OXFAM: "100 richest people could end world poverty"

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ecoli73 said:
Go down the top 10 David and tell me why they are criminals and murders.


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murders? where did you pull that from?

Rich and poor are relative terms. You cannot have one without the other.....extreme wealth and extreme poverty are likewise linked.
Gates does some good charity work, and better yet, plans to leave his kids a very limited amount when he dies. Likewise Warren Buffet.
Part of the trouble starts when someone is born on 3rd base ( to great wealth) and thinks they have hit a triple ( made it themselves)
Money and the acquisition of extreme wealth ( and 'bling') have become too much of an end in themselves. This is called avarice, one of the 7 deadly sins.
Back to Bill Gates......his wealth is built on intellectual property.....much of which came from other people ( " every good idea microsoft ever had they stole from apple"), but he was the employer so he got the 'rights' and the profits ( them's the rules...but who makes the rules?...the employers do so the deck is stacked from the get-go) In effect he denied others the same opportunity that he himself got rich from .....if Microsoft was broken down into its various component parts and hard assets and sold off today it wouldn't be worth much at all compared to its 'market' valuation. This is because for the most 'the market' in this form is not a true market, but is a manipulation, a gross distortion of a true market and of assets by the 'super-haves', based upon speculation and pie-in-the-sky and not based upon supply and demand.
 
cichlid_obsessed92 said:
Your kidding me right.... he got sued because he gave away free stuff with his program and it made the other internet services go out of business ? That's not a criminal that's called beating the competition.

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Its actually called market manipulation and monopolistic practice
 
cichlid_obsessed92 said:
Your kidding me right.... he got sued because he gave away free stuff with his program and it made the other internet services go out of business ? That's not a criminal that's called beating the competition.
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It's called creating a monopoly which is illegal.

"Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact[13] on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86 based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, RealNetworks, Linux, and others. Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[14] On 2000-06-07, the court orders a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy. According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.[14][15]"

Ecoli, if you can't make the connection between Gates and Microsoft, then I don't know what to say....

He's certainly not squeaky clean.
 
flowerpower said:
I don't know much about Bill Gates other that the fact that he is philanthropists working hard to vaccinate the third world. I'll admit, his intentions seemed good to me until I realized that he is also an strong advocate of population control.
“The world today has 6.8 billion people... that's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
I don't quite understand how disease prevention decreases population growth but maybe someone can enlighten me.
And just some background on forced sterilization: "The issue of forced sterilization is neither small nor new in African according to the international lobby group, Stop Torture in Health."
http://allafrica.com/stories/201208240201.html
No, I'm not accusing Bill Gates of trying to use vaccines as a means of population control. It's coming right out of he horses mouth. http://youtu.be/T9vZLlJhI7o


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A LOT of people are advocating population control on both sides of the political spectrum. If there is a problem feeding the people we already have it make sense to provide birth control and education to say, "wait, you are starving now.. lets work on that first before we make the problem worse.." As for vaccines that's not really the same thing.
 
The broader point is that the influence of the mega rich disproportionally impacts what is legal and what is not. What is an enforcement priority and what is not.

Rigorous enforcement of a law (like the Sherman anti-trust act) is very different from lax enforcement.

For example, after decades of lax enforcement, Teddy Roosevelt used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up monopolistic businesses...

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 became law while Theodore Roosevelt was serving on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, but it played a large and important role during his presidency.

When Theodore Roosevelt’s first administration sought to end business monopolies, it used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as the tool to do so. Passed after a series of large corporate mergers during the 1880s, this Act enabled government departments and private individuals to use the court system to break up any organization or contract alleged to be in restraint of trade. The federal government used the Act to invalidate formal and informal arrangements by which different companies in the same industry set prices, though for the first decade of its existence the Act did little to slow the rate of business mergers.

This changed when, in 1904, President Roosevelt urged his Justice Department to dismantle the Northern Securities Corporation. This entity was a holding company, a combination of separate railroads administered by a Board of Trustees. At issue was its control of railroading in the northern tier of the United States from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Northern Securities Corporation violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the first major example of trust-busting during Roosevelt’s presidency.

bottles said:
It's called creating a monopoly which is illegal.

"Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact[13] on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86 based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, RealNetworks, Linux, and others. Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[14] On 2000-06-07, the court orders a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy. According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.[14][15]"

Ecoli, if you can't make the connection between Gates and Microsoft, then I don't know what to say....

He's certainly not squeaky clean.
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majorhavok said:
A LOT of people are advocating population control on both sides of the political spectrum. If there is a problem feeding the people we already have it make sense to provide birth control and education to say, "wait, you are starving now.. lets work on that first before we make the problem worse.." As for vaccines that's not really the same thing.
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I couldn't agree more with birth control and education, but mandatory/involuntary sterilization?


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David, that is a very narrow and bias view of the case. I was actually working at then Compaq computers consumer division at the time and we as a major customer of Microsoft felt that this case was a lot of jealous competitors trying to derail MS. Be's CEO has a point that Microsoft's dominance in Operational system IS the true monopoly; but again I do not see consumers were harmed by it, as the alternatives we saw at Compaq were no where as good as Microsoft.

From the same article that you didn't quote:

On September 26, 2000, after Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact,[13] the plaintiffs (to save time) attempted to send Microsoft's appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal and sent the case to a federal appeals court.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because the Appellate court had adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" under which the Remedies could be taken, and also partly due to the embargoed interviews Judge Jackson had given to the news media while he was still hearing the case, in violation of the Code of Conduct for US Judges.[17] Judge Jackson did not attend the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, in which the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct and determined he should have recused himself from the case.[18]

Judge Jackson's response to this was that Microsoft's conduct itself was the cause of any "perceived bias"; Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing."[19] However, the appeals court did not overturn the findings of fact. The D.C. Circuit remanded the case for consideration of a proper remedy under a more limited scope of liability. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was chosen to hear the case.

The DOJ announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty. Microsoft decided to draft a settlement proposal allowing PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.

The late Nobel economist Milton Friedman believed that the antitrust case against Microsoft set a dangerous precedent that foreshadowed increasing government regulation of what was formerly an industry that was relatively free of government intrusion and that future technological progress in the industry will be impeded as a result.[28]

Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO of Be Inc., claimed Microsoft was not really making any money from Internet Explorer, and its incorporation with the operating system was due to consumer expectation to have a browser packaged with the operating system. For example, BeOS comes packaged with its web browser, NetPositive. Instead, he argued, Microsoft's true anticompetitive clout was in the rebates it offered to OEMs preventing other operating systems from getting a foothold in the market.[29]
 
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