Bill Gates is a badass

[The Gardener]

However, imagine that tomorrow I need 100 cars and you know about it. You go out, and buy all the cars that are available without telling the sellers that there is a guy who wants to buy 100 cars. Now, you are in a position where you are the only one that can provide me with 100 cars, and you charge me whatever you want. Now, I have a question to you, you think this business practice is legal?

Sure. People who corner markets only increase the opportunity for competitors to enter the market and provide alternatives.

And, you neglect to mention that the monopolist in this case is parking a substantial sum of his cash into the form of "holding onto" 100 cars, 100 individual assets that are depreciating in value as the monopolist holds them. Does the time value of the monopolist's money, plus the depreciation he is losing by holding the cars, equate to a "good investment" for him?

If a market for a particular asset got to the point where the demand were THAT inelastic, then I'd surmise that market would never have allowed itself to become so narrow. In other words, in a market for a product with inelastic demand, there are usually too many sellers to allow for one person to corner it.

An example of this is, say, oil. We recently had, last summer, a period of time where a mini commodities bubble resulted in speculators trying to buy as much oil as they could. Sure, the gas prices for us went up for a limited amount of time, but its impossible to cheat the market and in time, most people who got caught up in the oil bubble lost their shirts... and prices PLUNGED as a result, in the aftermath.

In a nutshell, to your point directly, there will ALWAYS be speculators. But speculation is not always a bad thing, sometimes speculation leads to more mature markets, and sometimes they result in consumers looking to alternative things... as in the aftermath of the oil bubble, people are now very concerned about alternatives to gasoline.

 

[ali777]

I take it you don't consider it to be legal, yourself. So where (and how) do you draw the line? How about buying only 75 cars? Is THAT legal? Or 50 cars? Or 30? Or 10? Where do you draw the line?

As long as your buying power doesn't distort the cost of the 100 cars that I will buy tomorrow, I don't draw a line... Otherwise you will be the opportunist or the monopolist... I believe monopoly is illegal in your country?

If your financial muscle is causing price changes, then maybe we should draw a line.

I believe according to the UK monopolies commission using financial power for price control is illegal. You could get in a lot of trouble for doing that.

Sure. People who corner markets only increase the opportunity for competitors to enter the market and provide alternatives.

And, you neglect to mention that the monopolist in this case is parking a substantial sum of his cash into the form of "holding onto" 100 cars, 100 individual assets that are depreciating in value as the monopolist holds them. Does the time value of the monopolist's money, plus the depreciation he is losing by holding the cars, equate to a "good investment" for him?

No, you are wrong.... The monopolist is not taking any risk at all.. He knows he will off-load his stock tomorrow. He buys today, and sells tomorrow. He KNOWS there is a buyer in the market, and he's making a quick killing.

You would be correct if we were talking about random processes, but we aren't. You are missing the information already present which is the ZERO RISK... It's like someone telling me the shares of X company will go up tomorrow, and I put all my money there. Now this is extremely illegal...

I agree with the way you describe cornering, however, we aren't talking about a long term cornering here where there is sufficient time for a competitor to come in. We are talking about strictly short term investment, where there is zero risk involved.

If a market for a particular asset got to the point where the demand were THAT inelastic, then I'd surmise that market would never have allowed itself to become so narrow. In other words, in a market for a product with inelastic demand, there are usually too many sellers to allow for one person to corner it.

An example of this is, say, oil. We recently had, last summer, a period of time where a mini commodities bubble resulted in speculators trying to buy as much oil as they could. Sure, the gas prices for us went up for a limited amount of time, but its impossible to cheat the market and in time, most people who got caught up in the oil bubble lost their shirts... and prices PLUNGED as a result, in the aftermath.

In a nutshell, to your point directly, there will ALWAYS be speculators. But speculation is not always a bad thing, sometimes speculation leads to more mature markets, and sometimes they result in consumers looking to alternative things... as in the aftermath of the oil bubble, people are now very concerned about alternatives to gasoline.

Why do you think I'm anti-capitalist?

I was just outlining a situation where capitalism doesn't work. In my opinion, it is an illegal practice.

 

[barcafan]

There is nothing wrong with your example. You can buy cars and sell cars if you are in the business of buying and selling cars. Garages provide a service and they make their money by buying low and selling high...

However, imagine that tomorrow I need 100 cars and you know about it. You go out, and buy all the cars that are available without telling the sellers that there is a guy who wants to buy 100 cars. Now, you are in a position where you are the only one that can provide me with 100 cars, and you charge me whatever you want. Now, I have a question to you, you think this business practice is legal?

What law is it breaking, again? Im genuinely curious...

 

[ali777]

There is nothing wrong with your example. You can buy cars and sell cars if you are in the business of buying and selling cars. Garages provide a service and they make their money by buying low and selling high...

However, imagine that tomorrow I need 100 cars and you know about it. You go out, and buy all the cars that are available without telling the sellers that there is a guy who wants to buy 100 cars. Now, you are in a position where you are the only one that can provide me with 100 cars, and you charge me whatever you want. Now, I have a question to you, you think this business practice is legal?

