As of 01/20/19, the richest six American tech leaders (Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page, Brin) averaged over $80 billion in net worth. Meanwhile, the 25 million Americans just above the median, many of them teachers, have an average net worth of $78 thousand. That's a difference of a million times.
For anyone questioning this disturbing truth, the following information should be helpful: There are over 4 million preschool, primary, secondary, and special education teachers; the median teacher age is 41; the median elementary school salary is $57,000; the median wealth of a 41-year-old is only $60,000. So it's probably even worse than a million to one. Consider also that about 77 percent of teachers are female, and that females suffer the discrimination of lower wealth, especially Black and Hispanic women, for whom net worth is in the low HUNDREDS.
The Los Angeles teachers are striking for better pay, smaller class sizes, the addition of nurses and counselors, and the ending of the rash of charter school openings that suck the lifeblood out of the public school system. They could also be striking for a fairer wealth distribution. A technology boss is not a million times more important than an L.A. teacher.
Bill Gates was lucky and opportunistic. Gates didn't invent the PC operating system, and any history that says he did is wrong. Gates provided an OS based on Gary Kildall's CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property law for software had not yet been established.
The late Steve Jobs spoke for the industry: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." The biggest expense in the iPhone is the touchscreen, which was developed at the CERN laboratories in Europe.
Mark Zuckerberg also took his ideas from others. Zuckerberg developed his version of social networking while he was at Harvard. Before he made his contribution, Columbia University students Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting built a system called Campus Network, which was much more sophisticated than the early versions of Facebook.
Jeff Bezos built his business with the extraordinary advantage of minimally-taxed sales on Amazon to offer discounts while undercutting competitors, pushing many of them out of business. Bezos spent millions of dollars per year on lobbyists, deployed an army of lawyers, and cultivated political allies with large campaign contributions.
Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, their company has gained recognition as one of the world's biggest tax avoiders, a master at the "Dutch Sandwich" and "Double Irish" global tax games. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model.
Capitalism is a perfect system for people like this, who care only about making more money than everyone else, and fail to grasp the importance of a healthy, working society.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/21/capitalist-style-wealth-gap-1-tech-guy-1000000-teachers
For anyone questioning this disturbing truth, the following information should be helpful: There are over 4 million preschool, primary, secondary, and special education teachers; the median teacher age is 41; the median elementary school salary is $57,000; the median wealth of a 41-year-old is only $60,000. So it's probably even worse than a million to one. Consider also that about 77 percent of teachers are female, and that females suffer the discrimination of lower wealth, especially Black and Hispanic women, for whom net worth is in the low HUNDREDS.
The Los Angeles teachers are striking for better pay, smaller class sizes, the addition of nurses and counselors, and the ending of the rash of charter school openings that suck the lifeblood out of the public school system. They could also be striking for a fairer wealth distribution. A technology boss is not a million times more important than an L.A. teacher.
Bill Gates was lucky and opportunistic. Gates didn't invent the PC operating system, and any history that says he did is wrong. Gates provided an OS based on Gary Kildall's CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property law for software had not yet been established.
The late Steve Jobs spoke for the industry: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." The biggest expense in the iPhone is the touchscreen, which was developed at the CERN laboratories in Europe.
Mark Zuckerberg also took his ideas from others. Zuckerberg developed his version of social networking while he was at Harvard. Before he made his contribution, Columbia University students Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting built a system called Campus Network, which was much more sophisticated than the early versions of Facebook.
Jeff Bezos built his business with the extraordinary advantage of minimally-taxed sales on Amazon to offer discounts while undercutting competitors, pushing many of them out of business. Bezos spent millions of dollars per year on lobbyists, deployed an army of lawyers, and cultivated political allies with large campaign contributions.
Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, their company has gained recognition as one of the world's biggest tax avoiders, a master at the "Dutch Sandwich" and "Double Irish" global tax games. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model.
Capitalism is a perfect system for people like this, who care only about making more money than everyone else, and fail to grasp the importance of a healthy, working society.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/21/capitalist-style-wealth-gap-1-tech-guy-1000000-teachers
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