> Paul was driven by an incredible curiosity his whole life. Even when we were just kids, he seemed to be interested in just about everything.
I can identify with this. I've founded a gamedev company, taught Computer Graphics, and worked at Google and Improbable as a SWE; but in the middle of all this I wrote a novel, I recently quit my job to become an actor/filmmaker (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10232800), and I really enjoy making Italian goodies on my free time (mostly biscotti, tiramisu, and limoncello). I'm also thinking of learning bookbinding / restoration, and how to draw and paint.
I can't tell whether I'm "doing this right" -- and by "this", I mean "life". Sometimes I feel like I'm half-assing everything, and that I'd be better off laser-focusing on a single thing. Some of my friends have, and they're further along their careers (are they happier? I don't know). Sometimes I feel life is too short to not do what I feel passionate about.
I'm 38 and I'm doing OK in life, but I feel like I haven't figured out what to optimise for. I have this lingering feeling that I could, and should, be doing better (for some vague definition of "better").
Sorry to bring a personal question to HN, but the article made me think about my situation, I can't think of a better crowd to get their opinion than this one.
The only question to answer is, “are you happy?” I’m almost 50, I don’t have a high profile job, failed at getting into Google 5 times, but just bought my wife a $20,000 grand piano for our anniversary without thinking about it. My kids make me happy, my house mortgage is less than 1X my household earnings, my work pays well and I have a great Work Life Balance.
We all die within 120 years, and if we are cremated, there will be no trace of us left in this universe. Who cares about anything except our happiness and our ability to make those around us happy during this short time we are alive?
He mentioned it because it shows that while he hasn’t been in the rat race he’s done well enough to treat his family well. I’m happy for him, and honestly 20k isn’t that much money in the big scheme of things so he probably didn’t think of it as a brag
As someone who wants to be financially independent, how did you make so much such that household income > mortgage? Do u just live in a crappy neighborhood? Even on Midwest states tech yearly salary is about half of a decent house?
Basically we got lucky. We bought our house 7 years ago, just before the housing bubble went crazy again. I live in the SF Bay Area to be honest we almost gave up and went back to renting but managed to find a house just before we gave up.
My wife makes 50% more than me, but we bought a house that we could afford on one salary. It’s in a nice neighborhood but not super fancy. It’s the house I plan on dying in. We have lived well below our means and was able to save a good down payment that helped. Not living above your means and maintaining a standard of living well below that is the most important thing, in my opinion. Not having worked for FANG (not being able to get in because I’m not good enough to pass the interviews) and not being able to amass great wealth from stocks, basically it’s been from saving.
My wife is more successful than I am, but I stunted my career to take more of the child rearing. That said my career isn’t terrible, I make a good salary but I turn off my phone at 3pm every day. My calendar automatically rejects all meeting requests after 230pm and I pick up the kids and spend more time with them to give my wife the opportunity to further her career.
No we haven’t. Our decision is to pay off the mortgage as slowly as possible. The interest rate on the mortgage is 3.5% so if inflation rises significantly, we will be paying negative real interest rates for much of the duration of the mortgage.
Historically inflation is approximately 3% on average, also, re-financing your mortgage could be very advantageous for you, the lowest rates you can find right now hover around 1.7%.
It’s off-topic, but such a great question you asked. My view is that its “horses for courses”as they say in the UK. Some people will optimize for high income because that’s what makes them happy - and may be helped by a predisposition for high focus. Other people will optimize for a life in which they cultivate many interests because that makes them happier than staying focused and earning a lot of money.
For what it’s worth, I started out in a high focus, high income career (law) but quickly realized the level of focus required left me feeling a little bored with life. So I reworked things, did a masters in environmental economics and now have what I’d call a portfolio career in which I can do a variety of things, allows me to travel a little and satisfies the curiosity itch. Which if unscratched - I realise - makes me feel unhappy. However, this does give rise to an inner tension. I live in a culture which associates money with status. I’m not rich like my old law school friends, and I feel lower status for that. Because I am (probably like most people) not unaware of status, I get some negative cognitive feedback from my choices,
but on balance feel it’s better for me that I pursue a diverse livelihood than get rich and bored.
