would have been spent on the projects. If Linus headed a non-profit that received 10B a year revenue and spent most of it, leaving Linus with 0.5M-1M yearly salary, he wouldn’t be a billionaire and the billions spent on the Linux project would have had a significant impact. If on the other hand he pocketed 1B a year, there would be 1B less for the Linux project. And Linus would have been/become a different person.
then the lore of Linyos Torvoltos would’ve been true :p
I’d strongly disagree there too. Y’know basically the entire internet runs on Linux right? Our global communication system containing the sum of all human knowledge is like 99% Linux servers. And the reason a whole bunch of companies sponsor the hell out of Linux now is because it’s just that good and just that important on a global scale.
Image of me is missing but I still agree.
Haha love your humour dude
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IMO RMS already has the attitude of a billionaire. He’s a thoroughly weird man who says stuff he really shouldn’t then stands by it. He’s right about a lot of things when it comes to software, licensing, and open source in general but outside of that track he’s more than a little loopy.
I think it might be because he’s had to fight society so long for things he knew he was right about that now he doesn’t know how to have people tell him “no Richard, that’s ducked up”.
Anyhow, I don’t think him being a billionaire would be a good idea, him having enough funds to branch off into doing wherever strikes his fancy could be very bad.
And Linus, I love Linus but look at how he’s grown as a person and listened and changed how he interacts with other kernel developers. Would he still have been as receptive if he was a billionaire? Something tells me no.
I understand your point, but those weren’t the words he said. though I don’t think that’s going to make a difference.
I like RMS for what he did(and is doing) for the free software community. I can also talk about some uncanny things about Gandhi, but that doesn’t make his contribution to the independence movement and his views on nonviolence any less relevant.
to me, a person should be seen in his entirety. because only fictional characters are without flaws.
People should indeed be seen in their entirety, the failure of this is why so many people get upset about Stallman.
The guy is routinely portrayed as a bastion of righteous good will, championing the little guy against the evil corporations. The hero worship is real.
Some of us see Stallman as a misogynistic asshole who routinely belittles people on mailing lists when they don’t agree with him and publicly defends people who sexually abuse children.
For some of us, it feels like we need to go out of our way to point this out because we don’t want a guy like that as the public face of something we care about.
what did
ithe say about women that makes him a misogynist?Edit ok found this
https://www.arp242.net/rms.html
a pretty much reasonable, reasoned and merciless account on the figure of rms. I very largely agree with it - spoiler he isn’t a misogynist, just a super massive weirdo
just a super massive weirdo
I once heard him described as “The smartest man to ever throw a tantrum like a 4 year old”
this thread is terrible… people reporting "I heard of"s as proofs. eh once I read, eeeh once someone told… once sjws bite, there’s no chance they let go. and the most important thing is that 99.999999% of the people bad mouthing rms have at best fifth hand reports about him.
to all the superior etichs white knights: I’m not defending rms.
I’m very worried about the lynching, with proof based on I once read, i heard of, and also straight out of jealousy and envy.
rms, like suggested in the article I posted, could very well be a neuro divergent person. I wonder how many of all of these rabid dogs biting at him preach themselves as super supportive, super inclusive, 360° hexa-dimensional full rainbow, but then aren’t able to understand the person they have in front of them. let’s start by ruining someone. there’s always time to say “I was wrong, I’d like to apologize. At the time I didn’t know. I vow to be a better person.”
Wrong person to post this in response to, dude
why, i thought you’d agree
I agree with your point in spirit, but again, he didn’t say any such thing. I haven’t talked to him in person, so, I can only rely on internet to validate/refute those claims.
he is the public face of free software because others have their own terminologies(e.g.: open source championed by bruce perens and eric raymond), with which the GNU project disagrees.
Here you go, someone has done me the service of clearly laying out the case against Stallman here so that I don’t need to l: https://drewdevault.com/2023/11/25/2023-11-26-RMS-on-sex.html
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Which he did not do.
Richard Stallman on paedophilia:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue. "
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
Honestly I cannot see any way one could interpret his words like that
Richard Stallman on paedophilia:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue. "
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
Aaron Schwartz too
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/
I fight laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website.
Unlike humans, computers see everything as bits (numbers). They can’t tell the difference between the random movement of a lava lamp and a copyrighted song. I believe that our technology should similarly make no distinction and that I have the right to transmit arbitrary bits.
Here’s a list of laws that restrict this right, in order from least controvertial (i.e. most people agree this freedom shouldn’t be restricted) to most.
…
…
…
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
wha?
you can read everything in great detail and with citations here if you have the bandwidth.
but I’m not sure if the commenter is mixing two unrelated accusations towards him.
stallman is known for his fixation on certain choice of words, which is the reason most people get him wrong. that’s why I shared the link to read his exact words and make up your mind by yourself.
the man sure doesn’t know how the read the room… and when to shut up.
He did not. Go find his exact words if you don’t believe me.
Richard Stallman on paedophilia:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue. "
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
Why don’t you link his exact words, then?
Since the other person hasn’t (surprise), here’s Richard Stallman on paedophilia:
“The nominee is quoted as saying that if the choice of a sexual partner were protected by the Constitution, ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia’ also would be. He is probably mistaken, legally–but that is unfortunate. All of these acts should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.”
RMS on June 28th, 2003
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. "
RMS on June 5th, 2006
"There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.
Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That’s not willing participation, it’s imposed participation, a different issue. "
RMS on Jan 4th, 2013
Yeah I’m not surprised either haha
Thanks for the quotes, what an appalling man smh
Yeah. He had/has some great ideas when it comes to free software, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t a POS in other parts of his life.
I’m tired of the Linux world literally worshipping him. It’s weird. Hilariously it’s no doubt the same people who would cringe at the cultish following of Steve Jobs. Another person with some good ideas but was an awful person.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
I don’t think he was ever a billionaire, though he’s certainly done quite well for himself. Since leaving Apple, he has founded several new companies and projects, focusing a lot on education and philanthropy. He was also involved in founding the EFF.
He’s an engineer first and foremost, and several of his projects never achieved mainstream success, partly for being, IMHO, ahead of their time – for example, a programmable universal remote in the 80s, and a GPS-based item tracker in the early 2000s.
As far as I know, he has never been involved in any notable scandals.
At Apple’s IPO, Woz gave $10 million of his stocks to Apple employees. Jobs didn’t want to give any to employees. Seems like a good guy.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
We don’t work tirelessly. We get tired all the time, but keep at it as well as we can.
Can we throw Steve Irwin in here. I bet that dude could have saved the Great Barrier Reef and a whole lot of wildlife if he had more means.
This is exactly why those people never become billionaires. You can’t make billions without screwing over people and the environment.
Rip Swartz man, the idea of all human knowledge from how to change your tire to how to put out a fire being monetised is legitimately scary
RIP Aaron Swartz.
the US government has blood on their hands for this one…
