This is a retarded way of thinking. Imagine money is sand and you’re building a sandcastle. And you’re really good at it, so your sandcastle is the biggest one and has the most sand. And now you ask “why do you need more sand?” This is just bullshit way of thinking.
It’s fine to limit the size or forcibly split the sandcastles so they don’t shade the sun for other smaller sand creations. It’s okay to force lifeguards to tax the sandcastles without letting them get away with just nominal tax. It’s fine to ask why wouldn’t guys with biggest sandcastles share some of their stuff.
But why need more sand? To make more sandcastles, fuck off.
Good metaphor. I think the downvotes are because your language is abrasive, but I believe it’s because you’re passionate about this and English may not be your first language (hard to tell due to your native-level fluency though). Keep it up
I’d like to think I’m no less abrasive in my native language. I prefer to live by the rule “it’s the Internet, you might be told to fuck off”.
Indeed, I’ve been here a while and I understand the rules. Sometimes hostility can undermine one’s argument however.
It really doesn’t matter. It’s just internet comments on a obscure website. It’s not like I was hoping to change someone’s mind with my comments.
Ok but your point is weird. We don’t live in castles of cash as cash itself is only a concept.
Billionaires don’t have literal billions worth of cash either. Their wealth is whatever assets they own - stocks, companies, w/e.
Capitalists aren’t making the sand castles, they were built by the Workers. Giving Musk credit for SpaceX, for example, is to take away the effort of the engineers and workers actually making SpaceX.
So there’s absolutely no need for Musk, right? Why then there’s not tens of other successful private space companies with reusable rockets? Workers don’t work in other companies?
Musk provides the Money required to fulfill the M-C-M’ circuit, by which a sum of Money M is turned into a Commodity C which is then turned into a larger sum of Money M’. SpaceX is more of an RnD company than anything else at this point, so the required M is very high for a currently negative M’. Eventually, the goal is for SpaceX to turn profitable once it finishes enough of the initial design phase.
The thing is, anyone can provide M. The fact that Musk provides M for SpaceX does not mean there is a talent or skill being deployed by Musk that makes him any more special than anyone else. It’s the Engineers that are designing the rockets, after all, not Musk.
Further still, there does not at all need to be an individual who provides M. The workers can collectively own Capital and vote on managers and how they wish to direct production, all without a petite Dictator, ie a Capitalist, who stands on top of the Workers for the pursuit of profit.
Another easy to envision example is 2 factories. One version is owned by a Capitalist, and the Workers have little to no power. The other is owned by the Workers, who elect a manager. Both have the same amount of labor (including management), but the latter example has a more equitable distribution of power via ownership.
Is any of this confusing for you? I can elaborate, if you wish.
This is the degeneracy I was talking about. So if Musk isn’t important, where are other, more or equally successful Musk-less space companies? How come SpaceX was about to close down after several failed launches and only Musk was able to find the fund to continue on? Why haven’t workers chipped in?
The degeneracy of communist way of thinking is that “capitalists” are not just evil, but also unnecessary. If the idiots would put all the efforts into actually controlling the corporations, making them follow the laws and would actually work on pushing better laws not lobbied by the corporations, first of all, I wouldn’t call them idiots, but also the world would’ve been a better place. Instead, we have neo-marxists citing a century old bullshit.
What should be done with the degenerates?
wtf are you implying? Slur is a slur, I’m not into eugenics or whatever you imagined. Although degenerate communists should all be sent to North Korea - land of the free and equal people, the best country in the world.
Musk is only “important” because we allow a society where individuals can amass vast amounts of Capital and rent-seek. He is a beneficiary of an apartheid emerald mine, that’s why he’s special, born with a silver spoon.
Workers struggle to chip in because Capitalist states are designed to be as comfortable to Capitalists as possible, as Capitalists have outsized influence. Worker co-operatives, ie Socialist businesses, have higher rates of stability and employee satisfaction, but are difficult to start as there isn’t developed infrastructure for that.
Capitalists aren’t a group of evil people that are powerful because they are evil, that’s a child’s view of Marxism. Capitalists are a class, that share similar class interests and as such can act in a way that protects their own interests without individually collaborating. Capitalists themselves are unnecessary, unless you happen to think that Worker Co-operatives don’t exist.
Communists and Socialists cannot control corporations, that’s an absurd idea. The closest would be Unionization, which I support heavily and donate to strike funds when I can. The idea that workers can simply lobby for better policy though is an extremely naive view of how the electoral process works. Perhaps on a local level, yes, but when you have to combat the media’s smear campaigns and work against the overwhelming forces of Capital, it’s much more effective to gain grassroots progress.
Also, it’s cringe as fuck to call this “degeneracy,” it reeks of major neckbeard energy.
Also, it’s cringe as fuck to call this “degeneracy,” it reeks of major neckbeard energy.
the term quite literally describes what’s going on with neo-marxism or whatever ideas you’re pushing
Being a multi millionaire in no where close to having enough money to do what you want when no regard. It’s enough to keep you comfortable until you die.
