patrick.net

Maybe a little historical perspective would help. What do you guys think of the Carnegie and the Rockerfellers?

Mike,

Once a person's networth gets above $5 million and if they're not totally stupid, financial planning gets driven by tax planning. Practically all billionaires and near billionaires shelter their money from tax, by trusts and borrowing money to avoid taxable recognition events.

I haven't checked out the Gates's rate of distribution. Are they going to burn through the money fast or are they going to be another one of those charitable foundations that lasts forever and have great grandkids overseeing the board?

Glen said:
Sounds like the myth of the ‘noble savage.’ Primitive peoples cooperated only when resources were plentiful. When salubrious conditions prevailed, populations would grow to the point of unsustainability. Then, whenever there were shortages of food, water or other vital resources, warring tribes would kill and maim one another with rocks and pointy sticks. They were no better (or, frankly, no worse) than modern humans–greedy, selfish and self-interested (undoubtedly with a few nice qualities as well).

not true. you are conflating different periods of history, different forms of social organisation, and probably mixing in some episodes of conan the barbarian and xena the warrior princess.

population densities were very low, and people lived a 'hunter gatherer' lifestyle for most of that time, prior to horticulture and domestication of animals and plants, roaming in nomadic tribes, clans or bands, normally within an area defined by other tribes' boundaries. competition for resources was not that intense because of the low densities. disputes broke out for other reasons, however, often due to accusations of 'witchcraft' for want of a better word. anything unfortunate that happened was usually attributed to witchcraft from another tribe, a common form of superstition seen right through to the 17th century in europe. people were assumed to possess some sort of tribal magic in these animistic belief systems. some of the main living examples of this type of social organisation are the australian aboriginals, new guinea highlanders and amazon basin 'indian' tribes. intertribal warfare ends up being more of a sport and proclamation of status and territory, and casualties are normally extremely limited.

when my anthropology professor visited the new guinea highlands, they assumed he possessed some sort of 'football magic' since he was a white westerner, and that he would help them win their games just by being there, although he was actually completely useless at the game.

property is held in common inside each tribe, and you receive the use of something just by asking for it. the other is obligated to give it, and 'private property' does not exist as a concept, particularly hunting spears, etc. even today, westernised aboriginals in the same family ask each other for things, e.g. blankets, heaters, furniture, and they know they have to hand it over. this is where emile durkheim actually studied tribes' patterns directly in formulating sociology theory, apart from all the other anthropologists out there.

please indicate your sources of information if you dispute this, particularly claims of overpopulation and selfishness vs mutual reciprocity. i would begin by researching estimates of world population over time as a starting point.

you are actually using the older, discredited hobbesian notion or assumption or 'thought experiment' of what savage life must have been like from the 17th century as a philosophical assumption in forming social contract theory, and then magically woven in overpopulation to thepicture for good measure like they were a bunch of high breeding rabbits. the 'noble savage' conception actually came about as a corrective as colonialists and explorers starting invading places and realised everyone had reached a stable social settlement no matter how 'primitive'.

consider the state in which the north american 'indian' tribes were discovered -- they do not fit your description at all, and had reasonably sophisticated horticulture while maintaining tribal kinship or band societies with low population densities in a synergy with the land. i think you insult their memory and harmony with the land, in fact, and they were generally not 'acquisitive' with the possible exception of potlatches as an artifact of the 'big man' society. more on that in another free internet college lesson...

I haven’t checked out the Gates’s rate of distribution. Are they going to burn through the money fast or are they going to be another one of those charitable foundations that lasts forever and have great grandkids overseeing the board?

i believe buffet and gates are donating significant shareholdings to the foundation, and continuing investing monies, which means there will be a constant profit flow into those foundations, rather than into their bank accounts...

tax dodge? maybe -- others do it. but i think they've realised they can't take it with them, that you can't possibly spend billions of dollars on yourself, that you need very little to live, and if you read interviews with buffett, he is very down to earth, is not narcissistic, and quite modest about his 'born ability to allocate capital', as he puts it. like george soros, quite a progressive intellectual in fact. vs the average sort of greedy republican nob doing reasonably well who resembles the pointy-haired manager from dilbert. i think the research and global reach will be worth it, and i don't think it's a tax dodge, gates and buffett have had decades to come up with tax dodges. (monies of that order get fed into corporate structures anyway, they only pay income tax on what they draw down and use...)

as for GC's remarks that somebody bright is intrinsically worth $40 bn of YOUR money, that's highly debatable in terms of overall social good. even gates' own father has published a book saying estates like that should be highly taxed, and that accumulating vast fortunes are just a freak of modern property law and the way assets are protected.

