Is Dolly Parton a billionaire? She has numerous assistance programs. I figure she wouldn’t be.

Swifties triggered.

There's vastly worse billionaires than Taylor Swift. Idk what Swifties on Lemmy you're trying to trigger. Thompson wasn't even billionaire but I'd say he was worse than Swift.

Empire is devaluing its currency so fast that we'll all be billionaires soon.

I know how to fix the economy!

After 1 million, you win at life so you can stop working and get a basic income with food included, housing, etc. You won, you don't get to play anymore. No w2 forms or banking or anything. If you buy something, the government just makes the funny money to pay for that which then means more jobs for those still playing the games. Big projects and big companies all public owned and only players get to work there and decide. Anyone who reaches the 1 Million mark gets kicked out into permanent retirement. Once you reach this level you get a party and you can invite anyone you want.

One benefit of winning is that you can be completely naked the entire time. Because why not. At your party you can request everyone to be naked too.

You can be married to a winner but you must keep working until you reach the 1million mark.

That's it!

Oh jeeze, you mentioned Swift in a meme. I feel sorry for your inbox.

What does Taylor spend money on? Since she's still a billionaire I'm guessing she doesn't give it all to charity.

I'm so so on this example specifically.

Most of Taylor's wealth is in the value of the rights to her songs. The liquid value she gets from those rights she is generally pretty generous with, she pays her employees very well and donated quite a bit of it.

That said, the bar is on the floor, and even a good billionaire is still pretty bad. She has much to improve

I think it's kind of stupid that we're defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default "well, that's too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!" metric we're using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that's not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don't control it, there's probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

No, my criticism isn't so much that billionaires aren't necessarily evil, because I think it's mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn't really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We've put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where's the cutoff, here? I'm sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what's actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that's the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a "not necessarily a billionaire" healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

Billionaire: "So if they don't exist anymore, I'm good? How many do I have to kill?"

The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I'm not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.

For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:

Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.

reference

Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

A more useful question to address homelessness would be "why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?"

$500/ticket at the show in Vancouver.

How much does she need to feel like that she won ?