Re: Yahoo! News Story - GATES AND BUFFETT
A friend emailed this article to me:
GATES AND BUFFETT: 1000 TIMES WORSE THAN KEN LAY - Yahoo! News
My reply:
That was the dumbest article I've read in about a decade.
"instead of building plants in the Third World and relying on the slave labor of prison inmates!"
WTF is he talking about??!! All those darn Microsoft plants in Indonesia, where they use endangered trees and child slave prostitute labor to, um..., write code for the latest crappy version of Windows?
I've read Rall before, and occasionally think he's not a total windbag. And I believe that both Gates and Buffett have done harm in this world just through their legal business endeavors, like most any self-made rich person; business, like sports, almost always requires that someone lose, and the size of their businesses ensures it. But Jesus, to actually compare them to someone who purposely and repeatedly broke the law, consciously ruining his employees' lives (via their retirement savings) is quite a stretch. And I'm sorry, but Buffett just gave away 37 BILLION dollars. Not the end of the world for him, but more than most countries of the world can claim as their GDP.
Back to the tenacity it takes to be a self-made rich person. The corollary of Rall's accusations is that someone who's obscenely wealthy who did nothing to earn the money besides being born would be blameless, yet those aren't the types of people I want to hold up as heroes for my children, either.
You're right, compassion is relative. Just one day of Mother Theresa eclipses beyond all perception the act of Buffett giving up money he can afford to give up. But compassion is still compassion, and Lay died without having it, so he doesn't deserve it. Gates and Buffett are now trying to act on it, so they should at the very least be excluded from the same scorn we reserve for the whining uber-rich who still feel the need to steal from those less fortunate.
j
GATES AND BUFFETT: 1000 TIMES WORSE THAN KEN LAY - Yahoo! News
My reply:
That was the dumbest article I've read in about a decade.
"instead of building plants in the Third World and relying on the slave labor of prison inmates!"
WTF is he talking about??!! All those darn Microsoft plants in Indonesia, where they use endangered trees and child slave prostitute labor to, um..., write code for the latest crappy version of Windows?
I've read Rall before, and occasionally think he's not a total windbag. And I believe that both Gates and Buffett have done harm in this world just through their legal business endeavors, like most any self-made rich person; business, like sports, almost always requires that someone lose, and the size of their businesses ensures it. But Jesus, to actually compare them to someone who purposely and repeatedly broke the law, consciously ruining his employees' lives (via their retirement savings) is quite a stretch. And I'm sorry, but Buffett just gave away 37 BILLION dollars. Not the end of the world for him, but more than most countries of the world can claim as their GDP.
Back to the tenacity it takes to be a self-made rich person. The corollary of Rall's accusations is that someone who's obscenely wealthy who did nothing to earn the money besides being born would be blameless, yet those aren't the types of people I want to hold up as heroes for my children, either.
You're right, compassion is relative. Just one day of Mother Theresa eclipses beyond all perception the act of Buffett giving up money he can afford to give up. But compassion is still compassion, and Lay died without having it, so he doesn't deserve it. Gates and Buffett are now trying to act on it, so they should at the very least be excluded from the same scorn we reserve for the whining uber-rich who still feel the need to steal from those less fortunate.
j
posted by jim at 7/11/2006 07:43:00 PM
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