this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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I mean if you think about it, the default of humanity is to die of thirst assuming we were to do nothing so 'earning a living' is just a realistic expectation for any society.
If able, you should provide enough to society to make it worth meeting your basic needs. They give you food, water, shelter, you give them back enough to compensate them for that effort.
At its root, this is what cash should be, a measure of what society owes you. You make other people's lives X much better, and they do the same for you.
We should really be trying harder to get cash to meet this goal. A person making 60k a year for 45 years is $2.7 million dollars. You can buy a person's lifetime of effort for $2.7 million.
Bill Gates is worth $131 billion. That's the lifetime effort of 48,500 people. He hasn't improved our lives that much. Something is clearly out of sorts. There's nothing one person can do to deserve the lifetime effort of a thousand people.
How much time has personal computing saved in your life? Are you really sure Gates hasn’t produced 48k lifetimes worth of saved time by his efforts?
To answer this question seriously, Bill Gates has held back computing by stealing other people's work and ideas and using Embrace Extend and Extinguish.
If Bill Gates had no existed, arguably open source computing and hardware would be even more advanced than what we have now. Windows has been a net detriment to society.
I don't think that's a realistic position to take though. If not Bill Gates it would have been someone else trying to capitalize, not a de facto FOSS utopia.