I like the concept of a "portfolio career". For better or worse, however, one of the things I want to achieve is to be financially independent... and that seems to be somewhat at odds with this kind of varied profile.
That’s what I mean: horses for courses. But it also depends on what you mean by “financial independence”. It seems obvious to say that I’ve found that outgoings are as bigger a determinant of independence as income. Oh, and I married a partner who sees status as a function of freedom more than money. And that helps a lot.
To add to that, an old friend married someone who’s main priority in life is to own a brownstone in Brooklyn. And their expectation engenders a fairly high degree of marital tension. The partner comes from a background in which, I’d guess, you show status by owning expensive property. And that’s a high barrier to happiness because earning that sort of money is not easy unless you’re willing to trade off a lot of your time.
As someone who has been very laser focused in life I often feel the opposite of you. I finished university, did my PhD, and now have a job doing research in the area of my PhD. I've been working 60-80 hour weeks for the past 10 years. I do some small activities on the side, so life isn't monotonous, but I don't invest in anything nearly as much as I do my work. I often wonder if I'm missing out on life by not committing to more things. So we're on opposite sides of the same coin. The grass isn't necessarily greener...
You're not doing anything “right” neither is anyone else. That’s the beauty of life.
Make the most of your freedoms and privilege, which it sounds you are and do things you love. Actually, I retract my original statement, it sounds like you’re having a great time. Don't let societal norms think that you have to live in any particular way.
I am having a great time. And my doubts aren't about societal norms; I've directly gone against societal norms at least twice (quitting my first well-paying, well-respected job to start a games company when I was 21, and quitting my most recent well-paying, well-respected job to focus on acting and filmmaking). I'm OK with that.
My doubts come from within. It's more about my own expectations for myself. For example, at my age and with my background, am I a fool for not trying to start a VC backed startup like everyone else? I guess there's a strong FOMO element in my questions.
I'm this way as well and for the longest time was worried I was handicapping myself.
Until I read "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"[1] which makes the strongest argument I've seen for having a "talent stack" and combining skills that aren't typically combined. Each skill increases your odds and essentially this boils down to Good + Good > Excellent. You can leverage a combination of average skills to great effect.
The author describes himself as mediocre at art, decent at writing a joke and having business experience... not that noteworthy in and of themselves, but mixed together resulted in Dilbert.
I've occasionally speculated that in a world with 8 billion people, there exists a job/activity for which I am the absolutely best candidate, because of the perfect match of my very specific mix of skills and the very specific mix of skills required. The tricky bit is finding that match, I suppose :)
I think the most important thing to optimize for is time. Move closer to work, get a roomba, buy a second monitor, etc. For me anything I can do to get extra time is a huge payoff because I'd rather spend my time learning something new, cooking, traveling, or cycling/running.
I recently switched jobs and am moving next month to reduce my commute. I'll have an extra 7 hours a week to do whatever I want and I cannot wait.
Now imagine building an online lifestyle business such that after it’s setup you can spend 0 time on it (for the most part) and still earn enough to pay (reasonable) living expenses.
This is part of the motivation for doing browserless.io for me (though I’m fascinated, still, by the tech and product).
I’ll say that the 0-hour thing is pretty impossible, though you’ll likely not work near 40 hours ever unless you want to. The biggest takeaway I’ve found is that, aside from gaining time, gaining freedom of choice is very liberating. You’ll feel the consequences as well, which I’ve enjoyed overall (even the tedious stuff can pay out in dividends).
It’s definitely worth pursuing, but does come front-loaded with work and a lot of time spent
That sounds fantastic and it's something I aspire to achieve; however this falls into the category of "should I laser-focus on this, or have a better work-life balance?". Part of my difficulty is figuring out the tradeoff of "sacrificing wellbeing today to build a solid foundation" vs "do not postpone enjoying life".
