In the News Today – Billionaires

I repeat. Here’s the link to the NYTimes story on old money billionaire thinking about new money billionaires. I don’t think you can read it unless you subscribe to the Times but I took one quote from Bill to share with you:

“But he supports a tax system that is more progressive. Every year, he adds up the taxes he has paid over his lifetime. He figures he has paid $14 billion, “not counting sales tax.”

Under a better system, he calculates, he would have paid $40 billion. Released in September, “Can You Be Too Rich?” already seems from another era. The answer to Mr. Gates’s question, in an administration staffed by billionaires, is no.”

Bill is still the 12th richest man in the world but like Zuck, Muck and Besot with their orange tongues licking Trump he has been spared his fair share of the burden for the Federal Government courtesy of the Dark Money mafia. He at least sees it.

I remember when I was grudgingly getting used to Microsoft on my PC after we exchanged it with my beloved Fat Mac (a Steve Job’s product) I was angry having to learn a more awkward way of computing for a couple years at the turn of the millennium. This story is about the autobiography Bill has written and the Times story gives him room to contemplate the world he still thinks is vastly improved by tech but with massive speed bumps he never anticipated. (like orange tongued tech billionaires richer than Gates scraping their knees as they kowtow to the most ignorant President ever elected by the people of the United States)

He thinks that as a kid he was on the spectrum which was revealing. I met a person who knew him when he was a young man to put that thought in my head thirty years ago…more on that later. I suspect it is true as I suspect it is good for humanity for such people to exist and that in time its liablities can be smoothed out in a loving environment which Gates had.

Get ready for it but more AI is on the way courtesy of the internet ethos of open borders that even Censorship heavy China has not fully reigned in. There have been a fascinating flurry of stories on the start up that is menacing the new tech moguls who are busy kowtowing to Trump. Their plans call for depleting Energy production to make more billions. The Chinese AI may save us from Zuck, Muck and Besot.

Gates explains that he did try his parent’s patience. He would refuse to talk for days on end a sure sign of something different about him. So about my first hint of his autistic tendencies came from the wacky, willful wife of one of my mother’s cousins who lived near the Gates in Washington state. She scoffed at Gates and recalled seeing him often at a restaurant sitting in a booth rocking back and forth for minutes at a time. She just saw a retarded guy not someone thinking through the mysteries of the universe.

The other person who met him was one of my kid swimmers from my miserable two year stint as the Proctor Swimming coach. I’ve bumped into a few of my old swimmers through the years and this fellow like the others were cordial despite my disastrous years as their coach.

Twenty years ago one of my swimmers got in touch with me and offered to pass out flyers door to door. Our paths crossed over several years thereafter. He had gone to law school, passed the bar and become a private attorney. He was however poorly organized and complaints caused him to be disbarred. By the time we met he had been doing a lot of thinking about life but I don’t think he was quite organized enough to know what he wanted to do with the degree he’d been deprived of making use of.

He told me, however, that he’d met Bill Gates in his very early years founding what would become microsoft in New Mexico, in the destination my grandson was eager to visit a year ago where Breaking Bad was filmed, Albuquerque. (He and his grandmother are preparing a summer course at a Presbyterian retreat on a Christian analysis of that series.)

My former swimmer apparently had a long philosophical chat with Gates who explained what he was attempting to do with computers. My swimmer had just been reading some philosophical books and gave the apparently very open Gates some suggestions about how he should pursue his computational work. After that, of course, Microsoft when on to change the world. My swimmer had a very strong sense that he had put the right bugs in Gate’s ear and that just maybe Gates owed him. He was debating paying a call on the now billionaire Gates to see if he just might get past being down on his luck.

I must say I can imagine the maturing Gates no longer bending at the waist like a Jewish student at Yeshiva listening intently in his early Microsoft years as my mother’s cousin’s wife related. I could add that the snarky analysis of the woman poking fun at Bill Gates had her own son who was an attorney who still lived with her at home and who she took good care to shield from life’s difficulties. My Mom told me that she once visited the home and that the wacky Mom opened the door of her sleeping child attorney and pointed lovingly at him for my Mother to admire. My Mom found that sort of mothering to be on another kind of spectrum.

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