This is why all of the megarich are selfish assholes.
The good people give their money away.
And the good people never brag how charitable they are for doing so.
Or they have an epiphany and realize they have, perhaps not ‘fuck you’ money, but at least ‘bite me’ money. Then they sit in a row boat and fish or something. Greed is a pathology and we do a favor to those inflicted with it by taking it away faster and faster the more they steal from us.
The good people don’t become billionaires in the first place
You have extra money to name a hospital wing after yourself? Should have been taxed appropriately in the first place so that the hospital didnt need to sell naming rights just to fill a funding gap…
You have extra money to donate to your family charity? Should have been paid as appropriate wages to your workers instead of accumulating in your personal net worth…
All billionaire philanthropy is a failure of policy that allowed them to unjustly accumulate those billions through exploting others, thereby creating most of the problems that they “solve” through their philanthropy later in life
Part of what I liked about Rowling was that she was the first billionaire to lose billionaire status due to donating so much to charity. She had been poor & alone and understood how to support that.
Then she decided fucking over transfolk was her favorite nonprofit.
She’s a clown and a transphobe for sure.
When I was in college studying Comp Sci I did a whois on Woz’s domain and sent an email to the registered email (this was generally before the days of free whois protection), not expecting a response, just mentioning how cool his work on the Apple I & II was among others, and how as a CS student was exciting to see where technology had gotten to, asking him what he was up to.
I got a response a day later, thanking me for my email, talking about how he loved hearing from students, telling me about his current dancing with the stars stuff (this was in late 2009), among some other quips and such.
Felt incredibly down to earth and casual, and while I know it only took him maybe 5 minutes to write that email, or maybe it was even copied and pasted, it was super cool to get a response from such a tech icon.
Gaben also does this
Oh what a world it would be if people like Wozniak and Swartz weren’t fucked over by their original techbro “friends”
I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns.
Words to live by.
yea this is the guy Elon tried to PR himself as (and possibly succeeded for a while when he wasn’t as popular), but shit starts to smell fast.
There are a few real deals out there, but they never get the same attention as the con artists. Apple brought back the wrong Steve.
Here’s a guy that actually tried to make something good, even if the other guy didn’t let him. He worked to live and not lived to work. Yet he still has 10 million and a couple of houses, which definetely doesn’t make him a billionaire, but he has enough to put him in the “fuck you” position
One of the rare birds you kinda got to let slide with his wealth. To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t used that wealth to abuse people.
Yeah maybe he’s like bill gates and gave away large portions of his wealth, to himself…
Stuff like this needs to be thoroughly checked before it becomes “heartwarming”.
Edit: my point: don’t just trust them, verify.
Edit: seems to have angered the bill gates boot lickers lol
Bill Gates’s wealth is listed as about $118 billion. Steve Wozniak says his is “maybe $10 million plus a couple of homes,” so perhaps $20m if they’re very fancy homes. This makes Bill Gates about $117,980,000,000 richer than Steve Wozniak - a completely different category of wealth. I’m sure there are plenty of asshole millionaires but asshole billionaires are immeasurably more dangerous. Woz couldn’t play the Bill Gates kinds games with his money even if he wanted to.
Anyway, I consider myself pretty left, and pretty pro-workers owning the means of production, but I think we should be going after the billionaires first, and not wasting our time on millionaires unless they’re doing something unusually bad.
Sure, but my point was: don’t believe their word for it. Check it up.
Edit: still can’t help yourselves sucking it up to rich people IMO. Guy lived like a billionaire his whole life and now “only” has tens of millions…
Fuckin’ class act.
This reads like a shot at Jobs.
The Woz is BOSS!
Can we make “secular saints” a thing? Why should we reserve the title of “Saint” specifically for the Catholic Church? I think we should just get in the habit of referring to any unambiguously good person, who has performed great acts of generosity and selflessness, as a saint. They don’t even have to be religious. If someone wants to interpret it religiously, they can say that anyone so good is almost certainly bound for Heaven, but it need not be religious. Why can’t we have secular saints? Why can’t we have Saint Stephen of San Jose or Saint Fred of Latrobe?