I'm continuing as a software engineer to pay the bills, but I pursue music, games, and at one point in my career was a graphic designer and illustrator (though perhaps not very successfully; I'll get back to it at some point).
I'm about to start learn electronics as I'm interested in building robots and making custom guitar pedals. I don't think I could ever be laser-focussed (95% sure I'm ADHD; used to think I was bipolar but not sure about that diagnosis anymore). Embrace your neurology.
I have said this before, but I will say it again here:
I do not personally believe in a “happiness optimization algorithm”
The best I think any of us can really do is have a “regret minimization” approach.
Whenever you have a decision to make, ask yourself “What would I regret more if I didn't do in 20, 30 years?
The only caveat is really make sure you think of yourself in the long time horizon: would you regret not saving enough money? Not spending more time with your kids? You get the themes... some things are obvious... others less so.
In general this has worked out well for me, and I have few genuine regrets.
It sounds simple, but in my personal experience, it is the simple things that are both the hardest and most important things to do right.
Very interesting. I was recently reading Happy by Derren Brown (best known as a terrific illusionist), and he talks about the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". I wonder if it's possible to combine both approaches.
His basic point is that our culture highly values the Tiger-Woods-style success story, where a person just beavers away at one thing their whole life. But there are a lot of successful people who specialize later or not at all. It definitely made me feel better about my similarly diverse resume, and has given me some good ways to think about what I want to pursue next.
People are optimization functions. Trying to define it as happiness or whatever other complex formula won't work because it quickly goes meta. Its output becomes just one of your inputs. I know that "doing what you want to do" does not seem like a useful answer to that question, but I think the problem is more in the question than in the answer.
We have these huge computation machines in our heads and we're provided with results like "I want to write a novel" based on earlier inputs and with practically all computation happening subconsciously.
Also, I don't thing you would have such a nice list of accomplishments without a laser focus. By keeping it pointed around the same direction you can achieve more in that area compared to others (because strong flashlight can provide comparable amount of energy to the same point during long enough time), but.. back to the first point (achievements are just another input)
You might be surprised how laser focus can be just as ineffective and dilettantism. It only works when you laser focus in a place that happens to be the right opportunity. I’d venture that most laser focuses just fail on a longer timeline and maybe with less fun along the way.
When I was in my early twenties I had some amazing experiences that prompted me to ask the question, "if I died today, would I be ok with it?". I'm thirty five now and no matter how hard a day has been I have always been able to answer "yes".
Often the journey is hard, really hard, but if you are moving in a direction you are excited about and being true to yourself it's ok.
There is no success, there is no winning, there is only your own comfort when the lights turn off forever.
That's not to say you can't have financial success and career satisfaction. It's just to say that those things won't give you the freedom to die.
I have the same problem. I taught myself marketing, then design, and enough code to throw together decent web pages. I've written a novel, then decided it wasn't good enough and shelved it. I taught myself how to play the guitar, then how to produce music.
This can feel like bragging but I really feel that I haven't really specialized in anything. Although being a marketing consultant has been my livelihood for nearly a decade, I'm somehow not able to call myself a marketer.
I'm turning 30 and beginning to wonder if these grand experiments have been stretched too long. And if they have, what do I focus on? And can I even focus on one thing?
FWIW, most of the interesting stuff I've done, most of what makes me who I am today, have happened after 30 :) Enjoy the ride!
I really like the "can only connect the dots backwards" speech by Steve Jobs. I'm no fanboy, but this one idea resonated with me, and has served me well.
I'm also extremely curious and honestly I'm not sure if it is a curse or a blessing. I dream of projects where I could put all my skills to work but these seem totally inaccessible to me.
