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Bill Gates on Picketty
- Thread starter NobleSavage
- Start date
Horatio Parker
Veteran Member
Whatever the answer, computers running MS can help.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Deleted by Simple.
Last edited:
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Sorry, I wasn't trying to take over the thread or redirect it. I just re-read it and realized that it does that. I was just so taken with the coincidence that I thought about this last night. I apologize.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Bill Gates...the bundler, a genuine software monopoly player. He played the game very well, now he thinks he's swell...what with all his philanthropy. Just Bill Gates talking to himself and Dismal........
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
The income inequality debate is mostly us vs. them. Even thought the conservatives cry about "class warfare" they are willing telling their base that 50% of Americans are just takers. The only legitimacy this article has is that Bill Gates falls into the "them" camp. It seems he is mostly speaking against his own self interest. Or maybe he has a nefarious plan to implement a one world socialist government where he can be in the Nomenklatura.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
Now you have me curious.
dx713
Senior Member
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Me too. Your posts are usually well thought-out and intellectually challenging (especially for an engineer like me who had a grand total of 60 hours of economic science basics during his whole education).
Can you create another thread for that post?
Clivedurdle
Member
Do we need a basic rule like Godwin to the effect that if one of the wealthiest people on the planet, who collectively own what is it, half of it, says something supportive, they have an agenda?
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
It was one of my normal posts in which I quickly wander off subject and talk about what I am interested in talking about but am too lazy to host my own thread about. I remembered a personal hero of mine, Karl Polanyi. I did warn you.
I have to write my posts in a separate text editor so I still have a copy of it. Here it is.
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Noble Savage Piketty and Polanyi
I also read Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. It is completely understandable by non-economists.
He developed a very good statistical base of data on the accumulation of wealth over centuries, mainly in France, England and the US. He has a solid data based understanding that it is bad for a capitalistic economy to have so much wealth in the hands of so few people. It chokes off the life blood of capitalism, innovation and risk taking and causes social unrest.
He has only a vague idea of why so much wealth has been accumulated by so few people. He needs to read the Austro-Hungarian/American social historian Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Polanyi benefited from having no formal economics training, but as a social historian he recognized that the social history of mankind is dominated by the economic history of mankind, that economics is the most powerful social force. He was a socialist who morphed into a social democrat, what we would call a "New Deal Democrat.
His book came out in 1944, the same year as Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, the second book that budding libertarians read after Ayn Rand, although most actually only read chapter 10. Polanyi knew both Hayek and von Mises, he was the anti-Austrian economics and often debated them. He was the first person to call the idea of a self-regulating free market a complete and a dangerous fantasy. Which it is.
Polanyi foresaw the Great Depression as well as the turn to market fundamentalism, the cult of the free market, and the economic problems that it would create and why the entrenched powerful would push market fundamentalism in order for them to accumulate every increasing amounts of wealth. Exactly what happened. There are numerous videos on youtube about him if anyone is interested in why we are having the economic problems that we are having now. His The Great Transformation is a very readable book that is available for the Kindle at a reasonable price.
It is interesting that this thread appeared today. I just came across Polanyi again last night and I thought how much Piketty would benefit from Polanyi. Thanks Noble!
Here is the video that I stumbled across last night. It is with Fred Block who has written a book about Polanyi entitled The Tensity of Market Fundamentalism, which is available on Kindle but for an un-Kindle price of nearly $40. I know that I will eventually buy it, but I feel better if I consider it for a day or two.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Incredible wealth begets incredible narcissism. When you are as rich as Bill Gates, you begin to think of yourself as a God. You begin to believe it is your "goodness" that got you all that money. Your mind conveniently forgets all the people you stole from and stepped on on your way to becoming God and see only good in yourself. He applies a lot of philanthropy to his gaping evil wrongs and thinks it is all good again. Big capitalist predators, when they win it all, act just like Bill Gates. I really don't hate the man, and at least he is trying to be Mr. Beneficent. It is just that there does not seem much of a chance he can be anywhere near as good as he thinks he is.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
That's painting with a broad brush.