Does the word “paragon” apply in this case? That’s what I think of when I see someone outside of religious context that I would aspire to emulate.
Paragon works, but it’s not really a title. Could we make “Paragon” a title? Instead of “Saint Stephen of San Jose,” we have “Paragon Stephen of San Jose.” Sounds odd, but maybe?
There is (video game) precedent
Dragon Age: Origins Dwarves refer to their heroes/saints as paragons.
I’d love for some kind of “social model of a great human” canonization process… A bit like the Nobel prize, something determined by a committee or something, but it would have to be people that were actual genuine fucking awesome humans.
I’m thinking Steve Irwin, Fred Rogers, etc…
I like this.
Tangentially related - I was thinking the other day about how it seems like the rich used to feel obligated (for whatever reason) to use some of their wealth for the good of the world. But can you even imagine a ‘Musk Foundation’ or a fucking ‘Zuckerberg Foundation’? No because they don’t have even an ounce of shame or a shred of conscience. I don’t know what it would even take but I do think it’s far past time for us to start talking, bare minimum, about their obligations to the country and world that gave them so much.
Sure, let’s not give them a choice though. Aggressive wealth tax caps at $100M, you get a park plaque and sainthood for each billion we redistribute to UBI.
Wow, some uplifting news which proves there are still some good people on this earth. I needed that, thanks! <3
I saw the Woz at El Burro Restaurant in SJ once and my wife said: Oh it’s the guy from dancing with the stars! 🤦
I had an Apple IIgs back in the day “signed” (printed) by Woz. I’m glad that dude is still living his best life.
It’s wild the simping done for Gabe on Lemmy. Gamers acting like he’s THEIR billionaire and steam is THEIR corporation and pretending he ain’t evil
He’s significantly less evil than other billionaires and Valve provides a pretty solid service at a fair price. Not very many companies even reach that bar. Giving them credit for that isn’t unreasonable.
All billionaires are bad but I’ll take Gabe over a Bezos or Zuckerberg every day of the week. There’s a huge difference on how those guys see/treat the world.
That’s like saying someone is the nicest serial killer on earth
Edit: it is disheartening seeing so many people on here defending billionaires, we are fucked as a species
Sure.
But there is still “a nicest serial killer” out there.
Dexter as far as serial killers go was pretty nice compared to the average serial killer. He brought donuts and glides like a lizard on ice.
I’d rather be murdered by the nicest serial killer than any of the others.
Logic dictates that he’d use a ‘nice’ way to do it, such as laughing gas, or something.
Over slowly skinning me alive and dunking me in a salt bath.
That’s like saying someone is the nicest serial killer on earth
Yeah that’s a fair statement someone could make. You wanna get killed by the serial killer that just poisons you in your sleep or you wanna get killed by the one that removes your skin and dismembers you alive? See the difference?
it is disheartening seeing so many people on here defending billionaires, we are fucked as a species
Literally no one is doing that here (“ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE BAD”) Saying one thing isn’t as bad as the other isn’t a defense of the former.
Wouldn’t it be nice if serial killers joined a club where they serially kill each other? Just throwing an idea out there, so we don’t need a Luigi club to do the dirt work for them.
I still wish he used his wealth to start an Anti-Apple co-operative
Yeah, its kinda bleak to see
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I horded my wealth like a dragon and used it to burn down all the neighborhoods in my area, because the money drove me insane
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I wadded up my money into a basketball shaped bundle and just started tossing it anywhere that seemed politically correct and popular
That said, Wozniak did the best with the hand he was dealt. He kicked a bunch of Apple employees in on stock options long before it became company policy. He threw a bunch money into tech museums and art schools and colleges (which California’s state and municipalities have been underfunding in order to subsidize the private tech sector for decades). He invested in environmental R&D and even kicked some money into the effort to prevent Kessler Syndrome - which is, again, shit best served by a collaboration of G20 nations, not just some random rich guy from California. But hey, here we are.
Maybe capitalism wouldn’t be dogshit if we inverted the number of Wozniaks and Zuckerbergs. But also, maybe, billionaires (and heaven help us, trillionaires) were a bad idea to begin with.
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