It's a cop+out, but I feel pretty sure that (if I understand your curiosity) it's both a curse and a blessing. Those are probably two different ways to frame the feelings you have around your curiosity. I'm sure there are many places where the curiosity serves you well, and as you know, there are also places where it gets in the way.
Whatever ends up being the right amount and kind of curiosity for you, I hope you can meet yourself with love and appreciation. Even if your curiosity brings you deep dissatisfaction because of unfulfilled dreams or the impossibility of knowing it all.
Often I wonder if I choose the wrong race on character creation or a few eras too early to spawn. Humans are certainly capable of dabbling in many domains simultaneously, but our current social structures (and limited lifespans) generally require us to specialize in basically one or two fields in order to be significantly successful.
Note that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I know a lot of people and I've yet to see someone that is wealthy or famous that is also really happy but I do know some people that by HN standards would qualify as poor that are super happy, and a good part of that is because they are not chasing the buck or how many people have their autograph.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. If through a combination of luck, skill and effort you sell your first startup for tens of millions before you're 30, you probably have a lot more freedom to do whatever you want next. Unfortunately, that's not my story :(
To be honest, a regular life with limits is probably best for our health. Humans are built for mild adversity. Closest to happiness are probably the monks meditating in the mountains wanting for nothing. Conversely why so many rich folks are mentally ill, imho.
Let me get this straight, you're criticizing the parent for mentioning him/herself in a request for personal advice? Or... just... for asking for advice?
Your comment is pedantic, unconstructive, and rather missing the point.
If an article about persons varied interests and selflessness inspires someone to ask how to apply that to their own life, it seems quite on topic to me. Or do you consider the only relevant discussion to be that on Paul Allen’s life specifically, not on how it might inspire yours?
Maybe that's the point. You can either be more selfish or altruistic.
Get more for yourself and to help with consequences to others on one end or burning out forever helping others in whatever way you can.
Regardless, life can be as boring or as interesting as you make it, focused or diffuse too.
> Recently spent 4 years living in London, and I picked up some of the UK spelling.
Lucky duck! :-)
I want to hide behind my auto-spellchecker (which flagged it as I was replying, which is what prompted me to tease you about it) but really I'm just more ignorant than I like to believe. Good lesson in humility really. Oddly enough, I used to have it set to British English and so used e.g. "colour", etc.
> > Open secret (it's like a cheat code): service to others is the most rewarding.
> Very interesting, thanks!
Cheers! It's like a whole 'nother level to life, like as if you've been playing checkers the whole time and now you're ready for chess. You're at the right age too: you've seen enough of the world to avoid the naivete of youth, but you still have energy and ~20-50+ years to work/play with!
Paul allen owned an island in the san juans - when i used to fly to my mothers on Orcas we had to land first at paul allens airport...
There was a beauty and a freedom i used to feel from that experience:
There was no tower, nor staff; just a landing strip and we would fly in - do our thing and then take off again.
It was awesome... and i loved it, because we talk about america being the “land of the free” but we are really the “land of the regulated —special terms apply such as 1) are you rich enough to be free”
But i really liked flying into that island in particular over Orcas due to how libre it felt.
As a private pilot flying in the US until the beginning of this millennium (then I moved away) - there are many, many such airports all over the country, that's nothing special. I landed at such airports even as a student pilot. Half Moon Bay airport, to be exact (student home airports were San Carlos and Palo Alto, so I was allowed to do that as a student, didn't even have to ask the instructor after getting the general approval for local solo flights). You even have "pilot-controlled lighting" to turn on runway lights if you arrive at night at some airports.
Yes, such airports are a lot of fun. Some are nothing but a strip in the middle of nowhere.
Each one has a frequency assigned and you announce yourself (or at least you are supposed to) when you come in to check if anybody else is there already, maybe even using the runway.
I found a number, the vast majority of airports is in this category:
> There's a huge number of uncontrolled airports in the U.S. According to the FAA, there are 5,300 public-use airports. Out of that number, there are 500 that are controlled. [Mar 1, 2005 -- https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/uncontrolled-airpor...
