721
Mentally unwell hoarders
Absolutely obscene.
this should be illegal
One billion should have been illegal.
Agreed
Every developed nation should tax these motherfuckers' entire assets at 99%. If they want to flee with all of their money to Honduras or Haiti or something, let them enjoy that paradise.
I mean, the issue is getting all nations to agree to that and making any agreement binding because otherwise the nation that decides to tax them at 98% gets all of the tax revenue...
I'd be fine with just taking them out of the entire system. Like I said, let them live in a place like Haiti if they want to be rich and keep them out of the rest of our lives. Let them build themselves a Dracula castle in Port-au-Prince.
They're not going to go to Haiti though, they're going to go to Monaco or Switzerland or Ireland or The Netherlands. That's my point, for this to work all of the "developed" nations need to agree despite having a massive financial incentive not to.
98% of... what? Billionaires don't get a paycheck like working people. They're already sitting on all that wealth! If they spend money, it's buying something once like a football team or Twitter and waiting until the value goes up before selling it. Same thing with stocks. And those realized gains are taxed lower than payroll taxes. They even take out unneeded loans like Trump just to avoid paying taxes! There's a reason people say the rich pay less taxes than us...
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That assumes national borders mean anything to this class. They travel by private plane and go directly from the tarmac to the car. They don't even need passports.
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When money is used in society as security for basic rights like a home, food and clean water, healthcare, political representation in government, then people hoarding wealth at the detriment of others are responsible and shouldn't be surprised when those same people they oppress become violent.
This is why they are shoveling so much money into loyal robots.
Bullets don't care about your net worth
Drones are extremely cheap.
I just wanna say that Zimbabwe had trillionaires before it was cool.
The fact that we even have billionaires (and they should not be a thing. The notion of a trillionaire is even more fucking atrocious) is probably why donvict and elon are assuming power right now.
Without the broligarchs and their thumb heavily on media, both "legacy" and not, do you think there would be so very many stupid people willing to vote for the convicted felon?
and yet, no one will stop using their services.
only way I see an option to not is to live similar to Amish lifestyles in the US, but even then, I assume AWS, Meta and Alphabet can make some money off their existence through satellites and IP cameras
I don't disagree with you and not arguing not to be aware of individual actions. it just seems the situation is more dire than just not giving them our money or data
Even if every single person stopped using them. They would still be billionaires, and still be making money by other means.
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Unfortunately I don't have a viable alternative for some goods from Amazon without a good price increase because local sellers up the price on top of the import fees.
On the bright side, I don't shop there often and it's mostly limited to electronics.
Your local sellers are probably buying from Amazon and marking up, then.
Jesus Christ, I'm getting hungry! When do we eat?
Simply famished
Shopping list for this year:
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AR-15
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Any 9mm pistol
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Semtex
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Military surplus gear
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Toyota Tacoma
I mean, there is a way to cure billionaires and prevent trillionaires. Several cures, actually, some of which are likely more palatable than others.
Billionaire wealth surges to 'unimaginable' levels in 2024 as Oxfam predicts emergence of five trillionaires within a decade
It's less impressive when you realize that much, if not most, of that wealth isn't "real." The vast majority of that wealth is in corporate stock, and the value of the stock is based on a lot of speculation. How much of that trillions of dollars in corporate stock will ever be converted to cash? Who knows, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being only a small portion, and well less than a trillion dollars.
Whether their wealth is real or not apparently doesn't prevent them from buying themselves politicians, ruining the environment and keeping everybody's wages stagnant.
I didn't say all of their wealth is fake. Much of their wealth is very "real."
I guess what I meant is the reverse: I have nothing against people getting rich - even grotesquely rich - but not at the expense of everyone else, and not if you do it by buying yourself legislators that do your bidding instead of that of the voting public.
The billionaire class of today is rich because the billionaires evade taxes and manipulate elections in their favor. They became billionaires by making everyone else's life more difficult. That's why I want to see their heads roll, not because they're rich.
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Compounding interests. I don't think that most people realise how powerful the effect of it is. Anyone can take advantage of it but there's no getting around the fact that the more money you have the easier it gets to make even more which then makes it even easier and this just keeps accelerating.
The effect is kinda broken though.
The old idea is that investment enables the unwealthy to use capital to be productive, and the wealthy to take on their risk. This is… fine. It still happens, and that’s great.
But past a certain point, there's basically no risk for the wealthy, as illustrated how boards make boneheaded, abusive decisions every day yet still compound their wealth, often handing "the bag" of their failure out to the public and getting away with millions and a new gig. Startups hope to get bought out by megacorps instead of actually being sustainably productive, and the megacorps don’t care because they're still stupendously rich when their boneheaded buyout fails, and it squelches competition.
Near trillionaires should not get the benefits of compounding interest. Their incentives are horrendously misaligned and broken, and it’s basically cheating the system.
What's more, no one should be opposed to this. Socialist, free market libertarian, far right/MAGA, any flavor of communist, neoliberal, whatever, logically all of humanity should agree mega billionaires are bad for everyone and should be taxed to shit. The only exceptions are crypto bros, con artists, fraudulent day traders, (why would lose the systems that enable their pump and dump schemes), and… billionaires.
No shit, fuckin obviously. This is how money works. The point is not the number it is the proportion (though obv they're related)
Resources to be extracted for the public good.
Bro! But capitalism uplifted the most amount of people out of poverty than any other system right? Right?
The nice thing with having a list of billionaires - and trillionaires - is that you have a list to go through when the day of reckoning comes, after the American Reich falls.
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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