Text 1897, 205 rader
Skriven 2006-06-06 11:52:00 av Robert E Starr JR (2343.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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On Sun, 4 Jun 2006 02:51:58 +0000 (UTC), "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:cgg482dfdv9leb6musu5ttvejnveo7ffgh@4ax.com...
>> On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 21:01:49 +0000 (UTC), Paul Harper <paul@harper.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 20:31:42 +0000 (UTC), Josh Hill
>>><usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>anyone who criticizes someone who's wealthy is automatically
>>>>jealous?
>>>
>>>Anyone who criticises someone *for* being wealthy - and that does seem
>>>to be the drive of your hatred for him - is, yes.
>>
>> That has nothing whatsoever to do with my hatred of him; I revile that
>> kind of wealth and have never sought to possess it or anything like.
>> Lots of people are wealthy without being selfish criminals who stick
>> us with crap software,
>
>Exactly what are your complaints about Windows, Word, Excel, etc?

That would take a book! Inconsistent interface, kludgy architecture,
Byzantine API, bugs and annoyances that never get fixed, year after
year, some of them, like the WYSIWYG bug in Excel, say, present since
Version 1 . . . the shared DLL's, the wild-west security holes (Word
macro can infect your system with a virus: what is wrong with this
picture?), all those maddening exceptions that mean that nothing ever
works the way it should . . . the spaghetti code that means that you
can't say remove a malfunctioning security update because of
dependencies, and which has made it virtually impossible for them to
revise and improve in a timely manner (and which led to the failure of
the first Vista project, the fuck the customer attitude which makes
them say "Oh, sorry, yeah, we know that the bug in this security
update will make it impossible for you to transfer files over the
network but we have no plans to fix it." 

Just the fact that everything you go to do turns into a nightmare --
the reinstalls from scratch, the files that won't copy and can't be
deleted and the way the entire transfer craps out, the difficulty of
transferring an installation to another disk or another machine, the
way a machine slows down as its used and ultimately has to be
reinstalled -- the difficulty of doing a backup because your data is
all over the place -- the fact that the damn thing gets stuck and
won't shut down -- the fact that hibernation doesn't work reliably and
that yes they know about the problem and -- guess what -- have no
plans to fix it -- yada.

IOW, nothing that others haven't griped about ad nauseam. Unless I'm
the only one who just spent an hour yesterday figuring out why the
characters I typed into the remote desktop console didn't appear for
several seconds after I typed them . . . the problem went away when I
disabled Topdesk, a Vista-style alt-tab replacement. An alt-tab
replacement interfering with a terminal program? Go figure. Only in
the world of Microsoft . . .

>>  and I've never expressed any criticism of them.
>
>Actually you have. A while back when we had our long discussion on the rich 
>I told you that I know some very good people that
>happen to be wealthy.  You said that I know the only ones then.  You said 
>that the wealthy gained their wealth by inheriting it (and therefore were 
>not deserving so the money should be taxed away from them) or even worse, 
>the new rich that got their money through greed. etc.

My view of the matter is a lot less one-sided than you imply. I do
believe in incentive, and I do believe in rewarding people who put in
extra work and extra effort and take entrepreneurial risks, or who are
merely diligent enough to do their homework and salt things away. And
I don't believe in confiscatory taxation of the sort they had in
pre-Thatcher England. That serves no one.

What's more, call me the victim of my bourgeois upbringing, but I
don't believe that we should reduce everyone to Mao-suited poverty.
There's something to be said for ideals and culture, even if the price
of their existence is a certain degree of inequality. I hate snobbery
and conspicuous consumption, but I hate as well depressing mediocrity,
and so would rather elevate than reduce.

But I don't believe in the opposite extreme, either. I think that the
rich should pull their own weight at tax time, and, having benefited
from the air we all breathe and the wars kids from the other side of
the tracks fight, do what's right and help those who are less
fortunate rather than engaging in ever-greater orgies of consumption
or amassing more gold than Croesus. And I sure as hell don't think
that trust fund babies shouldn't pay at least the same tax on their
unearned inheritance that working stiffs pay on their wages, or that
executives should award themselves ludicrous compensation packages
that far outweigh their actual worth in a competitive market,
particularly when they're laying people off and outsourcing their work
because, er, the market demands it.