Well, I wasn't making a quantitative assertion. What I really meant is that Gates wasn't just a lucky guy. He is ASTUTE. I said he was sharp. I didn't say he was bright. That term is reserved for, uh, "bright" students. There are a lot of supposedly bright people. But they don't make good businessmen.

C'mon, the guy's brought great good to the PC industry. Without him, there probably won't be a Microsoft, there probably won't be an affordable PC for everyone and there probably won't be a Netscape revolution.

Another real reason why I defend Gates and other rich people is that because I fucking believe I'm worth at least 10 bil, if not more.

Glen,

Since I don't want to get into another endless discussion with DS (really dizzying), I'll just bring up this point that partially supports your assertion. There's a big difference between property concepts in kinship groups and property concept in larger groups.

One obvious example to me is the effectiveness of people's communes in China. Mao's elimination of property ownership lead to major production drop offs that partially contributed to a massive nationwide famine in the late 50s/early 60s that killed upwards of 30 million people. The cooler heads were able to prevail temporarily and take measures to increase production, via decreasing the size of groups that share production (from equal distribution amongst 50K people to equal distribution in groups of 50 to 500). So while these people did not "own" individually, they continue to exercise a property interest.

The idea that people do not take property interest in their surroundings, and when pressed will die to defend those interests, is patently absurd. The native americans didn't just surrender the land to the white men for beads, they found long and hard, by words and deeds. They may not understand their property interest as specific land holdings, but they certainly fought back when their right to use of land was taken away.

Most self made billionaires and near billionaires are highly astute people. And often quite charitable. The Carnegies and the Rockerfellers' industrial practices are debateable (though not obviously bad, in retrospect) but they've made lasting contributions to American society. (the Waltons, on the other hand, are social leeches and their charity choices suck)

I don't think much of MS software though, but I prefer a software based monopoly to a hardware based monopoly envisioned by Jobs. I just wish MS would crank out some good code, google and mozilla definitely seem to have the edge right now.

GC, what would you do with those billions if you got hold of them?

Glen,

PS, I did noticed that DS didn't actually refute your observation at all, he just went into some other tangent. Then said that Hobbes's basic construction was clearly discredited, without bothering to cite who had so clearly discredited it. Also, I didn't really see the Hobbesian spin in your original comment.

My own spin is: If one goes by Collapse, there's a tendency of overcrowded primitive societies to become more rigidly hierarchical and oppressive. I posit that this transformation occurs because scarcity leads to more property crime and the larger social gatherings make the individual members less altruistic to the entire society.

Bap33,

Right on! Oregon I believe is the 2nd or 3rd least "ethnically diverse" state in the Union (after Idaho and Vermont?) and uh, we have PLENTY of predatory lending and toxic loans to go around! But I don't believe this is necessarily a lib/con issue. It's an FB issue. Remember, when it comes to mortgage brokers (and their fees) FB's "know no color".

This is a time for FB's of ALL races, colors and creeds to come together, set aside their racial differences and figure out how to get someone else to help pay for their equity extraction scheme!

Looks like "Boycott housing" made it onto the nightly news last night. Looky here: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=assignment_7&id=4356937

In other news, I read in the paper last week that a housing activist group in Pleasanton is thinking of sueing the city over a ban on affordable housing: Here's the link: http://www.publicadvocates.org/

So... it looks like the poltical activism energy might finally have caught on and is now taking the issue of housing on the band wagon. Hopefully, there will be more of this kind of public outcry in the future.

