Like most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.
They need to regularly take a shit, like everybody else. They just use more expensive toilet paper I suppose.
Except at their offices where they but the thinnest 1 ply air they possibly can.
If anything, I have ever so slightly less problems with billionaires like Gabe Newell (Valve ceo) since he's doing something constructive (proton/steam deck) that, while it does absolutely help line his pockets, is still helpful to people who play games.
Though on a moral level I personally feel not allowed to like him because he's a billionaire. That sentiment is spread across all billionaires for me. Either way, in general I don't like them because 99.9999999% of all billionaires do as much as possible to fuck over literally everyone else.
I feel like there are billionaires in the world who manage to be rich without damaging society (or being the society).
If there's one example then there's no excuse for all the others to behave the way they do..
If all billionaires are the same then it's past time to question why we have to put up with them
It depends on the billionaire.
Honestly, I try not to think about them. It's an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they've got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I'm not going to do it for free.
I under stand the human desire to compete in wealth as a [genitalia] measuring contest, but there should probably be a cap somewhere...
Maybe a cap at somewhere between 500K and $10Mil, I'm not sure where, but someone else fancy enough to write laws should maybe figure it out... cuz any amount higher kinda make no sense.
Oh and redistribute the excess as a UBI that everyone would get.
I don't like the bandwagon of "kill billionaires". Like why need to kill when we can just seize excess funds that they don't need and redistribute, everyone can just chill.
500k is absurdly low these days to be considered rich. Thats like a house in the midwest, or around half a house in cali
Unless the real estate bubble pops, which I have no faith in happening anytime soon.
I mean like, I said somewhere between 500K to 10Mil. I'm no expert, but maybe someone experienced in the economy would decide where to draw the line.
Medium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.
Seems logical if there was a law that the average worker had to be paid a percentage of what the top people get paid. I thought that Japan had something like this.
Same as that guys from yesterday. I would prefer a guillotine, but You gotta work with whatcha got.
Fuck 'em all to death.
In terms of scale, from the person at the top making xxx times the person at the bottom, they've likely always been around.
"Robber Baron" is the ye olde term.
Google tells me John D. Rockefeller peaked at around $1.4 billion in 1937. 1.5% of US GDP.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47167
The average wage in 1937 was $890 a year.
https://time.com/archive/6760420/personnel-above-average/
So Rockefeller, at his death, had amassed as much wealth as 1,573,034 average people would earn in a year.
In order to hit 1.5% of current US GDP (27.36 trillion), Bezos or Musk would have to hit 410.4 billion. That's how wealthy Rockefeller was.
1.2 Musks. 2 Bezoses.
The easiest way to identify enemies of freedom and liberty. Count their net worth.
I'm always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a "billion" is, we know how many 0's it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.
Not good
Conflicted. I'll give you my top 4 considerations.
Don't know them, don't care about them.
Is this a joke topic?
Too much power
Their an abomination. An exploitation of a system that values exponential growth more than inherent human values. In a world where public infrastructure is collapsing and there's homeless people on tbe street, individuals should not be able to amass such absurd wealth only for their own self enrichment.
Abolish with prejudice
I have no problems with billionaires, in a society where everyone's a millionaire.
A society that allows for such wealth disparity to happen is deeply corrupt. Anyone who not only participates in that society, but voluntarily becomes the cause of such disparity is irreparably morally bankrupt. They are a burden on society, contributing millions of times less than what they take.
That's still a pretty wild wealth gap, though. The difference between one million and one billion is about a billion.
That's a very poor way of comparing wealth. For example, the difference between $1,000 and $1,000,000,000 is also about a billion, but $1,000 is 0.0001% of $1,000,000,000 while $1,000,000 is %0.1
Buying power is not linear in today's world, either; at best, it's logarithmic. Because the law of diminishing returns is a thing, you can sink as much labor (and value) into goods and services as you want, and the quality will eventually reach an asymptote: it will approach perfection, but never get there. This means that in general, the difference between what millionaires and billionaires can afford is measured in quantity and not quality: billionaires can afford 100 yachts or one megayacht, but millionaires can still afford one of those near perfect yachts. Billionaires can afford many mansions, millionaires can still afford at least one. The millionaires have more in common with the billionaires than they do the average incomers ($60,000/yr in the USA). I make 3/4 of the average income, but I'd be lucky to afford a used jetski, much less anything resembling a yacht.
Put another way, in a society where everyone's a millionaire, the richest possible billionaire is 1,000,000 times more wealthy than the poorest possible person, and the average billionaire is only 1,000 times more wealthy than the average millionaire. Whereas right now, they are infinitely more wealthy than the poorest person, and the poorest possible billionaire is still 17,000 times more wealthy than the average person in the US.
So what I was originally getting at is that the mere fact of billionaires existing can only approach some semblance of morality in a society where their wealth doesn't put them on an entirely different plane of existence from the poorest people.
I support billionaire behaviour fully
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
in the (translated) Words of Knorkator:
The world doesn't need billionaires imagine how beautiful it would be without you! Empathy and reason instead of greed and scam fresh air, green forests, clean seas.
The world doesn't need billionaires and we will even achieve this without guns: No, we won't kill you and we won't imprison you, on the opposite: you will be millionaires!
Leeches. Fuck em.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
