[OT] Linda McQuaig on Bill Gates

[Thomas Milne]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Jamon Camisso
<jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 3/22/2011 9:47 PM, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:34 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
>> <clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> I also heard that he tore the labels off mattresses, jaywalked, and
>>> mixed colours with whites in the wash.
>>
>> Okay, he never murdered anyone...but the billions of dollars that he
>> has amassed and hero status are not deserved, which is the point of
>> all this. He cannot claim to be a 'self-made man' or that he was the
>> progenitor of the home PC revolution.
>>
>> I've never put much stock in the whole 'great man' theory of history
>> anyway. Even someone like Einstein had to base his ideas on the
>> thousands of years of scientific progress before him.
>>
>
> Why doesn't he deserve his success? He played the game, played it well
> and came out on top based on the opportunities that his situation
> afforded him and the subsequent success of his company. None of us did
> that. I'd put money on most people acting the same way in a similar set
> of circumstances.

Well, the word deserve has to itself be defined, and that's something
of a tangent I guess. It depends on what outcome you want, so if you
want a stable democracy, you probably want to avoid extreme
inequality. Having a system that rewards selfish behaviour as you
describe (only winning matters) will inevitably lead to conflict. So
in that sense 'deserve' has a function for greater good. I suppose if
you reject the idea of a 'common good', then the word can have a very
different meaning.

> In the end, I don't mind Microsoft, or Apple, or Oracle or company XYZ.
> Someone has to run the world's computers, and the more of them there
> are, the more of us have work to do. Of course it wouldn't hurt any of
> us if more systems ran Linux ;)
>

She didn't mention Linux, which disappointed me of course.

-- 
TBM
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists