I’m gonna say my top non fiction books are:

The Narnia series, who knew that lions could be found in seemingly ordinary closets! Wow!

Harry Potter series, if I had known about hogwarts before i went to college I would definitely have applied there.

And then probably Wikipedia, man there is a lot of info on that book

Make sure to sign the petition at the bottom of the mozilla report.

But it’s not free, is it? It’s paid for by the government via taxes and through donations. The only reason libraries are still free is because the cost to run them is very small and the amount of good that comes from them is very high.

I didn’t say that billionaires don’t have enough money, in fact I said the opposite if you reread however it was poorly worded from me. Gabe Newell is a billionaire off the back of Valve in the sense that he owns Valve which is a billion dollar company. Our views will differ and that’s obviously ok, but really Valve is the best example for my POV because it’s a company with lots of profit and a very small staff which means it can much more easily pay its staff a more than reasonable salary for their work. You can obviously argue that valve’s profits should be distributed more among the employees but this really comes down to the fundamental difference between Socialism and Capitalism and is something more than I am capable of arguing against since I do not have a postgraduate degree in Economics.

I personally prefer the Capitalistic view of whoever puts up the most risk gets the most reward if they succeed. How well this is done in practise is a very different matter, the government should definitely let business fail more often than they do [with the exception of the G-SIBs].

But I definitely believe that we should be looking to an increasingly socialist system as technology advances and jobs become less available.

I really appreciate your response to my comment and whole heartedly thank you for sharing your views on the matter :)

True, but also net worth isn’t somebody having money equivalent. I don’t really consider any net worth statistics to be reliable especially considering people who own private companies. There really is no way for them to gauge how much a privately owned company is worth and any attempts should be looked at with a very, very large grain of salt.

Obviously, the ideal situation for a platform like Steam (like pretty much everything else on the internet) is to be a big open source decentralised platform. But what we have now is really the second best thing you could ask for.

If Gabe Newell truly wanted to hoard wealth he could easily turn Valve into a publicly traded company and likely 10x his net worth in a matter of months and cash out. But he hasn’t (and this is speculation obviously) but I imagine it’s because he would rather keep his company and do what he loves than sell it and have even more money than someone could ever need across a thousand life times.

Any time someone mentions the net worth of someone who still actively runs a company like Mark Zuckerberg, it really quite annoys me because it is very very true that Billionaires have more money than is needed but it’s not like The Zuck just has $100bn in cash locked away in a safe, and it’s not like stock is completely useless pieces of paper that entitle people to have money. Taxation of wealth is a very difficult issue to solve and when you see sensationalist posts like this one it makes it look like a much simpler issue than it actually is.

There are lots of very, very smart people all across the world trying to find away to fairly tax billionaires and it is all well and good for us to comment about how something should be done. But, in my opinion, it’s like stating “look how many people die of heart disease every year! Why hasn’t someone stopped heart disease yet?”. Obviously it’s a bit of an exaggeration but taxation of wealth isn’t a trivial issue like many internet users would have you believe.

If I am wrong or you disagree with anything I have said here please please correct me, this is just my current knowledge and I am no expert and would very much like to learn if I have made any mistakes. Thank you :)

I don’t think warren buffet belongs in this group, he has made almost all his money only via his investments in other companies. He hasn’t actively done anything to screw over others. And there are definitely a few other cases where someone has a high net worth and hasn’t really done anything wrong. Gabe Newell owns Valve and forbes estimate his net worth to be around $3-4bn but Valve is a private company that makes games and has a marketplace for other game makers. You could argue that Valve promotes gambling via cases in games but thats really the extent of the bad things Valve has done.