C’mon, the guy’s brought great good to the PC industry. Without him, there probably won’t be a Microsoft, there probably won’t be an affordable PC for everyone and there probably won’t be a Netscape revolution.

bill gates has always lead technically from behind. DOS was taken from CPM (not written by gates), was a pretty hopeless OS, more just a non-reentrant interrupt handler, nowhere near as powerful as Unix or Linux, BASIC had been around since the 60s (he just did a port), and finally he copied the Mac interface some 5 years later and got sued. his main strength was massive sales and clever licensing. it always took to at least version 3 before his products were any good.

while windows 1, 2 and 3 and the mac os were all co-operative multi-taskers with swapping, and windows needed a minimum 80286, there was another GUI product that ran on an XT 8088 with 640K RAM and tiny HDD (slowly), worked well with most hardware, was as easy to use as windows 98 was much later, was a proper preemptive multi-tasker with paging, had advanced user interface features and threaded menus, high quality dot-matrix printing and ease of setup, etc, some of which windows doesn't even do today. all for about $200, including a built-in wordprocessor and spreadsheet. it sank without trace. but a much more 'affordable' solution for a PC and much more user friendly and robust than windoze. a team of programmers had created the technically perfect and cheap OS for much less than M$.

a world without microsoft wouldn't be a bad thing, there could be a lot more choice of products out there, and his practices were often aggressive and predatory. Netscape was an NCSA project, nothing to do with M$.

Another real reason why I defend Gates and other rich people is that because I fucking believe I’m worth at least 10 bil, if not more.

well, we all are, of course...

My thoughts on PCs: I've owned both Mac and PC. I used to be a fervent Mac guy. Apple definantly has a better UI. The problem is A: their computers are damned expensive. B: You cannot easily modify the guts of a mac. They're mostly permenently manufactored. Lastly, there simply isn't the variety of hardware and software available for Macs. A video card for a Mac is at least double of that for a PC. If you go PC, all you have to do is find some ugly metal box- even one thrown away- strip out the guts and buy a bunch of over the counter parts and bingo! Instant computer! I like the fact that you have more options with a PC. I on both and like the PC better, but will admit that my PC is pretty ugly.

Astrid said:

PS, I did noticed that DS didn’t actually refute your observation at all, he just went into some other tangent.

He seems to do this a lot.

My own spin is: If one goes by Collapse, there’s a tendency of overcrowded primitive societies to become more rigidly hierarchical and oppressive. I posit that this transformation occurs because scarcity leads to more property crime and the larger social gatherings make the individual members less altruistic to the entire society.

My "source," for DS's purposes, was also Jared Diamond, filtered through my own understanding of human behavior--I have only read a few chapters of Collapse, but GG&S was excellent and also contained a lucid discussion of the lives of primitive peoples.

DS:
The idea that primitive cultures did not experience scarcity is so absurd it is not even worth discussing. But even if true, it would mean that we could not emulate their purported carefree cooperative lives even if we wanted to. Unless, of course, you mean to suggest that we do not experience scarcity in the modern world. (Which would be an even more absurd claim.)

Perhaps in a primitive culture with unlimited untapped resources, a communitarian ideology could succeed as a method of social organization. Outside of that context, though, communitarian ideologies simply don't work. (Ever heard of the "tragedy of the commons"?)

astrid Says:
PS, I did noticed that DS didn’t actually refute your observation at all, he just went into some other tangent.

oh dear, have i not met your expectations again...

Then said that Hobbes’s basic construction was clearly discredited, without bothering to cite who had so clearly discredited it. Also, I didn’t really see the Hobbesian spin in your original comment.

everyone has discredited it. it's gone the way of the scientific debates about whether worms are generated from the air from the 16th century, which was the big debate of its time. it's like the flat earth has been discredited. it's like the theory of the aether has been discredited, and the plum pudding atom. why i have to reference the bleeding obvious is beyond me. once the anthropological and archaelogical evidence came in, and people started doing more research on simple pre-state societies, hobbes was realised to be conducting a thought experiment. he was operating essentially in pre-colonial and pre-scientific times. bit like the 4,000 year old earth was refuted by geologists, biologists, and physicists all at once -- which geologist was it?