What amazed me was learning that you can fly across country and never have to talk to ATC. I'm not sure on the details, I'm sure it's VFR, no class Bravo airspace, not sure about flight plan, but the fact that you can cruise around up there without ever announcing yourself or communicating with anyone is really surprising.
VFR and air space classes are orthogonal. You can fly through class B (e.g. SFO, for me, learning in the Bay Area, when you transition north starting from San Carlos you first have to talk to SFO tower and then get to pass north just a bit west of the airport, right through class B) or any class. VFR/IFR means something different [0]. A flight plan too is orthogonal, you can file a VFR flight plan too. It is used for safety mostly, in case you go missing, for example [1].
Owning a private island definetly requires you to be super-wealthy, but aviation doesn't necessarily require that. My dad wouldn't even qualify as upper-middle-class, and he has a private grass strip for an ultralight. In many parts of the country, 40 acres isn't that expensive (my father paid 40k for the land, the entire place was under 200k. And many airports aren't towered, I guarantee there is an untowered airport within reasonable driving distance if any metro area in the US; most private pilots can't afford hangar space at a towered airport, and the larger airports aren't very friendly to small private planes anyway.
Note however that aviation almost requires you to have at least a middle class income now due to rising costs, even for a homebuilt. Whereas my dad was able to afford a used piper cub in the early 70s while he was a student, with no financial help from his parents.
Depends where the private island is. There's definitely people with private islands in the Broughton archipelago, and other areas in between Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast/BC Mainland, where the assessed value of the small island + home is less than a dumpy old 2BD house in East Vancouver.
If I had $1.25m in a bank account right now I could go write a check for a crappy early 1970s vintage Vancouver Special, on a narrow lot somewhere off Fraser Street in east van, or for a 3000 sq ft craft built house on a private island with its own off grid power system. Not talking about places with their own airstrip. Islands small enough to be accessible by boat or floatplane only.
>we talk about america being the “land of the free” but we are really the “land of the regulated —special terms apply such as 1) are you rich enough to be free”
Well.. most people in America live in places that depend on other people to coordinate shared resources. People will likely die or get seriously hurt if you hit them on your joyride flight, so we try to put procedures in place so that does not happen.
When you have the privilege to assert a colonial ownership claim to a large land area, you don't need to coordinate with other people when you're landing on an empty part of that land.
Same principles apply to companies as they scale. It's why startups can move fast.
Cinerama, MoPOP, Living Computer Museum. They're all love letters to geek culture. If you're in Seattle they are absolutely worth a visit.
Old Microsoft guys tend not to be recognized as being "one of us"... maybe it was Microsoft's culture, and the systematic undermining of open source software and startups through the 90s, but Paul definitely was more like us than we probably care to admit.
Didn’t know that Allen had a big part in funding KEXP, in addition to all the well-known stuff (Seahawks etc). Crazy the impact one person can have on a city, even if that person is insanely wealthy.
I'm moved by what Bill said about Paul - in many ways, he was still the geeky guy on the teletype, ferociously well read, and driven not only to understand the world, but also to protect it and share it with others. I miss him.
This reminds me of a day at Asymetrix - a startup founded by Mr Allen. Somehow we got a very early incarnation of Mosaic and I remember showing everyone how to bounce over to each lab with just a click and what authoring in HTML meant. Asymetrix's main product at the time was Toolbook, essentially a Hypercard clone -- but this was obviously the future. Paul's reaction was muted but I think he knew "This is happening without us!"
They had the very strange idea they were going to take on Microsoft and Borland with their own C++ development system, which seemed to make no sense to me given the other things they were doing.
Being driven by curiosity is a wonderful thing. I don't know how he managed to keep it up his whole life, and I very much envy his ability to do so. In my case, I find my ability to act on curiosity to be waning as I get older. Commitments and general fatigue have started getting in the way.
