Why do people considered politicians to be the most crooked people on the planet yet,

pentazoid

You will find people making endless donations to their campaigns and you find endless bumper stickers of politicians attached on the bumpers of cars, people becoming emotional at political rallies at the mere presence of a politician, even though the politician will not fullfill all of there campaign promises. You would even find posters of politicians on peoples walls, Obama being a recent example. Why won't you ever find posters of businessmen and bumper stickers of businessmen like we find bumperstickers of politicians? Businessmen provide far more for society than politicians , so I would think there would be greater appreciation for businessmen because they produced things we need and things we take for granted. Some may say that we do show appreciation for businessmen by paying thems for the goods that they produced. But we also pay the politicans we elect and they don't fullfill half of their promises once they are elected. However, typically most businesspeople provide quality products and therefore there consumers are satisfied most of the time. Businesspeople should be appreciated like Rock musicians are appreciated, since they both fullfill our desires. There should be of Bill Gates and Larry page bumperstickers everywhere!

LowlyPion

You mean like Ramalinga Raju bumper stickers?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...Ts&refer=india

Or Bernie Madeoff?

pentazoid

Wherever you find a shady businessmen , you will probably find a crooked politiician . Politicians enabled shady businesses to thrive unfairly because of the corporate subsidies they are given by politicians because of endless lobbying in Congress. I Didn't say businesspeople are all saints, I only said businesspeople offer a lot more to society , than politicians, and without businesspeople , products like cars would be only affordable to the superwealthy had Henry Ford not developed the assembly line that would make the production of cars cheap , and therefore affordable to the masses. Were it not for Bill gates, who envisioned personal computers in every home, computers probably would not have been in everyone's home.

LowlyPion

I certainly don't think that's true. Human nature is fallible. And businessmen and politicians succumb to their fallibilities likely in equal measure. But one doesn't necessarily enable the other.

That is just plain not true. Bill Gates took commercial advantage to create a monopoly and has profited handsomely as a result. The personal computer wasn't his vision. Printing money was however.

Don't tell me you think Al Gore invented the Internet too.

drankin

LP, you make Bill Gates out to be a crook. He is simply an entreprenuer that had a good, aggressive business plan. "Printing money" was not his vision it was a result of his marketing and business savy.

LowlyPion

I'm not suggesting that he was a crook. But neither was he the visionary that invented the PC when more than anything it would seem that his vision was more about how to make himself rich by creating, maintaining and extending his monopoly advantage. There's nothing wrong with being successful. Just in purloining this idea that people should be grateful for his vision, when his vision was clearly to enrich himself.

BoomBoom

I think his initial vision was to create a software interface to make the PC more user-friendly, and he certainly did that (and yes, I believe that was rather visionary).

Let's not forget how much Bill Gates invests into charitable causes (probably more than anyone else on Earth).

To paint him as some sort of money grubbing greedy bastard who is only interested in lining his own pockets is a little unfair.

jreelawg

If you knew him now, then you might take that back. Bill Gates is all about having humanitarian visions now days. He has one of the most successful charitable foundations in the world. When asked by a reporter if he would have to cut back on the charity because of the economy, he said that, though he would be making less, he would be donating more because more people are going to suffer.

pentazoid

Whats wrong with enriching yourself. Everybody on this earth is enriching themselves. Why would you put somebody else's desires above your own?

pentazoid

Politicians are worse than businesspeopl because they steal your earnings to invest in projects and programs that might have absolutely nothing to do with you such as the US taking 600 million dollars worth of taxpayer money and investing in projects like the Large Hadron collider. Granted , I am this fabulous accelerator will take us back 3 minutes into the big bang, but I am sure many people who are not interested in the LHC and therefore should not be forced to financed this projects. Whereas businesspeople don't coerce you into buying there product.People like Bill gates used persuasion rather than coercion to get people to buy his software.

TheStatutoryApe

The majority of programs out there are geared for (if not exclusively for) use with Windows and aside from Macs just about any laptop or home computer you buy will automatically come with Windows on it. Whether or not this is Gates' fault I do not know. I'm sure his investors want to make money and there are probably hundreds of people working on marketing whom Gates has never even spoken to. But to say that we are not coerced into using Windows is rather silly considering the circumstances.

drankin

Nobody is coerced into Windows. It's basically the only consumer operating system that works with everything (for the most part). There are plenty of free open source operating systems one could choose but that comes with a lot effort in order to get it to work with all your other hardware, peripherals, and the software you want to run. Microsoft did the work up front and created a platform that anyone can create software or a hardware product on. It is a "killer app". What people don't like is that there really isn't another choice.

LowlyPion

The value of scientific knowledge, I will leave to others to determine for themselves. It's true the low hanging fruit that can be worked out with common materials from a lab workbench have likely already been plucked. The value of the LHC ...? Manned trips to Mars ... ? Certainly the paybacks are less identifiable in monetary terms.

But as to Bill Gates, I'd say you are vastly mischaracterizing Microsoft's so called "persuasion" as they have leveraged their monopoly in operating systems to applications.

TheStatutoryApe

Coerce may seem a rather strong word, I agree, but that is generally what we consider a monopoly to be: coersing the consumer. And its not that Microsoft puts so much hard work into making an OS that is friendly to all hardware and software but rather that the near monopoly of the market that Microsoft enjoys means hardware and software companies must make their products Windows friendly above all else if they wish to be competetive and remain viable.

pentazoid

I don't really want this thread to focus on Bill Gates, but I want to addressed the person who said Microsoft is a monopoly and that Microsoft software is the only software on the market right now. I didn't think Linux and Macintosh utilized Microsoft software on their computers, so they must be using software that is not microsoft.

Anyway, Politicians or more powerful than businesspeople because otherwise businesspeople wouldn't ask for subsidies from the government if they wanted to wield power . They would be able to wield power all on their own.

LowlyPion

You would do well then not to lionize business people as humanitarians, when in the final analysis they are motivated by self interest and actualizing their commercial interests.

TheStatutoryApe

Lol.. you don't have to be so subtle about it! ;-)
And I didn't exactly say monopoly but that is certainly the accusation which has been around for some time. I'm not sure what to think about it myself.

I see two contending differences between businessmen and politicians:
1) Businessmen are "voted" on by consumers on a day to day basis while politicians stay in office at least for their term.
2) A businessman who finds him[her]self in a good situation can not be impeached/overthrown/fired with out significant harm done to thier comapany and hence investors, workers, ect.