"Earlier notions of abiogenesis, long discarded by science, are now more commonly known as spontaneous generation, held that living organisms are generated by decaying organic substances, e.g. that mice spontaneously appear in stored grain or maggots spontaneously appear in meat."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Extremophile/Abiogenesis

"Hobbes's view was challenged in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that Hobbes was taking socialized persons and simply imagining them living outside of the society they were raised in. He affirmed instead that people were born neither good nor bad; men knew neither vice nor virtue since they had almost no dealings with each other. Their bad habits are the products of civilization specifically social hierarchies, property, and markets."

there, rousseau first challenged it, not counting all the anthropologists of the last 200 years who would also challenge it based on all the anthropological and archaelogical evidence, and throwing off the veil of their own culture.

My own spin is: If one goes by Collapse, there’s a tendency of overcrowded primitive societies to become more rigidly hierarchical and oppressive. I posit that this transformation occurs because scarcity leads to more property crime and the larger social gatherings make the individual members less altruistic to the entire society.

which 'primitive' societies, exactly? there is no such thing as property crime in primitive societies which don't possess property. man was pre-horticultural for 200,000 years. 'crime' suddenly appeared in horticultural societies once a surplus had been created, as it is easier to nick someone else's produce than grow your own. it seems that things like theft started to occur once horticultural societies evolved, which took a very long time to occur in the scale of human history. then there are agricultural societies, involving widespread domestication of animal and plant species. following from this trend seemed to occur the explosion of 'civilisation' abotu 10,000 years ago, which created massive surpluses. so we are talking about many different types of society.

i think astrid is trying to bait me to get that semester's worth of liberal arts training ;) i'll give you list of recommmended reading...

My own spin is: If one goes by Collapse, there’s a tendency of overcrowded primitive societies to become more rigidly hierarchical and oppressive. I posit that this transformation occurs because scarcity leads to more property crime and the larger social gatherings make the individual members less altruistic to the entire society.

the normal state of man in pre-horticultural societies is to group in kinship-based tribes, clans, and bands. they generally aren't hierarchical to any extent at all -- that is an artifact of much more advanced societies usually involving villages, towns and cities. when colonial powers went forth and would say to locals 'take me to your chief' they would be confused, as they often had no chief -- hierarchy came much later in terms of social evolution. sometimes the british etc more or less forced someone to be chief when it had no meaning to them, so the british could somehow relate to them.

oh, i give up, you don't seem to have read the observations on tribal life whatsoever, nothing on population densities, nothing on types of society, the advent of 'civilisation', etc... just get a 1st year college social anthropology textbook and have a read.... it's just an exercise in frustration.... 'collapse' is a work in pop anthropology -- not that many early societies were under population pressure at all... you are projecting your understandings of your own society onto totally different kinds of society, and it ain't gonna work... thank god i got a free university education instead of having to do business studies to pay back the loans...

Unless, of course, you mean to suggest that we do not experience scarcity in the modern world. (Which would be an even more absurd claim.)

scarcity of what? in your modern world? i assume you don't mean people living in the garbage mountain in manila. what are you short of? food? shelter? clothing? ridiculous. everything else is a luxury item...

the first chapter of every into textbook to anthropology discusses the low population densities and reproduction rates of simple hunter gatherer tribes that meant they could usually feed themselves reliably with about 3 hours work a day, especially when world population was low. that was my first point, which you haven't bothered looking up yet. let's just leave it as a research challenge for you to confirm or refute the other observations, instead of just whining.

how about those CME housing futures....

DS said:
scarcity of what? in your modern world? i assume you don’t mean people living in the garbage mountain in manila. what are you short of? food? shelter? clothing? ridiculous. everything else is a luxury item…

Everything is scarce. Otherwise, I wouldn't have to work to feed, house and clothe myself. I could just swing by my favorite restaurant and order a complete meal--free! I could fill my closet with clothes--free! My landlord wouldn't charge me rent! Where do I sign up for this world of abundance?? As for "luxuries" I suppose you mean things like cars, telephones, computers, plane trips, etc... These items may not be strictly necessary, from a survival standpoint. But they are kind of nice to have.