What law is it breaking, again? Im genuinely curious...

The first point was that there is "inside trading", which leads to opportunist monopoly. Using inside information to gain advantage is illegal. Using financial muscle to gain monopoly is also illegal, but a very common practice.

The more common way of achieving monopoly through using financial muscle is by driving the competition away. Eg, a company with big cash, moves into an area, provides cheap services and drives the competition away. The rule says, you can't provide services at a loss. The idea is that, if you have lots of cash, you can afford to sell at a loss until the competition goes bankrupt. So, if you can provide a service cheaper and still make profit, you can kill the other guy legally as well....

Now imagine that the garage owner is the only person with 100 cars and he doesn't have the inside information that I need 100 cars. He can still charge high price because he's the only supplier, but there is no rule breaking because he doesn't know in advance that I'm going to need 100 cars and he doesn't distort the market with the intention of charging me high fee for those 100 cars. In this case, it's not his fault that there are no other suppliers. That's what The Gardener was trying to explain.

 

[HughJass]

Do you or anyone else you know give over $93M annually in charity?

I'm poor, and I donate when I can't afford to.

I don't know if $93 million is as important to this guy as $20 is to me.

Then what's with your cynical comment?...

Let's see him pummel his entire fortune into malaria research.

 

[CCS]

And Gates happens to have a full head of hair otherwise he would'nt have said that. :thumbdown2:

Agreed. They don't care because it does not affect them. If you want to spend your money improving your looks so you can get pretty women, some guy with perfect genetics will say you are selfish and he is not since he devotes his time to helping the poor, and his hot girlfriend who sleeps with him every night will agree he is a nicer person than you are.

 

[CCS]

Bill gates is awesome. I read somewhere that he doesnt even give his kids money (like allowance or buy them anything they want), they have to work for it.

hahaha. But how much does he pay them for their work? Probably more than $7 per hour. I bet they get perks somewhere.

I hate college kids who say they bought their car with their money, when their parents were paying their room and board at the time. I don't mind the parents giving them stuff. But the kids need to acknowledge that it was given to them and that other people don't have those gifts. When you have to pay for your own living expenses, buying a car is no longer so easy.

 

[CCS]

nothing worse than a billionaire getting on his humanitarian high horse

While there are members of the "Filthy Rich" club that like to spend a few hours a year attending charity gigs for "good P.R.", Bill Gates is definately not in that group.

He does huge amounts of humanitarian work and donates $Millions to charity every year, most of which is unpublicized.

People may Love or loath MS, but Bill Gates is a genuinely good guy.

Um, he's highly publicized. Can't listen to the radio without hearing about the Gates foundation. He donates 0.1% of his wealth to charity, which he earned with a monopoly piece of trash operating system after running the competition out of business with deliborate tactics. He told magazines that if any of his competitors advertized something, they had to state after the ad that MS has a similar product too, or else they would not do business with that magazine at all. They also made no other software engineers could make software compatible with MS unless they somehow reverse engineered it. If you write a word process that competes with Word, MS will find a way to make Windows non-compatible with it. If you want to make a mother board, I'm not sure, but I think they tell you they will make Windows non compatible with it if it is compatible with other operating systems. Or maybe there is some other reason why less than 10% of hardware is lynix compatible.

 

[CCS]

I don't doubt he has some good intensions, but a lot of it is just so people will like him more since they hate windows. Windows gives me so many problems. Firefox is 100x better than explorer, and free too. And smaller.

 

[CCS]

if memory serves I read that Gates plans to donate ALL his money through his founation... he plans to leave each of his kids 10mill.(not completely sure of exact ammount) but something like that....

I read this in some Fortune magazine piece they did when Warren Buffett announced he was givin ALL his dough away through the gates foundation.....

according to Gates, Buffett is the one that influenced him on this issue.they have been really good friends for years.

Buffetts philosophy on what he calls " putting your kids on a type of welfare allowence for millionairse is very intersting..... in regards to rich people who set generations of their relatives by inheritence....

a very inetesting man Warren Buffett.

I hope if he does that that he donates it somewhere that won't squander it. I would not give my money away. I'd hire scientists to find a cure to malaria. I'd hire them to solve other problems. Might give some to head start programs. I certainly would not just "give it to charity". Most poor people are poor because they make many bad decisions, especially with money.

 

[ali777]

They also made no other software engineers could make software compatible with MS unless they somehow reverse engineered it.

Well... This is a good case of implementation vs interface. Implementation is the contents of a blackbox, and interfaces are access points to that blackbox. The internal structure of the blackbox belongs to MS, so you can't blame them for protecting their investment, there is nothing wrong with that. However, theoretically anyone that can engineer another blackbox that is compatible with the interfaces should be allowed to sell his/her product.

I don't understand how software patents work, but I know of a few cases where blackboxes have been engineered by third parties and MS sued them for patent breach...

If you write a word process that competes with Word, MS will find a way to make Windows non-compatible with it.

