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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 30 2017, @11:12PM (3 children)
There are far more empty homes than there are homeless people
There's 7.5 billion people on the planet. 100 million of them are homeless [homelessworldcup.org]
About 50-60% of food is destined not for somebody's belly but the garbage bin.
More like 30% but I agree that's a problem. [fao.org]
There are massive surpluses of clothing all over the world
Never even heard of this one. Google hasn't either.
The per-capita income of the world is about $12,500 per person
Nope, $2920 [gallup.com]
$12,500 per person, which is above the US poverty line.
Partial credit. Does not apply to Alaska or Hawaii. [hhs.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 30 2017, @11:57PM
There are massive surpluses of clothing all over the world
Never even heard of this one.
I have.
Google hasn't either
Wanna bet? [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:04PM
There are far more empty homes than there are homeless people
There's 7.5 billion people on the planet. 100 million of them are homeless
To be fair, you haven't refuted his point at all. You didn't look at how many empty residences there are. There's a lot of empty houses in rural parts of America that people have abandoned (whether they're habitable is another matter), and a lot of vacant properties on the market. There's also a lot of properties that are just being sat on by investors. It's such a huge problem in Vancouver Canada that they passed a big tax on it; Chinese investors were buying up properties and sitting on them as a store of value, and not bothering to rent them out because that's too much work and they didn't need the rental income. It's also a problem in NYC; I read about how many of the buildings in Times Square are sitting vacant because they simply rent out the side of the building to put LED signs on, and leave the interiors empty because they don't want the hassle of dealing with tenants (either residential or commercial).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 01 2017, @06:56PM
US: 18 million vacancies.
Europe: 11 million vacancies.
China: 55 million vacancies.
India: 10 million vacancies.
Brazil: 6 million vacancies.
And I'm already at 100 million, and haven't even looked at most of the world yet.
The per-capita income is the mean average income, which I calculated by taking the $78 trillion or so the world produced (per the World Bank) and dividing it by my guess of 6.5 billion people in the world - if we accept your 7.5 billion people in the world, then the number shifts to $10,400, which means we're not quite as well off but still much closer to my number than your number.
That vast difference between the mean and median gives you an idea of how unequal the economy really is.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.