I suppose in your ideal world we would all be rounded up (kulakh style) and forced to be farmers, builders and weavers. No one could have a horse, let alone a car, or a phone, or take a vacation. On the production side, we will need to come up with a way of ensuring that farmers grow enough food for everybody, builders build enough housing units and weavers make enough clothes. Hard to do without some kind of oppressive, authoritarian central government. Then we should entrust our centralized beurocracy to handle the distribution side in a fair, impartial and inarguably "even" way. If you are lucky enough to be connected with one of these beaurocrats, maybe your allotment will include a spanish style home on a .25 acre standard-issue lot in Marin with views of the ocean. Of course, you may end up in a poorly built s*box in Modesto. But I'm sure our wise leaders can solve any perceived inequities without a problem...

The beaurocrats will also get to decide who gets the sushi and who gets the peanut butter. But never mind, I'm sure they will be wise and judicious enough to treat us all "equally." Or maybe, in this fantasy world, all food will be homegrown--so no sushi or peanut butter. Because you can't make sushi without fish *and* rice and most of the standard issue plots will not have a source of fish *and* a local rice patty. So we will all be eating home grown produce from our own gardens. But god forbid we attempt to trade some of our extra potatoes for an extra chicken or two! We might actually make a "profit" (based on some beaurocrat's determination of the FMV of said items) and that would be exploitative!

Even if your fantasy of utopian pre-horticultural societies were true, we could not go back to such a lifestyle in the modern world. In a world of 6 billion people we could not feed, shelter or clothe everyone without advanced forms of social organization. Any attempt to do so would quickly degenerate into a war of all against all. So how should we allocate resources? In socialistic societies (eg: Cuba) resources are distributed (roughly) evenly, as a result, no surplus is generated and everyone is poor. In capitalistic societies (eg: US) resources are allocated (roughly) to those who generate the most surplus, as a result some people are poor and some people are rich. I'll take the latter.

newsfreak,

Just visiting over on Ben's and they were featuring a major story about the Lehigh Valley in PA! It's become quite dreary actually.

"Things were soooo good just this time last year"

"We invite a more level playing field between buyers and sellers"

"Days on Market have increased from a few days at the longest to several months"

"No one could have predicted this happening" etc. etc.

Uh, I'm no expert in "criminal psychology" but any time someone gets stabbed 20 times there's more involved than just money. IMHO.

a close italics would've been handy...

now it’s philanthropy all the way. well, he’ll keep 20 billion and give away 20 billion. should JUST leave enough to live off… but the research is all good, altho there are numerous drug companies already developing anti-virals and vaccines for HIV, and for a host of other viruses. you have to make sure the countries being benefited aren’t just the Microsoft software mill ones, also…

If philanthropy is his love, his will eventually give almost everything away. Didn't he say that he will give ~95%+ away upon his death? Now, he still needs wealth and power to further his philanthropic goals.

Some people do not care about luxury. Some people like fine things. It is all in the stars.

BTW, it is better to extend big help to a small group than to extend small help to a large group. His wealth is limited, his has to make a choice.

Education is by far the most important, because one should be taught to fish. ;) Helping people in poor country is nice, but that will just prolong their hunger/suffering.

DS,

tribes were discovered — they do not fit your description at all, and had reasonably sophisticated horticulture while maintaining tribal kinship or band societies with low population densities in a synergy with the land. i think you insult their memory and harmony with the land, in fact, and they were generally not ‘acquisitive’ with the possible exception of potlatches as an artifact of the ‘big man’ society. more on that in another free internet college lesson

You don't know a whole lot about the history of the Amercian West, do you? There was, uh, a great deal of conflict between tribes before the European settles came. They slaughtered, tortured and kidnapped one another for centuries before the European settlers came along.

While some of the conflict between the Indians and settlers was tragic, I think it was also inevitable.

Let me ask you this: if you were able to travel back in time to 16th century America, to an area in which no white man ever set foot, and had the ability to start a new colony, one which would follow your notions of fairness, justice, and respect for native cultures and traditions, would you be willing to bring your wife and teenaged daughters with you?

Please answer the question.

I do not like the Microsoft programs on my computer, however. They are simply not intuitive the way my MAC was.

