- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 31.7 years.
Just a good way to ground an unimaginable number in something more familiar and drive home how ridiculous having a billion dollars is. I hear we’re on track for our first batch of trillionaires this decade.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Yes, that includes Gabe Newell and the Costco guy.
I mean dont you dare generalize a group of people unless they’re people the echo chamber agrees not to like.
Gabe proves there are less-bad billionaires though
Eh, I feel like everyone in the billionaire club is playing a slow game of poker trying to get the first “trillionaire” title. I’m expecting that when Gabe shows his hand it will be revealed that his fleet of yachts is also equipped with luxuries such as nuclear armaments.
Gabe’s net worth hasn’t increased as far as I’m concerned. I think the bad billionaires would typically be those who obsess with growing their net worth assets.
George Soros?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros
“As of October 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion,[9][10] having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations,[11] of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune.”
This is great, but he still tanked the UK economy to make his fortune, didn’t he?
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It’s like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you … but you’d rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it’s a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
Sir/ma’am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
There are many responses. Not all of them are right
No, they are right.
All the many responses.
Just not right -in this circumstance-
Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy … a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
I hope they all get cancer and.die just slow enough.
General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
When you do it, I’ll do it. But I’m not wasting my life if it’s not a community effort.
Been on strike since the election. Come join me!
It’s not just me, there are others.
My industry doesn’t strike. It wouldn’t work. BUT I hope that all works out for you.
However, striking only works for so long. And, with Trump as president, I doubt there will be much striking allowed once he changes those laws or just replaces you with people from the concentration camp.
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Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
Gabe Newell. Costco guy. Im sure theres europeans as well.
Oh theres communist billionaires too, im sure stalin and lenin and chinese ones were wery respectful of the working class, never had a genocide where up to 20% of the population (that is one in every five. Every fifth post in this thread, gone) were killed for not being the right nationality. And they never exploited entire nations forcefully.
But its okay, fuck everyone in a certain group, dehumanize them and talk about violence against them because a few do bad things. Surely the solution is not to use it to fuel political anti campaign to swing the pendulum hard in the other way by limiting power rich can have in the us via providing the myriad of evidence we already have.
No instead sit on internet and make literal hitler speeches where you replace the word “jews” with “rich” and wonder why everyone thinks far left and right are the same Nazis
And even then, if they managed to amass that kind of wealth, it had to come from somewhere, i.e. consumers paying enough for their product that it made them a billionaire, meaning all these people found have paid less and that billionaire could be a millionaire or just middle class and more people would be richer.
The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
Yes, even that one
I don’t have a problem with open lobbying per se. If it’s on behalf of all of the workers and customers as well and not just their own interests.
But can anyone identify such a billionaire?
And by definition that rules out any that step on their workers like bugs…
What about Warren Buffet? Out of genuine interest.
While he certainly comes across as one of the more virtuous billionaires, his company Berkshire Hathaway, has massive investments in some of the worst and most damaging industries in the world, in terms of labor exploitation and ongoing contributions to the climate disaster. For example, his company owns 6.6% of Chevron and 27.2% of Occidental Petroleum, two massive exploiters of fossil fuels. That’s no good in my book.
Taylor Swift?
Nope. That amount of wealth is only generated via exploitation. Exploiting workers or exploiting customers, or cutting corners and skirting regulations, failing to internalize externalities. Mostly all of the above
I assume you have examples?
I love how swifties always say, “WhAt AbOuT tAyLoR?!”
And I say this as someone who loves her music.
She’s still a bad billionaire.
EVEN IF she paid everyone who works for her or her label above market rate, even if she charged her concert tickets below market value, even if she “goes green” with every CD, every piece of merchandise, the fact that she has more money than most people makes her a bad billionaire.
She could easily give half of her wealth away and still be okay.
She’s a bad billionaire.
