So I just read Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      There’s plenty of wealthy people who aren’t psychopaths, but they are all broken in some way. Usually it’s because capitalism has completely alienated them from our natural communal instincts and taught them that the individual is god. Many are capable of empathy, they just choose to do the selfish thing because they’ve been told their entire lives that “taking care of number one” is a virtue.

      Of course, the impacts of their behavior are the same as if they were psychopaths, so this isn’t me excusing them. But it’s important to know what capitalism does to people and how it requires us to ignore our natural instincts, because the wealthy (the ones capable of empathy, anyways) are the same as the rest of us, only luckier.

      • IronBird@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        as someone who recently escaped the labor trap (that is what capitalists call it…wages are suppressed for a reason…), the shift from needing to work and not is…profound.

        no wonder so many rich cunts are batshit psychopaths, nobody born into $ can ever truly know this feeling of relief (and the resulting stress, just from your brain leaving “survival mode”…hierarchy of needs stuff, then realizing just how fucked everything is, how powerless you still are even as new-rich to change anything…)