I loved Bill Gates so much that I would only use Microsoft software if one is available. But since he stepped down as the CEO I have started using other alternatives.

of course there was conflict between tribes. what numbers were they slaughtered, tortured and kidnapped in though for centuries before the europeans arrived, given that there were no europeans there to document it?

the english and americans quite happily exploited the native americans for their own military advantage.

one big difference is that native americans often used 'counting coup' in battle rather than just shooting people -- counting coup is a form of asserting dominance without causing death.

the answer to your question? you had absolutely no right to invade their lands, crowd them off their territory, give them fatal diseases, knowingly and unknowingly, lie to them about your aims, prevent them using the land in traditional patterns, upset the balance of nature, slaughter and destroy everything that they held dear, including the spirits of the buffalo, and destroy a group of proud peoples... but it happened... what would you do now if you discovered such a continent in the 21st century? please answer the question...

Peter P,

Gates hasn't stepped down just yet has he? I thought that would be phased out over the next year or so. Well, either way you are now free to explore other alternatives.

Godless: The Church of Liberalism - Ann Coulter

terrific....

Or teach them to grow crops suitable for their climate, not just corn, but the kind of corn or another crop that will thrive in their area.

True. Also, I think population control though education is important. The idea is to empower people with choices.

Giving poor countries food will only condemn them to perpetual poverty. Everybody dies sooner or later. Saving lives today or tomorrow will not make this a better world. We need to help people help themselves. This is the way to end poverty.

Gates hasn’t stepped down just yet has he?

He stepped down as the CEO a few fears ago. However, he is still the Chairman of the Board.

yeah, there never was a labor-saving device invented yet...

Well, either way you are now free to explore other alternatives.

Yes, I like FireFox better.

Nobodies worth that kind of money except God. Gates and Buffet are avoiding paying taxes by putting their excess money in trusts. Who looses? American tax payers.

Maybe Gates and Buffett decided they would rather do something about poverty and disease among the poorest of the poor, rather than provide support to the imperial aspirations of George W. Bush. Of course, if Bush had his way the charitable deduction "tax dodge" would be unnecessary, because you could pass 100% of your wealth to your kids without paying any estate tax.

SFWoman,

I understand that both Bill and Paul were perfectly approachable before the "pie incident" in Denmark? Since then they have both stepped up personal security and one fan was escorted out of a Blazer game b/c he "touched" Paul Allen on the shoulder during a game. The fan claimed he didn't really know who Paul Allen was but it was perceived as a threat.

Anne Coulter is possessed!

the big test is whether she can actually walk thru the door of a church without frying...

Better to feed them well and teach them to grow their own, and teach birth control, just extra food without education seems to end up producing more starving mouths.

Exactly.

did you know pollution over europe seemed to cause climactic change which lowered rainfall over ethiopia, thus inadvertently bringing on the famines?

did you know pollution over europe seemed to cause climactic change which lowered rainfall over ethiopia, thus inadvertently bringing on the famines?

It was unfortunate.

did you know pollution over europe seemed to cause climactic change which lowered rainfall over ethiopia, thus inadvertently bringing on the famines?

Yes, Western civilization and technology are the root of all evil.

Before there were markets, money, factories, cars, cellphones, televisions, computers, etc., people lived in perfect communal harmony with each other and nature. Noone ever went without a meal or had a toothache, injury or infection which might benefit from medical attention. There was never a dispute over land, food, sex or religion. The world was a land without scarcity or strife of any kind. There was perpetual happiness and gumdrops grew on trees and the children laughed and played in rivers of chocolate.

newsfreak Says:
I guess many places around the world now seed the clouds for rain and snow?

hmm, i don't think it works quite that easily... all the desert areas of the world tend to be about the same latitude, often caused by dry prevailing winds especially where there are coastal mountain ranges which cause all the rain to fall on the coast and not inland... so not much moisture in the air to form clouds or precipitate...

*disclaimer: not climatology advice *

Yes, Western civilization and technology are the root of all evil.

probably quite a lot of it, but it's not all evil...

paleolithic peoples didn't really have the choice of mobile phones...

altho if we keep consuming without restraint, we might just end up back there...

yes, wiki also says there are a few places they seed the clouds... they can get a 30% increase in rainfall... not sure what conditions are required for success, e.g. % relative humidity, temp, etc...