I mean when wealth reaches levels beyond material comfort, needs, and wants, when it becomes easy to warp society. Billionaire’s lifestyles doesn’t change AT ALL between 1 billion and 2, its about expanding power. That is what capital becomes at those levels.
Politicians swoon over you for “donations” (bribes), you begin to see regulations over the industry you exploit your profit from as amendable through lobbyists you can hire to represent your interests over society. Meanwhile that billionaire’s factory workers, customers concerned with product safety, our shared commons, and our communal environment have no advocates with such massive influence to counter them, when the needs of the many shouldn’t just balance the needs of the interests of the wealthy few at the top, they should far outweigh them. As it is, its the other way around. The billionaires have the resources to take care of themselves and protect themselves, most of society does not.
No one should have enough wealth to have more influence over society than your single vote allows. If you want more power, that should come by selling your ideas to society that votes on them by putting you into a political office, with ALL of the rules and accountability that comes with that office.
The White House and Senate often invites the billionaires of industries to be the authority on how those industries should be regulated, and it’s perverse. The Foxes advising on hen house security.
I love how so many of them demand love and acclaim for claiming they will give their money away… when they die.
You want me to sing your praises because you won’t use the money you made exploiting countless laborers and lobbying government to benefit yourself above society to anoint a handful of nepo babies to wield that power after you as some part of a new nepo dynasty? Gee thanks?
Its like a serial killer promising not to train his children in the family business. Its not doing good, just doing slightly less bad. Except billionaires cause damage on a far greater scale.
Which is why the absurdity of letting someone accumulate a billion dollar plus discrepancy is so glaring.
There won’t be because the game is already rigged, over, captured, and hoplesss, but there needs to be a maximum net worth at which point the winners of the economy’s excess wealth is siphoned away to benefit the society that provided the conditions for that success in the first place. YOU WON! Now go enjoy having enough wealth to live 100 embarrassingly gluttonous lifetimes while we use the excess millions and billions to build Schools you can send your kids to and roads you can drive your collection of multimillion dollar supercars on. I know, I know, that would be eviiil and crueeel. A real victimization amirite? /s
Why is it a tragedy if the maximum wealth one person can hold is half a billion? Or better 100 million? They won’t want to keep “excelling” and working? Awesome, makes room for people without that kind of money to succeed.
There’s a damn good reason in game design why you NEED to have drains and hard limits and maximums in any multiplayer economy. The game would fucking break or leave players miserable. But not here irl where there are actual stakes. Nope.
With elections that monied interests can no longer purchase and disproportionately propagandize with their essentially limitless power/capital.
They have politicians work against the people, then buy enough ad propaganda to convince people that was a good decision in their interests without that, politicians would rise and fall moreso on what they do in office.
We are the weird ones in the developed world for allowing unlimited private money to pollute our politics, elections, and even buy sitting politicians though legalized political bribery superpacs. It got this way because of the influence of the wealth class being allowed in the first place using that in to expand its own power and ability to bribe, culminating in Citizens United.
I think our eventual collapse will be tied directly to that SCOTUS decision.
You’re right, but We’ll get what we deserve when it comes to that.
The one thing the greedy tech bastardizers have never been able to do is shut down, not for lack of trying, the benevolent open source and human knowledge belongs to the world movements. The seven seas are still free and the most motivated thinkers are still the open source ones, matey.
They have nothing that isn’t already being extrapolated and tinkered with on private servers. If they use the soon to come AGI to make the peasant’s lives even more bleak, they might not like the damage in kind that can be done with some militant engineer’s homebrew anti-cap AGI. What could that do? Engineer a plague? Mass delete banking records? Who knows but it’s increasingly likely we’ll find out!
If wealthy “winner” humans continue to insist on making most humans live’s increasingly desperate, solely because they are never getting richer fast enough and without regard to the concept of Mutually assured destruction, then our species will have to experience the inevitable consequences of that choice. They have the capital, so its on them.
He would love to muse about these times as he did so well, but he abandoned hope for humanity getting it’s head out of its ass decades before he died. Can’t say as I blame him, he was right about our nature. A person is great. People clumping up in groups in groups end in blood, cruelty, and tears on a long enough timeline.
I would take solace in those musings as well though.
