Chose your preferred answer on these two smug individuals

@hippyjoe1955 Whom do you believe their master? I thought Gates rather capable of looking after himself and telling the rest of us what to do!

@ArishMell I honestly don't know if it is one person or a group of people but there is no way anyone gets as rich as Gates without some massive help. The same goes for Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk. Huge government money behind them all.

@hippyjoe1955 A system more than particular people of the time maybe...

It would be ironical though - I though the American ethos was get-rich-quick but sink-or-swim, where help from tax-payers' money to anyone is seen as tantamount to Communism.

@ArishMell I am not picking on anyone for making money. I am simply pointing out how there are some people who seemingly make huge sums of money without actually doing anything. Zuckerberg is not very bright nor is Bill Gates.

@hippyjoe1955 yes - I wonder how they do it, too!

They might not be unusually bright in an academic sense, but they were obviously good at very deep but narrow skills, and at spotting money-making opportunities.

I think when you look at most big-name companies set up by individuals, opportunity-spotting seems one of their main skills. Another is recognising when they need engage people with skills they don't have themselves, such as book-keeping and sales. A management-consultant one told me many small firms fail when their owners had let the business go beyond their managerial abilities..

@ArishMell They were chosen to play a role part of which is receiving lots of money that they are to spend to do their master's bidding. They sold their souls.

@hippyjoe1955 "...to spend...", without thinking of the consequences?

@ArishMell Its not their money. Bill Gates and his 'foundation' is not spending Bill Gates' money. It was given to him in trust. Should he not spend his money as he is directed he would be dead in a few hours and his money would go back to 'his purposes'.

@hippyjoe1955 Where does the Foundation find its money? I thought it was basically him and his wife "donating" to it from his earnings from Microsoft.

@ArishMell Do you honestly think that Microsoft was not a government controlled corporation?

@hippyjoe1955 No, just the opposite if anything; apart of course from being subject to the same corporate legislation as any other company.

I don't know US law in this respect but I had the impression that companies like that have the money to influence the government, not the other way round; by lobbying, donations to political parties. and supporting candidates' campaign expenses.

@ArishMell Yeah well there is something called antitrust laws that microsoft was able to deftly avoid as it took over the entire world of operating systems.

@hippyjoe1955 That monopoly worries me for more than commercial reasons.

It has made so many people rely on the same basic software - and the Internet can only really work in particular ways anyway - that it makes life relatively easy for hackers.

Not so much for the old bored-teenagers-in-bedrooms stereotypes, but organised-crime gangs and the security departments of hostile governments, with the skill and dedication to analyse the operating-system and users' files.

@ArishMell Hostile governments including our own.

@hippyjoe1955 Well,, I can't speak for yours but I don't regard mine as "hostile". :-)

It might not always agree with it and I am not blind to its faults, but that's not quite what I had in mind!

@ArishMell I live in Canada. The place that forced people to get jabbed. Threw pastors in jail for holding church services and feeding the poor. It ran over grandmothers with horses and threw protestors in jail. It is busy shuttering businesses that keep the people warm and fed. It has spent the nation into penury and supported unethical wars. Kind of like Britain that way I suppose. Oh yes and now it is attempting to disarm all Canadians regardless of where you live or what you might need that weapon for. Got a bear eating your cows? Sorry no gun for you. Live off the grid and hunt to put food on the table? Sorry no gun for you either.

@hippyjoe1955 What was the case against the pastors? Or against the charitable actions? What was the protest about?

I didn't think Canada was gun-happy, like America! It is legal to own a licensed firearm in Britain but there are strict controls on it, and besides, there have never been calls for widespread gun ownership outside of genuine agricultural, sporting and antiques-collecting uses. If anything we want fewer, not more, guns floating around.

Nor is there much of a fad for living "off-grid" here. We see that as largely an American doom-mongers' fashion (the self-frightened, self-named "preppers" and "survivalists"), but I didn't know some Canadians try being wilderness hermits.

