People seem to forget how many companies Bill Gates put out of business by using their designs. It takes years to sue and win damages minus lawyer fees. Then to try to whitewash his reputation by giving the money away.
I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich. They remember that the damage he caused mostly affected capitalists and professionals in developed countries. His businesses mostly didn't abuse labor in developing countries. He didn't cause that much environmental damage. He didn't undermine democracy and the society that much.
People remember that Bill Gates played the game and won, and the damage he caused was mostly limited to the economic sphere and to other people playing the same game. That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
>I think it's the opposite. People remember how Bill Gates got rich.
That rags-to-riches myth about Bill Gates is not true.
He was a Harvard dropout, but not some poor kid.
Bill Gates was always rich. But with Micro$oft's success, he became a lot lot richer later.
His mom sat on some major committee at IBM. She had significant clout there.
That's how Bill even got the chance to pitch a new OS when the IBM big bosses were looking to unleash their new PCs.
Do you really think they just yanked a school dropout from the streets into their boardroom to decide important business future for their company?
Paul Allen had started Microsoft with Bill Gates. It was Bill's mom who pitched Microsoft as a potential partner to IBM's CEO John Opel.
Bill Gates scouted and found a chap (Tim Paterson) having a working prototype called 86-DOS. And Bill purchased it (with his family money), rebranded it as PC-DOS and sold it to IBM (but he cunningly kept the copyright as he rightly figured that other manufacturers would clone the IBM PC hardware and would need a DOS for their PCs (thus, he later licensed the new OS to non-IBM PCs as MS-DOS)). I daresay his mom was instrumental in such cunning dealmaking.
>That's why they are willing to give Gates a chance to redeem himself by using his money for good.
The problem is that he is using his wealth for some shady stuff, so it is not good.
Bill Gates's name is mentioned in the Epstein files, for some unsavory links to that child molestor.
And his BGMF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) got banned in India from funding local NGOs, because a Parliamentary committee indicted BGMF's involvement and funding for shady and shoddy vaccine trials on tens of thousands of poor Indian tribal children without informed consent and under false aegis.
Be careful whom you consider your heroes. They may not be all they seem to be.
I didn't even know that HN has karma! I thought that was a Reddit thing.
I have been using HN for some time, but I don't really know how it works.
People seem to be downvoting my comments that reveal some hard truths, but I don't see any downvote button when browsing HN conversations.
Anyway, I don't intend to downvote anyone. Let people have their own opinions and say, but is there anyway I can find out who is deliberately downvoting my comments?
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. I thank you for the heads up, my friend.
But I feel that if my account gets restricted or suspended on HN because of downvotes on my comments that merely state some hard truths, then so be it.
It would be a judgement on HN, not on me.
I will simply go elsewhere to speak up the truths..
Someone has to speak for those innocents whose voices have forever been silenced by evil people.
This doesn't pass the smell test. People are "telling the truth" every day on this platform and only a small % of users are so disruptive they have restrictions applied to their accounts.
I know that it's against the guidelines to make comparisons to Reddit, but this is exactly what I frequently see there. People complaining about 4 downvotes and telling everyone how they are being silenced for being truthful in the sea of lies, or whatever else.
Very, very often this is some form of lashing out and has no basis in any reality.
You'd be surprised how accurate your take is on reputation management teams operating on social media.
One time I joked about blocking a domain which would have embarrassed a notorious colour revolution organisation and the next day the domain was snatched up by the named gang.
Reddit and Twitter are cesspools of noise and misinformation since years.
Even whole subreddits are taken over by shady admins, and totally weaponised.
e.g., r/India is filled with anti-India hate posts and malicious misinformation, because that subreddit is controlled by Pakistani admins.
I was actually glad when my Reddit user account got banned for speaking some truths about history of my nation, LOL.
Lot less stress on HN, it is more peaceful, simple, and informative, I like it.
