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.
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.
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
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.
How much money should a person be allowed to have?
A lot less than a billion. The exact amount is negotiable.
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
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.
This is bullshit
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 little private jet already put out more CO^2 this year alone than everyone on lemmy combined
billionaires are shitty people, period.
Her ex-boyfriends.
oh no. they had to fuck taylor swift. boo fucking hoo
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.
no one should be billionaires.
Fundamentally speaking, none of these people would’ve ended up as billionaires for long. Most FOSS heavyweights already gave up their chance at being much more wealthy for their current roles. That being said, I’m pretty sure Linus and a few others here aren’t exactly short on cash
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.
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.
Rest in peace Bram Moolenaar
I’m sorry, but Stallman is an asshole…
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Aaron Swartz created markdown?!! I did not know that!
I also had no idea he made RSS
yeah, no
No one should have that much power.
I wouldn’t have trusted Fred Rogers with a billion dollars, and he’s practically the only famous stranger I could have seen trusting with my newborn alone.
It’s a society warping level of wealth. No single, unelected, unaccountable person should possess that much uniltateral power.
The global
allowanceencouragement of such an exploitative, reckless goal is why we are in our various bleak situations.I dont want anybody to be a billionaire, also they couldn’t because to be one you have to be exploitative and a bad person
It would probably ruin them and their work though. While I have little sympathy for the plights of billionaires, it’s difficult for people to not allow that level of ridiculous wealth and power to affect them. These people have found a much healthier path to success. I’m sure the living ones are all financially comfortable without the ridiculous distortion of excess wealth.
Also though I’d object to anyone being a billionaire since it’s absurd.
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.
Aspiring to becoming and staying a billionaire requires a certain amount of psychopathy because it takes a certain mentality to want to own so much wealth that you’ll never be able to enjoy all of it in a lifetime while at the same time denying or taking away the wealth of others who might need it.
If I had a billion, I’d take a few million and live off the interest and give away the rest and not be bothered by anyone or anything ever again.
