pianowizard wrote:Bruised, are there rich people that you don't hate?
I "hate" neither Gates nor the so-called "rich". I have in fact been a lone critic of those who use the term "Rich People" loosely and in a way that should cause serious pause among rational, logical, & rigorous minded people. "Rich people" is a term used so sloppy that its as loose and sloppy as the words "Race" & "Racist" are today, they are drawfed by the rampant misuse of the term "Rich People". In fact, the only competitors for the ambiguous, proported omnipotent and ominpresent "Rich People" are the terms "Red Neck", "HillBilly" & "The Free Market". "Government" is a close competitor as well. And then there is the all knowing, perfectly rational, & omniscient "THEY" and "THEM" of the conspiracy theorist.
I just happen to know a few dozen wealthy individuals through the wealthy husband of my eldest cousin (and a Levy I met in graduate school). He is a Bough, the male heir to the Cleveland, Ohio Bough fortune. I know "members" of what I consider a type of wealthy people. I refer to them as productive rich, as opposed to parasite rich and celebrity first generation rich. These productive rich people I happen to know are second or third generation rich. People used to know them as blue blood wealthy. They are educated, patriotic, cultured, and LOW Profile. Such people as the Levys, Fishers, Fords, Boughs, etc. They could but do not pursue lives of idle leisure, social arrogance, extravagance, or vulgar consumption. They actually work long hours in activities that generate jobs and taxes. Thus, 'the productive rich". The ones I know, disapprove as much as I hold suspect the idle, flashy, extravagant, ever greedy, loud & forever preachy wealthy. People like Feinstein, Boxer, Harry Reid, the Clintons, the jailed Maddow, the Kennedys, Gates, Trump, Soros, who base their lives on ever increasing wealth and power. I observed long ago that anyone who bases their life on money, things, & status never have enough of any of them. Bernie Maddow, Martha Stewart, Soros, & Helmsley, Donald Trump are examples of this specie of wealthy people.
The productive rich, contrary to popular imagination and divide & conquer politico propaganda, generally do not approve of the carrying on, extravagance and arrogance of most celebrity rich, who are largely pretensious and often hedonistic people, who in one breath brag about how little they read and how poorly they did in school and in the next breath try to tell other Americans how they should think, vote, and live. Babara Streisand, Mrs Hines-Kerry, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, & Rush Limbaugh come to mind here (Limbaugh was the black sheep of a well-to-do family).
I have solid reason to disapprove of Bill Gates and his band of two dozen con-men. I was into computing before Microsoft existed and I know the technological and powerful innovating engine that was the early American Personal Computing field. I bought and assembled the first personal computer which appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics. I had a Clive Sinclair Pocket Computer, the Z-88, Commodore Pet, C-64 & C-128D. I followed the exciting top five computer magazines and I witnessed what happened after Gates launched Microsoft and quickly became a huge monster in a once exciting arena of brilliant innovation. Gates still boasts in his biography about failing to complete his first & only semester of college.
I was online before Internet existed and in some powerful ways, the global free amateur home owned BBS (Bulletin Board Service) was superior to the Internet. There was no charge to log on and the BBS community was a firestorm of innovation. Then comes a greedy fellow like Gates and next a Giant AOL appears. In a few short years AOL kills off the World Wide Web of BBS systems. We sysops (BBS owners and operators) invented email and discussion groups. The first email system was named FidoNet (after the dog communication system in "The 101 dalmatians"). A second email system called Echonet was also created. ARAPANET copied a simple form of email from Fidonet. The truth is Internet borrowed more from BBS than from ARAPANET and the BBS
world provided the public its first access to Internet. We connected people to it by way of email. AOL borrowed from Apple's GUI desktops (for the Mac) and applied GUI technology to Internet access. SYSOPS had to be cost and byte efficient so our pipeline to Internet was command line only. It's a good thing IBM dominated early in the PC market. Otherwise, Apple prices would rule the field! Steve Jobs insists on dominating computing from the smallest hardware to the Operating System and the software --all at high prices. No blame goes to the only technical mind in the business, Steve Wozniac, the one who actually designed and built the first Apple PCs & choose a Unix variant for the MAC O/S. He could not tolerate the extremely crude way his friend and partner Steve Jobs openly trashed everyone who worked at Apple, so he cashed out of Apple in the early years, deciding $400 was enough for any one. The senior executives couldn't tolerate Jobs either. They figured out how to eliminate the founder and top stock holder. They fired Jobs.
He was brought back later when Apple was bankrupt. Extremely emotionally impaired rejected children like Jobs can be very charming to strangers. He is a super BS artist at promoting Apple products. He also. like Gates, is a master at stealing other people's ideas and intellectual property. He stole the GUI - icons, applets and all- and the mouse from an ignored Xerox research team.
We had rules. We strictly forbid time wasting "Flaming" and serial "Flamers" from participating in our global BBS discussion groups. There were no how-to books or literature for personal computing, no online browsers, GUIs or even menus. So, our time in discussion groups was serious and productive. We helped each other install cards, get phone modems up & running. Computing questions did not go unanswered or ignored like so many do today. Present a question or problem and dozens of people around the world either provided an intelligent answer or solution or worked on it with you until it was resolved.
What we had were really communities not just discussion groups.
Giant Robber Barons like Jobs, Gates & Case, reminiscent of the 1800s destructive railroad, coal & oil tycoons & greedy city-based ranchers took over the field that was populated by small innovative startups and brilliantly creative people. Small shops that assembled quality PCs for people were in every city.
