- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
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.
You do know that billionaires don’t actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don’t lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what’s good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let’s start somewhere.
A billion dollars distributed to 1,000,000 people is $1000.
All the wealth billionaires in the US hold is not enough to pay for the government to run for one year.
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Youre not talking about running the government, which isnt really expensive, youre talking about the whole country. “10 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”.
Can you reflect on how fucking ridiculous this statement is?
Whats next? “Elon Musk cant even buy a planet, hes not that rich”
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Let’s not pretend that assets work like cash.
What makes more sense in a society? One person who controls a billion dollars or a thousand people with million dollars?
The billionaire locks up all that wealth and it doesn’t do anything for anyone … sure it might make someone even more money but it essentially locks away that potential wealth from a larger group of people.
If you had 1,000 millionaires, then they would all go out to perform all kinds of other activities and businesses that would be smaller but at least benefit even more people.
Driving wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people only drives more and more wealth to fewer people while everyone else suffers.
Redistributing millions or billions of dollars might not change much … but at the very least it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The billionaires have their wealth in businesses, it’s not locked up. People don’t just put a billion in a savings account
If the people saying “kill all ceos” understood the basics of how a world worked or were past their edgy teens, they would also be smart enough not to grab for violence against entire groups as a first resort. Yes suck, hitlermelon, mexican currency and everyone running the american health insurance companies are not good people, obviously. That means society and laws must change to treat them as equals and to tax ultra rich more while removing money as a tool of influence from politics. I can’t see anyone not getting behind that.
But idunno, I see people going “all ceos, landlords and rich are stinkin fukin evil, kill em all”. Idk seems kinda violent and totalitarian. Seems like theyd want me dead too since I dont like them killing people they define as needing to be killed. Idunno, makes me not want to respect any of them or their political beliefs or their side.
Y’all see how you are actively giving fuel for the right? And now looking at the centrist threads, driving away people who dont like extremes by labling them as the enemy?
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
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-
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
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
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
That is kind of true. But on the assumption that the corporation (in this case Costco) is doing more good than bad, like generating fair jobs, it would benefit most to see that business grow. If you dont generate profit because you distribute everything to your employees or customers, you will never be able to grow. So Costco will stay with 10 employees forever and only those businesses that exploit workers and customers can grow.
You could argue that there is really no need for businesses to grow as big ss many are today and I would completely agree, but that has to be regulated by law.
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.
So the defining factor is her work, not her staff. Her staff doing the same work at another place wouldn’t generate the same profit. And if you think listening to songs on Spotify is work…
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?
From the Wiki, yeah:
“Soros is known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” as a result of his short sale of US$10 billion worth of pounds sterling, which made him a profit of $1 billion, during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.”
But who do you hate more? Billionaires or bankers? ;)
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.
Billionaires don’t have 1 billion in their bank account
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.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with you on your point, I just want to add that we have a system of cronyism. The taxpayers of a country (more specifically, the US) spend, say, $60 billion to feed an underdeveloped African country or area. The trick is, the politicians have made sure that the money goes to specific contractors. Who have no investment in using the money to solve the problem. Their business model is now not to fix something, it’s to make sure the program stays funded so they can keep getting $60b to do $3b worth of work with $2b worth of materials and make a profit and donate to more political campaigns to keep doing this on a greater scale. That $60b directly applied with government labor and government supervision would have worked. But cronyism prevented it at every step.
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:
-
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.
-
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.
You can’t own a yacht with 10 million
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.
-
I hope they all get cancer and.die just slow enough.
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.
I don’t care to hear about any reasoning about “bad” vs “good” billionaire nonsense. There are people in the world that need immediate access to food and shelter, but won’t get either largely due to billionaire cunts hoarding the wealth to try and get a top score into the history books.
It’s a class of people that shouldn’t have come into existence. Their being is a strain on the rest of humanity and nature in general.
I’m not defending all billionaires, but there is nothing wrong having net worth of at least a billion because the assets came from your own company. What is more questionable is how can someone go over one billion worth of assets.
We should feed them to the orca