Here's to hoping there are more Paul Allens out there.
Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work deciding to shake down a huge chunk of the web in a cash grab really isn’t a good look.
> Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work
The shorter time it took to make his wealth the better it looks because less time means better efficiency.
It's not like you're entitled to wealth because of how long you've worked. This is an idea that has lead few to financial success I imagine. Privileges and salary based on time keeping a seat warm somewhere is a union/government thing, not a common private business policy. In private business it's about the value you create, and Paul Allen and the early Microsoft team ended up creating quite a bit and did so relatively quickly.
To understand parent's comment you have to remember that not everyone believe that wealth correlates with work, or that lottery winners are immensely efficient. Some believe instead that wealth frequently comes from nothing but luck. In this model, quick gain certainly suggest more luck.
Which model is more accurate? I guess the huge majority of the inhabitants trapped in this planet do not need to think too long about it.
Comparing courageous entrepreneurs forgoing the safe route and staking out a claim for themselves in their passion, finding success thereof to a winning lottery ticket is not becoming and speaks of a mind filled with jealous spite and ill manners.
He only worked there a couple of years, and before MS got big. Did he really deserve the same cut as the other two (who worked for 30+) did? Maybe/not, but the question is valid.
Yeah I feel like this is an underrated point. Does being there at the early years of a company justify a cut of an unfathomable fortune that took the other partners many, many more years to fully form? It’s not so cut and dry, especially when we’re talking about the kind of fortune being fought over.
If the other partners want more value in exchange for continuing to work for the company, they should negotiate for more shares in a dilution event.
If they expected 30 years of service in the first place, then they should've put a 30 year vesting term on the shares from the start.
There's no right answer, it really depends on what people want and negotiate for. I may expect to put in 5 years and then retire with whatever value we end up with. That's totally reasonable. Just because my partner decides at that point to keep working doesn't mean our deal is suddenly no longer valid.
That's why I say, if you want to change the deal halfway through you need to get the board to issue more shares.
The subject is well trodden now, of course. But, ask me in 1981 and I wouldn't have had much in the way of clue. My first intuition is that they should have bought him out at a nice premium at the time he left.
On the other hand, it is so bad a cool guy won a 100x lottery? Worse things have happened.
For an extension of that thought: does being there in the early days of a company justify a disproportionate cut compared to the people who then work for the company for the next thirty years?
> You don’t get to repair that karma with some donated vaccinations and mushy blog articles.
I'm sorry, but why don't you? He's literally saving millions of lives through his foundation, and through getting other billionaires to give to charity through the giving pledge.
He was the richest man in the world. He could have done anything he wanted to with his life, and he chose to do good things. He deserves some praise for that.
While he was a tough business person and sometimes may have done things that were borderline unethical, he never murdered anybody. He's certainly redeemable. And I think he has more than redeemed himself the past two decades for any of his past transgressions.
I agree he and the Gates Foundation do wonderful things, but I will Never be entirely comfortable with one person sitting on that much money. He is worth in the range of 100 billion dollars. 100 billion dollars.
He has promised to give half of it away but as far as I can tell is no closer to doing that since he first made the pledge. I really wonder sometimes if that pledge was just PR for the absurdly wealthy. No need to tax us! We will be giving it away! But when?
He is doing good things but there is no way I can look up to someone who sits on such an obscene amount of wealth.
Bill has been giving away billions. He's just also been earning like crazy too.
I forget where I read it, but when Jeff overtook Bill, there were various articles highlighting that Bill would still have been a lot richer if you accounted for how much he'd now put through the foundation.
So just because his market net worth hasn't gone down (in fact it's gone up a bit), it's not from him not yet giving money away.
Gates most recent comments about Android and how he deserved to win the mobile market show that his attitude never changed. He’s the same person with better PR and an ineffective foundation trying to wash his money and extend his influence.
