Bill Gates is now (once again) the richest person in the world, even though he lost a personal 18 billion dollars since last year.
In other words, Bill Gates lost more than the GNP of Kenya, El Salvador, Iraq, Qatar and about a hundred other countries. If Bill gaes was a country, he'd be about the fiftieth richest, give or take. (For reference, there seems to be about 224 countries in the world at the moment.)
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Do you think it was Linux that did it? ;-)
Sure, but I've always been told that money doesn't buy happiness.
Of course, I was also told that there was a god and the world was just.
While I'm on this subject, to those who always told me that high school is the "best time of your life"...what kind of miserable existance are you tolerating? That's pathetic!
There's an anecdote that I read in an article about Bill Gates that puts things in perspective: When Bill Gates was touring Africa as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he chatted with one of the extremely impoverished women that his charity was trying to help. Since she didn't seem to know who he was, one reporter told her afterward that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world. The woman shrugged and said that all Westerners were wealthy as far as she was concerned.
She was right.
there seems to be about 224 countries in the world at the moment.
And from the link:
Today there are 793 people on our list of the World's Billionaires (...).
Hum... Seems like each country in the world could be sponsored by up to three billionnaires. How about giving away a tiny 10% (most have lost way more so that's not a big deal) into social and environmental projects?
I can't hate on Bill Gates. He worked very hard to get where he is today. And he does a lot of good -- he loves to give to tons of his time and money to charity. Microsoft bugs the shit out of me sometimes, but Bill Gates, I think, is a good man and also very intelligent and hardworking. I admire that.
Agreed. Also for Warren Buffett. I tend to kind of hate on the rich and useless, and was no Gates fan, but when I learned a little more about his views and actions, he seems like a pretty good guy.
The richest man in the world can afford to trick you into not hating him.
"Intelligent, hardworking" and "pretty good" isn't good enough to offset worldwide extortion and, worse, systematically stalling progress in development of reliable and effective computing. Subverting and perverting the ISO to the point that it can barely operate any more, just to get MSWord formats standardized, is just a recent project.