@ArishMell One pastor James Coates held a church service. The other Artur Pawlowski held a church service and fed the poor. The protest was against the restriction of goods and services coming across the border by insisting all the truckers carry vax passports. Off the grid here is a way of life for many first nations people. They live in extremely remote areas that are only accessible by air or ice road or ship. My friend was surveying the DEW line in the far north. He was issued a high powered rifle to protect himself from polar bears. Which btw are thriving not starving as the AGW crowd would have you believe.

@hippyjoe1955 Well, if that's all the clergymen were doing, what so upset the powers-that-be?

Ah, yes I remember now the bitter protests. They were reported in the UK.

I see what you mean now about living in very remote places. Yes, I know polar bears are among the most dangerous animals on Earth: from their point of view it's a matter of eating where and when they can and it doesn't matter if their prey is a seal or a human.

@ArishMell Yeah polar bears are a rather impressive alpha predator. They have no natural enemies so they are pretty much fearless. In Churchill Manitoba it is illegal to lock your car. If you are walking down the street and encounter a bear you are told to climb into the nearest car and hope the bear isn't very hungry. The pastors fell afoul of the tyrants that were in the provincial health services. They were not following the strict but utterly useless lockdowns. Rev Pawloski grew up in Poland under the soviet regime. He did not take the health boards dictates kindly. He spent time in solitary because he dared to challenge the orthodoxy.

@ArishMell I must tell you about the time I went to visit my cousin in law. I knew he was a real outdoorsman loving to fish and hunt. I went into his basement/den and was shocked to see a polar bear pelt hanging on the wall. He quickly explained that he didn't actually kill the bear. He was a dental surgeon and a fellow from the high arctic came to him for some work. The fellow didn't have any money so my cousin told him to send him something from home when he got back home. A big box showed up at the hospital a few weeks later. The fellow sent my cousin the pelt of a polar bear. Being native the northerner could still kill the bear whereas anyone else would be in jail for doing so. However since the pelt was legally gained there was no penalty for my cousin having it.

@hippyjoe1955 Interesting! Very much a cultural matter.

I have visited Norway a few times with a group of friends, to go walking in the hills. We became friends with a resident on one village, where his home was a menagerie of stuffed animals.

Though not a Sami, he was licensed to shoot up to, I think, three, elk a year; these are edible and indeed he did once cook us a delicious casserole of meat from one he had shot.

What we did not like so much, but were polite enough not to comment, was the rest of the creatures, all inedible, from a beautiful European Lynx down to of all things, an owl with a lemming in its talons. He also showed us a photograph of a large Brown Bear he had shot; but I don't know if that was defensive or purely for the sake of shooting it.

That was shooting for the sake of it, not for food or in culling a species too numerous for its own and everyone else' good, not even in self-defence.

I think he realised we did not really agree with such "sport". We also saw him fishing one day, in a small lake. He was not catching them to eat and we didn't know if they were an edible species anyway. He just left them in the grass.

@ArishMell Yeah we have the same problem with many of our native people. They can be very destructive even as they claim to be stewards of the land.

I went to visit an older lady one day when I noticed she had a grizzly bear pelt on the floor under her table. The head and paws were intact which showed just how big an animal it was. She told me how she got it. A bear was killing her cattle, she had a small farm on the edge of the forest reserve along the foothills, She decided to do something about the bear since she really couldn't afford the loss of any more cows. She and her dad got on their horses and headed west. About a mile out they spotted what they were certain was the culprit bear. They lassoed the bear and tied it between two trees. She rode home and got the old Enfield .303 came back and shot the bear. She also had a mountain lion pelt from a mountain lion that was raiding her hen house. Tough lady with a heart of gold. She raised two daughters and a son from the money she made farming.

@hippyjoe1955 I can understand shooting animals that are killing your livestock but there are too many who shoot for the sake of it.

Some of the worst in Europe is or was along the French-Spanish border on the Pyrenees, where they just blast migrating birds out of the sky.