I don’t know. I’d take explaining a complex concept to a 6 year old over a 70 year old any day. A 70 year old will probably rely on faded memories that have over time become wholly corrupted from disuse, yet still leaned upon, adding an extra layer of having to correct what they “know.” They may give you a head start on a few sub-concepts/aspects of the concept, but in my experience working with A LOT of seniors in a former Master’s level helping profession, you’re far more likely to make faster progress with a 6 year old, and far more often then not for an elderly person, you’ll hit an insurmountable road block of understanding if it’s a concept they were never familiar with.
With effort, patience and available time, you could teach an 6 year old of average intelligence significant aspects of calculus reliably. I would wager the average 70 year old whose career was never math centric, with only faded memories of minimally complex algebra, would take multiple times as long to do the same, if at all. The elasticity for new complex anything is extremely limited, outliers who have maintained some flexibility through uncommon determination and regular, vigorous mental exercise notwithstanding.
If you want to play really hard against the entrenched capitalists in a rousing game of “I win,” knock yourself out, but be aware, they always get to go first.
Literally what the board game Monopoly tried to teach everyone. No one else is having fun once someone gets their claws into the board.
The least losing move in this already owned board is to engage with the game as little as possible and make your own fun as far away from that shitshow con-game encouraging you to play as possible.
As humanity has found yet another way to pass the buck, it’ll be interesting to see the diminishing returns of LLMs as they begin to feed more and more on derivative content made by LLMs.
Say what you will about Sauron of Mordor, but at the end of the day he was just acting in rational self-interest, making big moves, was all in on expansion and growth, and no one can argue he was a hell of a job creator.
Then some jobless tree hugger from a commune in the woods killed him AND destroyed his private property just because Sauron wanted to develop that land and put those communists to work. Damn eco-terrorists sabotaging progress.
Fair, though I more meant the people who are effective asexuals because they were taught to be ashamed of sexuality in general and deny any sexual desire they have with vigorous effort to feel “pure.”
That’s a whole lot different than someone who just doesn’t really have those impulses. The former is an act and they have my pity because of how such people are usually raised/abused to be in a constant state of conflict and hatred of their own impulses, the latter is a completely valid identity.
It’s an unprecedented – and massive – experiment: Since 2017 the U.S.-based charity GiveDirectly has been providing thousands of villagers in Kenya what’s called a “universal basic income” – a cash grant of about $50, delivered every month, with the commitment to keep the payments coming for 12 years. It is a...
Just as with climate change, they’ll just keep shifting back and forth between “but there’s nothing wrong” to “it’s too expensive to implement this solution” to “Just give us a few years, we’ll come up with something better” in order to derail the argument because the point is to maintain the status quo.
The poorer the poorest are, the richer the wealth class feels by comparison. Inequality, separating the capital society generates from said society into the owner class’s private accounts, is the entire point of capitalism.
Why would capitalists want to mitigate the central social ill they literally engineered for their explicit, sole benefit?
I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn’t exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I’m not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I’m talking about self proclaimed “developed” nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life’s purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn’t have it any other way.
ZAP (slrpnk.net)
which ones do you think I missed? (discuss.tchncs.de)
image transcription:...
Scientists discover first new antibiotics in over 60 years using AI (www.euronews.com)
A fair trade (startrek.website)
Krampus - Sarah's Scribbles (Sarah Andersen) (64.media.tumblr.com)
Sources:...
chill dude (slrpnk.net)
I know some of y'all can relate (lemmy.world)
On the sixth day of Trek-mas, (lemmy.world)
SUBMIT ENTRIES FOR DAY 7 HERE! “SEVEN JEFFREY COMBS”...
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You don't actually have to assemble these things (sopuli.xyz)
Education - It's about to get wild (lemmy.zip)
Got a moment? (i.imgur.com)
"Who are my senators?", "What is a gyatt?", "How do you microwave ramen?" (startrek.website)
No! No! I don't want to conduct performance reviews! You can't make me! (slrpnk.net)
It's one of the biggest experiments in fighting global poverty. Now the results are in (www.npr.org)
It’s an unprecedented – and massive – experiment: Since 2017 the U.S.-based charity GiveDirectly has been providing thousands of villagers in Kenya what’s called a “universal basic income” – a cash grant of about $50, delivered every month, with the commitment to keep the payments coming for 12 years. It is a...
POV: you're American (lemmy.world)
Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of. (startrek.website)
Introverts unite (separately)! (lemmy.zip)