Simply having a lot of money makes someone evil? Why? They are obviously all quite competitive in business but the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy. Gates for example is giving away hundreds of billions of dollars. What does it even matter if he's compassionate or not if he's doing that?
In general (not always, but it is mostly true) philantropy from billionaires and very profitable companies tend to be overshadowed by how much they profit from a system biased toward enriching them (see: The divide by Jason Hickel). A small metaphor to illustrate: are you a philantropist if you film yourself giving away 100$ to homeless people but make tens of thousands from posting the video?
Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world.
If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society.
Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field.
My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given:
Zuckerberg 2.1%.
Ballmer 3.7%
Bezos 1.6%
Sergey Brin 2.5%
Michael Dell 2.6%
Ken Griffin 5%
Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people.
"Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power.
"Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator.
It's way less your choice what happens with a photo of your face in pretty much every other situation.
When your face is on your LinkedIn profile, anyone can download it and do whatever they want with it. Legally. Here, the vendor has to tell you how they use it.
Someone downloading it randomly is not the same as me volunteering information said random person wouldn't otherwise have and having that information be stored next to my image in a database that can be breached.
All for a checkmark next to my profile that says I'm a real human.
I review an SBOM 3 days out of the week before lunch. If you can source your butter and cheese from the same dairy repo you can reduce the overhead of a grilled cheese by about 20%.
"The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because, in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their age."
> why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?
Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.
I could be wrong and would be happy to be so but it seems like this to me:
If someone did a few months of house arrest for "pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor" it would be incredibly easy for that person to say - whoops, she said she was 25 and then they threw the book at me." And not terribly unreasonable for someone to take him at his word on that.
The real crime is that the prosecutors massively under charged him for doing an insane gigantic awful pedophile recruitment ring. No one really knew that til a long time later.
Sorry to be this person, but I don't really agree with the first sentence:
--> "Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life."
People are the backbone of our civilization. People who have good intentions and support one another. We don't NEED an FDA to function -- it's just a tool that has worked quite well for a long time for us.
There are a lot of tools to address the problem that some people have bad intentions.
We publish common sense laws, and we have police officers and prosecutors, and then we have a court system to hold people accountable for breaking the law. That's one pretty major method that has little to do with the need for an institution like FDA.
I don't know if a system that relied entirely on tort and negligence and contract law to protect people from being sold snake oil would function better or worse than FDA, but I do know something like FDA (where a bunch of smart people advise very specifically on which drugs are ok to take and which are not) isn't the only option we have.
as a lawyer, I'll just note that the legal system has standards for this. specifically, you can't delete stuff that poses legal risks to you once you reasonably expect a lawsuit about it. but you can delete it as part of normal business activity until that point.
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