“That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.” Interpret as you see fit. It comes off to me as if it was stated that the natural order meant it was deserved due to inherit superiority.
You guys are reading way too much into this. Its just an objectively true observation - not a declaration of "superiority". An OS company should win in the OS space.
I read that as more like "We're Microsoft, they're "Google"[Small fry]." Given the stature of the company, and the combined brain power of the staff it was their battle to lose
Especially given that prior to Android, Google was pretty
much just a web company whereas Microsoft had dominated the OS market pretty much the length of the entire personal computer industry. It WAS a natural thing for MS to win.
I think that's a very suspect use of "natural". Of course, many uses of "natural" are suspect, in that people smuggle all sorts of their personal prejudices into it. E.g., the way a number the Civil War declarations of secession mentioned how it was natural that whites should rule over blacks. Or the way today that religious conservatives think that the natural order is the dominance of men over women, and that gay people are unnatural.
Even in this case though, I don't think it means anything more than "we were so used to using our monopoly power to steamroll everybody that we expected to keep on doing that". Microsoft only ever dominated the personal desktop computer OS market. They were a minority player in server OSes their whole existence, losing first to big iron and later to Linux. The handheld market went from being owned by companies like Palm to Apple and Google dominating. I know less about the embedded market, but Microsoft has been trying to own that for 20 years, and I don't think they've ever had a dominant position. I think even their desktop OS dominance was less to do with Windows being an amazing operating system and more to do with it being the thing that ran Word, Excel, and other popular business software.
So I think tsunamifury is right. Gates got so comfortable winning he saw it as "natural", rather than a combination of luck and their willingness to be an aggressive monopolist in a newfangled industry and during a period where antitrust enforcement was falling out of vogue.
Or the way that modern progressives tend to skew everything towards race and class when a conversation is not even remotely about that, it seems like a natural thing for them.
It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.
Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.
You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.
I picked those examples because they're very prominent uses of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason that obvious examples in America are about things like race and class is that America was founded by a bunch of rich white dudes who wrote their systemic advantages into law, enforced them violently, and then tried to pretend it was just the natural order. If you don't like that, take it up with them. Were we in England, I could have used similar examples from the aristocracy and royalty, who thought their dominance was just as natural, but everybody else (we colonists included) thought were inbred, chinless goofs.
I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".
I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.
I think those who are defending Gates here naively believe they are of the same natural position, instead of realizing they are so far down they are more realistically his prey.
One thing I don’t understand is why both of these billionaires has named virtually every philanthropically effort after themselves by themselves while they were alive. It used to be the case that philanthropy was appreciated to be anonymous, or at least not outright ego boosters. It’s not that these billionaires would be forgotten if they didn’t insisted slapping their names on everything they funded. They are as it is massively ingrained in annals of humankind. If I was a billionaire and starting institute of cancer, for example, I would name it after unsung heros of the field who did not had billion dollars and sacrificed their entire lives without making buck only to benefit people, like, Faber Institute after Sydney Faber.
What do you mean used to be, how far back do you want to go?
What about the Nobel Prizes they were established in 1895.
What about Rockefeller and Carnegie?
It the same with universities and their donors. Donors essentially give millions to get a building or college named after them. For example, at the University of Texas, the business school is named after McCombs, someone who didn't even finish graduating. And the med school is named after Dell, another dropout.
As we know the Rockefeller Foundation, three generations from now Allen may be similarly known. Paraphrasing Horace Mann, Allen certainly created more than a few small victories for mankind.
Certainly we are thankful to him for cutting so many checks. However “funded” is better description than “created”. Creating something requires far more effort, time investment and expertise than giving someone sum of money.
My Dad, a DEC Technician, would come home and say "There are a couple teenagers from Seattle programming the BPA mainframes."
He then built a Heathkit home computer and taught me BASIC because "Paul and Bill can do it. So can you."
[1] https://www.bpa.gov/news/newsroom/Pages/Legacy-computer-syst...