And, from a purely economic perspective, I don't think that the
current tax system is even minimally equitable, never mind reasonably
progressive (since it hurts the rich not one jot to pay a bit more on
their taxes -- almost by definition, it has no effect on the way they
live, and they will notice the extra expense only to the extent that
they have Scroogian hearts).

>>>Despite him
>>>ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable causes.
>>
>> That's like praising Lake Ontario for yielding a cup of water.
>>
>>>He's no saint, sure, but he's put a hell of a lot more into charity
>>>than you or I have.
>>
>> He's put a lot less into it, because he has a lot more.  There's no
>> sacrifice and there's no generosity:
>
>He's given 1/3 of his wealth so far. Have you?  You seem to be under the
>impression that if you don't sacrifice until it hurts, it doesn't count.
>That's nonsense.

Give away 1/3 of my wealth? Dude, I /like/ that $10 bill.

That being said, how can something be a sacrifice if it doesn't hurt?
And how can I respect someone who isn't willing to give a bit of
himself to those who have less? Not of a figure on paper, but
something that requires a bit of an effort?

You know, I used to know an elderly lady who, the local nuns told me
after her death, was known as the "Angle of Inwood." Despite a broken
back that caused her great pain and left her practically wheelchair
bound, this eight-year-old woman worked long hours helping the "old"
people in her neighborhood, whether it meant filling out Medicare
forms, or getting them into nursing homes.

Now her own retirement money, the product of years of hard work and
diligent savings, had been stolen by a business partner, and she was
scraping by on the Social Security that those contemptibly arrogant
neocons so blithely tried to reduce.

Good Republican that she was, the Angel of Inwood would no more
consider going on the dole or accepting help than she would consider
shooting herself. Still, there came a time when she could no longer
take care of herself, and she was finally prevailed upon to get a
part-time nursing aide in lieu of entering a nursing home. And that
nursing aide was a woman on welfare, an old alcoholic too unreliable
to hold down a paying job who was working not because she had to but
because she felt she should and volunteered, even though the job
required a two-hour commute each way and cost her money which, being
on welfare, she couldn't afford to lose.

And you know what? This elderly wheelchair-bound Social Security
resident, who had to count every penny at the grocery store, never
failed to provide lunch for the nursing aide, even though she was on a
government-mandated budget so skinflinty it made her sacrifice her few
thousand dollars in savings and allowed her to save only $500 for her
burial. She did it because it was the right thing to do.

Now that, to my mind, is decency, that to my mind is sacrifice. And if
there were a billion Bill Gates's in the world, and if every Gates
gave away one-third of its fortune, the sum total of what they did
would not, in my mind, equal what she did.

>> There's no
>> sacrifice and there's no generosity: Gates is merely following the
>> John D. Rockefeller strategy, concocted by his publicist after the
>> revelation of his business practices made him one of the most hated
>> men in the country, of giving away a tiny bit of his stolen fortune to
>> burnish his image.
>
>What proof do you have of that?  Seriously, what proof do you have
>that Gates giving his wealth is strictly a PR stunt?

None. But have you ever read anything biographical about Gates? I
think the chance that a man as greedy and contemptuous of the welfare
of others as he is would suddenly feel a strong need to help kids with
worms.

>> Compare Ted Turner for an example of a wealthy man who really did
>> care.
>
>Really?
>
>http://www.nhf.org/charitable_planning/ted_turner.htm
>
>Even if one assumes that giving away 1/3 of his wealth wasn't a publicity 
>stunt (he certainly made it a much higher high profile event that Gates 
>does), by your logic...since Turner isn't wondering where his next meal is 
>coming from, his donation is a meaningless gesture too.

I'm always glad to argue with those who disagree with my views -- I
mean, who else would I get to argue with? -- but not with a
misrepresentation of my views.

-- 
Josh

"I'm not going to play like I've been a person who's spent hours involved with
foreign policy.
I am who I am." - George W. Bush
                                                         
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