I've heard about this as well. I don't know the details, but I think every single time the open source community comes close to implementing MS APIs in linux or something, MS makes changes to break the compatibility. There was something about office document standards as well.

 

[Eureka]

It's irrelevant to those people who are receiving the money through the charities though. They could care less about his business practices.

And although I don't know much about Bill Gate's past practices.. he is very successful. Someone doesn't make that much money without pissing a few people off.

 

[ali777]

It's irrelevant to those people who are receiving the money through the charities though. They could care less about his business practices.

I'm sorry to be dragging this subject.... I just don't buy into it...

A quote from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_M ... Foundation

Investments

The foundation invests the assets that it has not yet distributed, with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.[45] In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments to assess social responsibility.[46] It subsequently cancelled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[47]

[edit] Diversion of health care resources

In a January/February 2007 Foreign Affairs article, Laurie Garrett claims that many charitable organizations, among whom the Gates Foundation is prominent, harm global health by diverting resources from other important local health care services.[48] For example, by paying relatively high salaries at AIDS clinics, the foundation diverts medical professionals from other parts of developing nations' health care systems; the health care systems' ability to provide care diminishes (except in the area the foundation funds) and the charities may do more harm than good. Similar findings were reported in a December 2007 Los Angeles Times investigation.[49]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 7615.story

Using the most recent data available, a Times tally showed that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities — have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.

This is "the dirty secret" of many large philanthropies, said Paul Hawken, an expert on socially beneficial investing who directs the Natural Capital Institute, an investment research group. "Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future," Hawken said in an interview, "but with their investments, they steal from the future."

 

[s.a.f]

So in summary I guess Bill Gates really 'is' a badass, but it depends on what your definition of Badass is. :hump:

 

[patagonia]

if memory serves I read that Gates plans to donate ALL his money through his founation... he plans to leave each of his kids 10mill.(not completely sure of exact ammount) but something like that....

I read this in some Fortune magazine piece they did when Warren Buffett announced he was givin ALL his dough away through the gates foundation.....

according to Gates, Buffett is the one that influenced him on this issue.they have been really good friends for years.

Buffetts philosophy on what he calls " putting your kids on a type of welfare allowence for millionairse is very intersting..... in regards to rich people who set generations of their relatives by inheritence....

a very inetesting man Warren Buffett.

I hope if he does that that he donates it somewhere that won't squander it. I would not give my money away. I'd hire scientists to find a cure to malaria. I'd hire them to solve other problems. Might give some to head start programs. I certainly would not just "give it to charity". Most poor people are poor because they make many bad decisions, especially with money.

Buffett and Gates are not randomly handing out cash to poor people.... They are using their money to support vaccination/health/educational programs throughout the world.... mainly underdeveloped countries.

Most poor people are poor because they make many bad decisions, especially with money

You are wrong.

 

[CCS]

It's irrelevant to those people who are receiving the money through the charities though. They could care less about his business practices.

Maybe if he did not charge $400 for an operating system, people would have money to donate to charities. Microsoft office is like $700. You can't buy word or excell separately. I can build a top of the line computer for $300. Well, 85% as fast as the fastest possible. But the software is what costs an arm and a leg. And he'll donate 0.1% of the money he has not already spent, to charity.

 

[CCS]

Most poor people are poor because they make many bad decisions, especially with money

You are wrong.

I'm talking about in the US, not the rest of the world. Living in the US is a joke. Only people who don't like to wear condoms or love drugs end up in poverty here. Or if you are the victim of a stray bullet that leaves you in a wheel chair. Or if a woman puts her condoms in the sun for a few days, then puts them in her room and says you have to use hers, so she gets pregnant and wants your money. As long as you don't do something dumb, or spend your money on alcohol, or insist on living on the beach when you don't have a degree, you can live OK. Just move to a city that is afordable. In this economy things are a bit different, but I'm talking about pre-2008.

 

[ali777]

I'm talking about in the US, not the rest of the world. Living in the US is a joke. Only people who don't like to wear condoms or love drugs end up in poverty here. Or if you are the victim of a stray bullet that leaves you in a wheel chair. Or if a woman puts her condoms in the sun for a few days, then puts them in her room and says you have to use hers, so she gets pregnant and wants your money. As long as you don't do something dumb, or spend your money on alcohol, or insist on living on the beach when you don't have a degree, you can live OK. Just move to a city that is afordable. In this economy things are a bit different, but I'm talking about pre-2008.

what's with you and pregnancy? I bet 90% of the women you meet on the street are as scared as you are of falling pregnant. What makes you think they want to trick you into giving them your sperm?

I'm not saying women don't want to get pregnant, but most of them are probably waiting for the right man, the right time, etc... They wouldn't want to have kids with a random man...

 

[CCS]

I never said most women do. But a few do. You just got to be careful. Check your condoms for holes in the package. If she asks, just say that sometimes they are defective out of the box and you are just checking to be sure. I know people who've been in the situations I describe. And I don't know many people.

 

[Smooth]

I can see CCS taking out hes magnifying glass just before entering "You can never bee too safe! :geek: "