Not the first nor the last time Burr has made similar comments on the billionaires place in American politics. He is right though.
Highly based
When life gives you billionaires, make billionnaise.
Disagree. Rabid dogs who must be euthanized deserve care, compassion, and respect when doing so. Rabies isn't a life choice a dog makes.
Billionaires deserve no such care, compassion, or respect.
also did Bill Burr ever apologize for all the transphobic shit he's said recently? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with anyone of any walk of life gaining class consciousness, especially if they talk about it. But it'd be even better if he's stopped being transphobic on top of that.
Billionaire dont deserve our respect nor loyalty. They can go fuck themselves for all I care. Dogs however are loyal and love us unconditionally.😂
Yep, let people make all the money they want, but once you hit 10 billion, you get luigi'd.
Dumb shit clueless billionaires: "I've rented a house for a vacation once, they want $21,000 a week!?"
Billionaires should not exist. You don't get to be a billionaire without exploiting people - for that matter once you get over about 10M you're probably stepping on people, or exploiting systems, in order to continue growing your wealth. And why, exactly? It's a sickness that gets worse the richer someone gets. It's been studied and confirmed that people who have excessive wealth convince themselves that they deserve it, they earned it individually, and that they are special and more valuable than others. So instead of riding off into the sunset, they feed their addiction by buying outsized and unearned power in order to shape the laws so that they can make more money. Just fuck off already - you won at capitalism, now get the fuck out of the way and stop screwing over everyone else and making our lives miserable.
Beyond 100M we should just take it all for the state. 100% tax rate. If you want to keep earning beyond that, then great, you will have the glory of contributing to the public good.
But since billionaires have convinced idiots to advocate against the idiots' own interest, and argue that the billionaires can't be constrained in any way, then this will never happen in the current social context. So next best thing is to do as Bill says. Put the fear of God into them.
Super Luigi time!
To me it’s not about being “rich” or a billionaire, it’s about staying “Rich” by exploiting others OR the law. Trump is a prime example of human trash that has millions(Or billions if you believe him) but he’s just about the poorest person I have ever heard of him you measure his integrity.
As usual, lots of people in this thread calling for other people to sacrifice on their behalf by assassinating someone.
And as I said in response to someone, I do not think assassination solves systemic problems, but if you do, expecting else to go to prison (or die) for you is ridiculous.
I think that it's time we stopped putting the expectation on the working class to avoid violence while the ruling class and the state can use violence against us every single day.
I talked about what constitutes violence in another thread, but needless to say violence and the threat of violence is constantly used against us. Eviction, starvation, execution by police, denial of healthcare, denial of warmth and shelter, these are all kinds of violence that are used against the working class all the time. These things kill us, we die when we are evicted onto the street in the cold of winter. Or when our wages stagnate and we cannot afford food or healthcare. Or when some have disabilities and cannot produce endlessly for the ruling class. Those things cause death. Murder in its purest form.
We are systematically discouraged from perceiving them that way because if we did, we would see violence in return as justified. We have every right to riot against the conditions imposed upon us. We have every right to violently resist the rule of the state and the ruling class. I agree that assassination won't fix the system because the system is broken all the way down to its foundations. Merely executing one billionaire won't magically fix this. The ruling class will never give up their position within society, however. There are no conditions in which the ruling class will relinquish their capital or return any amount of power to the working class. For the sake of not breaking any rules of this community, I'll end that thought there.
1.5 people died during hurricane Katrina.
For every billion in a billionaires hands, how many lives are lost? It can probably be quantified.
Using this paper, we can calculate a number of deaths per megawatt of energy consumed (using global averages). If the planet consumes 17,000 TWh annually, and there are 10 million deaths annually, thats about 0.0006 deaths per MWh.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33577774/
Just quick and dirty numbers but from some lazy searching the following companies used..
Samsung: Nearly 30 TWh in 2023. Google: Approximately 25 TWh in 2023. Microsoft: Around 23.5 TWh in 2023.
Samsung:
30,000,000 MWh×0.0006 deaths per MWh=18,000 deaths
Google:
24,000,000 MWh×0.0006 deaths per MWh=14,400 deaths
Microsoft:
24,000,000 MWh×0.0006 deaths per MWh=14,400 deaths
Now these big tech companies don't all use fossil fuels, but we're just trying to get into a ball park... so lets continue as if they had used all fossil fuels.. Samsung:
18,000 deaths/ 17.92 billion USD≈1,004 deaths per billion USD
Google (Alphabet):
14,400 deaths/ 94.2 billion USD≈153 deaths per billion USD
Microsoft:
14,400 deaths/ 69.02 billion USD≈209 deaths per billion USD
So we can estimate some where between maybe 100 and 1000 deaths per billion dollars for these tech companies. Now of course how you make those billions matters (maybe). For example, we can do the same thing with Exxon mobile, which represents 3.7% of global emissions. 10,200,000 deaths×0.037≈377,400 deaths. 377,400/ 37 billion, Exxons 2024 profits gives us 11,200 deaths per billion.
We can of course also divide this out to get to about how much profit is generated before a single person dies. Maybe this could be considered the lower limit where profit extraction should be considered criminal
In the lower end scenario, it would be at between 6.5 million dollars and one million dollars in profit extraction would relate to at least 1 lost life. Obviously extremely rough numbers, but if we look at some one like Musk, allegedly worth 500 billion, that would relate to between 100k and 500k deaths their profit extraction is directly responsible for.
And of course this is only from particulate matter emissions from emissions. There are many, many other externalizes not quantified here. It also isn't fully representative because, yes, many companies do purchase renewables (Amazon claims to be renewable) but this probably gets us close enough to start having a more serious dialogue about the relationship between extractive capitalism and consequences to human life. Based on these back of the napkins, it would seem like every billionaire should be considered responsible for, at a minimum, at least one lost life.
And to put that into Hurricane terms, Elon Musk represents around 300 hurricane Katrinas.
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