Some people think all profit is “stolen” labor value, and thus all wage labor is exploitation. I don’t think that’s true, but it is true that all for-profit firms have an incentive to pay their workers as little as possible, while getting as much productivity from them as possible, because that will maximize profits.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to cut other costs as much as possible, to maximize profits. This is why we see things like shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, or products just getting gradually crappier over time.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to externalize certain costs, like pollution, environmental destruction, or resource depletion, to, once again, maximize profits.
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value, which is stolen from them for the owners and shareholders.
To be fair to Taylor she is producing a show, but the wealth should be fairly distributed with the crew that make those performances possible
Unless her financials are public, it’ll be hard to do but the general principle is that everyone’s labour is worth the same.
She’s able to get more money through manipulation, whether intending to or not, through her fans buying multiples of her merchandise, to playing her songs on Spotify non stop to boost her profits etc.
Applying this principle, she’s gaining profit from the work of her fans who aren’t getting any compensation for their labour, resulting in millions of dollars.
That wealth is the spilled blood of the working class
money is both power and violence
There is no need for billionaires. They have more money than they know what to do with and could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it. There’s literally no reason in hoarding all that money if you’re not going to spend it. It’s a necessity for literally everyone else while they hold onto it to make themselves more powerful. If all the billionaires were hoarding all the food and we had to deal with the scrapes, people would be going absolutely crazy. Even though that’s pretty much exactly what they are doing when people can’t make enough money to buy food. Throw everything else like medical care and housing into the mix and what you end up with is a few people living a life of luxury while they are literally keeping your life away from you.
One single billion at any one time is more than any one person should have. There really should just be a cap. Like, 999,999,999 is the highest your bank account can get, anything after that just flows into public programs.
The game Zelda: A link to the past had a max capacity of 999 rupees (money). If you picked up more, nothing happened. That’s how life should be.
What happens when something already owned grows in value past the arbitrary maximum? Net worth is, after all, a function of how valuable everyone else thinks the stuff you own is. It’s a price tag.
If you buy a rookie baseball card for $5, and he has a great year and now your card is worth $100, did you deprive anyone of $95 by continuing to own it?
I’m not super concerned with “things” and their value. If a person makes $1b a year and wants to buy a $1b yacht every year then they have a bunch of yachts. The point is that money went back into the economy. Now, if they have 2 and want to sell 2 for $2b all at once… sorry, no. There is a wealth cap.
The issue with Billionaires now is that money isn’t in the economy. The more they hold, the harder it is to get enough.
Greed is a horrible thing.
Maybe they could use 32-bit twos complement arithmetic so if you have $2147483647 and you add one more dollar, suddenly you have NEGATIVE $2147483648. When you call customer service, they tell you that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Heh heh.
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It’s just not that simple.
My proof that ethical billionaires don’t exist is that there’s a line (I usually like to set it at 10 million due to living in a very high CoL area) beyond this line you will never need more money in your life. Money will no longer improve your standard of living and your savings are enough to ride out life in comfort.
When you reach or approach this line you have two options:
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Look at everyone you’re working with and help them reach that line - if you’ve accomplished that then start lowering the costs of your business to customers to help your customers reach that line.
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Squeeze harder so you get more money and everyone around you gets fucked.
If you chose #2 you are a fucking asshole. You cannot become a billionaire[1] except by choosing #2. You have actively chosen to push down those around you so you can watch number go up.
- The exception here is inheritance though someone with a sizable inheritance also has questions about using it to help those around them and, IMO, the estate tax should be near 100% and we should ensure that everyone has as equal a shot at life as we can. I loathe inheritance of wealth as a general concept though some things like having a family home are obviously pretty meaningful to a lot of people.
Well, inflation has made that more than 10 million, but yes I agree there is a number that says “I own a huge mansion, 10 cars, a yacht, and I eat caviar every meal.” That number is significantly less than a billion without having to work a day more.
The premise that merely having more than you need is inherently unethical is completely arbitrary, doubly so when only applied to those who have the most.
I live a fairly simple and frugal lifestyle. The amount of money where I am living at the standard of living and want, and my “savings are enough to ride out life in comfort”, is likely a much lower number than most others in the US.
Does that make me more ethical than those others? I don’t believe so.
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We should feed them to the orca