Who are all the people he stole from? The original Microsoft Basic became popular because everyone stole it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
While he didn't "steal" per se, the monopolistic practices of Microsoft did force consumers to buy MSDOS. Manufacturers that wanted to sell any computers with MSDOS were forced to license a copy of MSDOS on all computers they sold even if it was bundled with a different OS. So consumers were forced to pay for it unless they were able to build their own PC compatible computer from scratch and install another OS.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Americans believe persons with an idea can ride that idea into the sunset and live off royalties the rest of their lives. Our science and technology is moving at light speed. Microsoft was a marketing scheme, buying up the intellectual property of others and bundling into packages which other producers could not compete. I think we could have patent laws and intellectual property protection but it should not be transferrable for cash.
For example, why should Joe Blow have the publishing rights for anybody but Joe Blow. What business does the estate of Michael Jackson have suing anybody for copyright violations? People own concepts they could not conceptualize themselves. Let them use those concepts, not own them. There have always been instability and other problems with Microsoft's bundled products.
The, in my view dubious, controversy surrounding MS bundling was related to Windows and not DOS.
PCs without an OS installed have always been available - and anyone who is cost conscious, that is to say the people who have been requesting Windows refunds, would do better to build their own computer than to buy from an OEM.
More to the point, I don't recall any Apple or Amiga computers ever being available without an OS and I don't recall any similar complaints against these companies.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
Copyright laws are one thing. MS is another. It's mostly been Disney and the Music industry pushing for longer copyright. 10 year old software is mostly useless. Yes, they did buy up intellectual property. The key word is "buy". I knew people who would specifically write software with the hope that MS would buy them out.
If you don't like Windows you can easily use Linux. I do. (well I also use Apple and MS) but I could ditch Windows easily.
lpetrich
Contributor
I wish to note that Adobe Photoshop is often loved while Microsoft Windows is often hated.
Why might that be?
A good reason is, i think, how easy it is to switch from it.
Adobe Photoshop is an image editor, software for working with image files. Though Photoshop has an image-file format specific to it (.psd), most of the image files that it is used on are in non-proprietary, open formats. So it would be easy to replace Photoshop with some image editor with similar capabilities. In fact, image editing approximates economists' ideal of a market, even though that ideal has a certain spherical-cow quality.
However,
Microsoft Windows is an operating system, a collection of software that hosts all the other software that runs on a computer. Other software is dependent on it, and sometimes fails to run properly or run at all when the underlying OS gets changed. So switching OSes is not as easy as switching image editors, especially if one has a lot of software that one uses. One has to get appropriate versions of it, if such versions exist at all. For the more common sorts of software, one can often get versions that run in the common desktop OSes, but that's often not the case for the more specialized sorts of software. One has to use such fakery as a Windows emulator like WINE or else a virtual machine to run Windows in.
Why might that be?
A good reason is, i think, how easy it is to switch from it.
Adobe Photoshop is an image editor, software for working with image files. Though Photoshop has an image-file format specific to it (.psd), most of the image files that it is used on are in non-proprietary, open formats. So it would be easy to replace Photoshop with some image editor with similar capabilities. In fact, image editing approximates economists' ideal of a market, even though that ideal has a certain spherical-cow quality.
However,
Microsoft Windows is an operating system, a collection of software that hosts all the other software that runs on a computer. Other software is dependent on it, and sometimes fails to run properly or run at all when the underlying OS gets changed. So switching OSes is not as easy as switching image editors, especially if one has a lot of software that one uses. One has to get appropriate versions of it, if such versions exist at all. For the more common sorts of software, one can often get versions that run in the common desktop OSes, but that's often not the case for the more specialized sorts of software. One has to use such fakery as a Windows emulator like WINE or else a virtual machine to run Windows in.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
I can open and edit Office files with Google Docs. Open Office opens and edits Office files. I use MS Office because it's the best there is. And MS is nice enough to make an Office completely available for Mac. I use Office 365 and at $10 a month is a good deal.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
The last time I tried to install Gimp on Win 7 it puked all over. Try installing Final Cut Pro on anything other than Mac.