FDR & his Regulators are certainly open to sharp criticism on many levels but self and socially destructive bankers, Wall Street, Airline tycoons and other corporate giants too big for folks to stand up to had to be regulated. Their wild conduct wasn't good for the country. You cannot let driven business innovators run totally unregulated any more than look the other way when brilliant actors, singers, athletes get cowboy wild. Do that and soon we will beg for a modern Wyatt Earp.
Reagan proved that with the huge mess we have today, a chaos I feared when he launched simple headed across the board budget cuts and across the board deregulation. HE deregulated banks, airlines, railroads, public transportation, the airways. On a positive note, Reagan stopped Labor fat cats from raping the public treasury by enfocing laws against public servants strong arm union machinations against the people. All these activities were regulated for good reason. I hoped we would learn now, at last, that certain things must be regulated, not nationalized, just restrained from hurting the little guy and from destroying each other. If we don't need that, then we don't need government at all.
Unfortunately, we face, today, the too familiar drum beat of extreme reaction to extreme action.
I pray we do not visit upon millions of average people the iron fist of do nothing government and the greedy rich guys claim that the only sane market is an extremely free market. Claiming that is really demanding we must let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they wish, despite what that may mean for the other 97% of us. Strange how folks who laugh at Big Government types for being tree huggers want you to believe that the best government is one that lets nature (in the name of extreme free market) redefine most people as losers and failures and throws them under the bus in the name of 'its righteous because natural.' Well, it's natural to die, natural to get sick and natural to grow feeble with age. Why bother with insurance- whether life, auto, or health insurance? Why bother with medical treatment? Why bother with fire and police forces? Why not just let 'nature rule'?
We have far more than two choices, extreme government control, extreme forced "social justice", & perfect forced "fairness" OR extreme government cut backs and extreme government do nothingness. The same people enjoy the top tier and the same people end up under the bus under either extreme. Ever notice who benefits either way? Do we want government that runs a strange race like the one run by the Mad Hatter in "Alice in Wonderland"?
Lumping together every one who happens to possess a certain amount of wealth, as if they are an actual club or race is no less ignorant, no less puts us on our knees before a mediocre arrogant elite, than does the opposite extreme of let the market decide, let the market do it for us. There are winners & losers in the market place and the losers vastly outnumber the winners.
That is why we must pay attention to people like Bill Gates who cuts the same huge check each year for the Democratic National Party and for the Republican National Party. It doesn't matter to him which one rules. He wants to be in with both. By the way, he learned this from the founder of another monopoly, Steven Case of Intel. He's not as rich, so his checks are only 124million each.
By the way, the Gates donated 500 million, not 500 billion. No wealthy person on the planet has yet managed to obtain anywhere near 500 billion. Ever wonder why Gates simply hands over such large sums to Prussian and Hindu model forced public schooling? Gates never donated to a charity or political candidate until .the Clinton Administration filed a huge anti-monopoly case against him. He got rid of the action by creating his education charity & by writing checks to both Parties. He only began this after Steven Case did it and his monopoly case was dropped. Keep in mind that Gate's charity seeks no education reform. It just funds the current failed systems.
Are you aware that BEFORE the authoritarian American laws forcing parents to send their children to public schools, Americans were the most literate, most educated people on earth? Their mothers taught them to read, write, spell, & calculate at home. People then went on to teach themselves. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most educated Americans who ever lived, was not schooled and he was not uncommon. His high literacy & lack of schooling was the norm. Gates supports public schools asthey are. From the perspective of people like him our schools do a fine job at a discount price. They program Americans to obey orders, be quiet when working, be on time, remain at their work station, respect work site rules & authoritarian management and to do hours of busy work. 12 years of American public schooling is spirit taming and mind numbing. Universities continue the mind numbing & they consume student life with pointless busy work.
In the past, our schools were 6 to 8 year long boot camps for factories. Today, they encourage memorization and discourage real thinking and train Americans for work boring service jobs at Walmart, Burger World, Kmart & other service industries, and to serve as mindless government (or corporate) pencil pushers, or for dangerous military assignments that often make no sense except to a few hundred professional politicians.
Read what major "educators" from John Dewey on (after he spent a year with Stalin and two years with Mao) wrote and preached about education. To the man, these swells talk about reigning in your imaginations, discouraging heavy readers and tinkering, and occupying children by filling their time with busy work. Unless you are focused on money and power, you want our children to do less school, not more class time as people like Bill Gates preach. Schools already fill up 12 years with less learning than the six years of 60 years ago. Then, youth are told they need another 5 years or more of school (at great expense) to get a decent job! 17 years to be the new person at work who doesn't know how to do anything?
No sir, you guessed way wrong. I am not lefty. I am not righty either. I am the ruling elite's worst nightmare, I am Aristotelian. I collect all known analyses and arguments and throw them against each other to determine which one makes the most sense and I hold all conclusions as subject to correction and revision. There are Truths but mere mortal man seems only able to figure out a few of them. I am certain of two things. Groups of people who surrender their mind to a single theory or ideology (examples, Progressivism, Communism, socialism, Free Market, Nazism, Green, One World Government, anarchism, Fabianism, Maoism, Reaganism, Fordism, Libertarianism, Global Warming, etc) given power over others are dangerous to the well being of the average person. ...And "Experts" do not know nearly as much as they assume they do.
...and yet, about this too I could be proven wrong...
--Bruised
"The more I learn, the less I think I KNOW"