While I think there are limits to how much money anybody can reasonably spend, if someone works hard and makes money legally and ethically by virtue of their efforts then that’s their own business. It’s different of course if they made their money through crime or exploitation, and it’s easy to think of examples, but that isn’t the case for most people.
Also, if people perceive inequity then the answer is progressive taxation and other forms of financial remuneration to the state which can be dispersed as they see fit. If billionaires were hit with super taxes then they’d still be billionaires but it would pay for services that would raise the quality of life for everyone else.
No one can do a billion dollars worth of labor in a human lifetime. The only way to get a billion dollars is to exploit the labor of many, many others.
Define “exploit”. If I give you a job at a competitive rate and you do the thing and you are financially compensated and enjoy a decent standard of living then where is the exploitation?
There are a few big issues with that statement. First, Capitalism itself is exploitative, as ownership creates no Value yet entitles the Capitalist to all of the power. It is the case for all bourgeoisie.
Secondly, progressive taxation is a fantastic first start, but is absolutely not the solution, even with state reimbursement. The state is owned and run by the bourgeoisie, and as such they will pay as little as they can. It is only through revolutionary pressure, such as via vast grassroots movements like Unionization, that the bourgeoisie gives up any amount of power. Worse still, the exploitation of Capitalism remains!
The actual solution is replacing Capitalism with collective ownership of the Means of Production. True, Democratic control. This eliminates exploitation and creates more equitable outcomes, levels the playing field, and results in true liberation of the Proletariat.
Thanks for the Marxism 101 lesson which has never been demonstrated once in practice. Capitalism can and does work. Plenty of countries have capitalism, democracy and social services.
Why hoard money?
When the fountain of youth is discovered, it’s gonna be expensive.
People think those telomerase injections are going to get free as fuuuuckkkkk
I personally like “Do you have that dream where you keep trying and trying to wash your hands but the blood never comes off”
“It’s not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else.”
Upper middle class? I think most if not 90% of billionaires are born in firmly upper class?
Watch Wolf of Wall Street - extremely NSFW btw - or if you cannot handle watching it, read the book.
For some, the money isn’t even the point, it’s the thrill of the con game.
For billionaires though, it’s something on a whole other level. Like, look at pictures of them - Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. - there’s something not right there at all. They are playing an entirely different kind of game when, e.g., they don’t even allow their workers to take breaks to pee, even if they are pregnant. Ofc YOU would not do that, nor likely would anyone that you know, nor would even meet in your entire lifetime. Who would do such a thing!? (unless their boss mandates it ofc, so like they would get fired if they don’t, I mean like if nobody was forcing you to do so and yet… you did it anyway, and then you also forced thousands of other
humanspeople to do it too)That’s why they are a billionaire and you and I are not - b/c they are on a whole other level. It’s true, money cannot buy happiness, but they are damn sure going to
watchcause the world to burn while they try.There was a twilight zone episode called “a nice place to visit” where this petty crook died and ended up in a place where he could have anything he wanted any time. Every time he’d gamble, he’d win. Every woman he talked to wanted him. Etc. But he couldn’t lose.
A billionaire can have anything, but without challenge nothing really means anything. It’s all fake, and they’re surrounded by people who just agree with them in order to get to their money. They have no friends. They can’t even go outside. They’re trapped in the mansions and sports cars and yachts, unable to live in or even experience the world they have so much influence over. They are trapped by their wealth, so they come up with impossible plans to escape… To Mars, to space… But there is no escape. They are trapped on a world they are killing, surrounded by people who they need who also hate them.
The crook in the twilight zone episode asked to lose or get turned down, wanted some kind of challenge. He didn’t want to be in heaven anymore… And he was informed that he was not in heaven. That was hell.
Of course they’re broken. They’re in a living hell that everyone imagines is heaven.
Both Bezos and Musk were also abused or neglected by their parents. They feel like they have to prove something, but there’s nothing to prove and the people they want to prove themselves to are dead.
They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they’ll never be happy
Bullshit like “the Forbes list” makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.
Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They’ll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do
I really do wonder why people like Warren Buffet are still working to make more money, for himself and others. What’s the benefit for himself? Some numbers get bigger, ok. But in terms of things and services he can buy for himself and his loved ones, nothing changes, he already can buy anything he could ever want. If he stopped working this seconds and would start spending money like there is no tomorrow, he couldn’t spend it all.
So why spend the last few years of your finite life increasing some numbers that don’t affect you? I really don’t get it.
These type of people make money as their hobby. The same way other people enjoy a good vine or a T-bone steak. They enjoy waking up and making money. I know someone that’s super Ritch in my country and that was his answer.
Bro was out of scale
I guess you don’t get Warren Buffett then. He’s pledged 99% of his wealth to charity. So, the more he gain the more will go to charity.
Hey man, give me all your money, I’m donating 99% of it to charity.
The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
This is your reminder that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Take from that what you will.
He’s not the only one either. Oligarchs own nearly all of our news media. There are only a couple exceptions, and those are independent groups that are reliant on platforms like youtube.
The question doesn’t make sense to them. To get that rich, they had to throw away their morals. They can’t answer the question because they can’t process it.
As a fun thought experiment – to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.
No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.
That didn’t really hit me until I realized it’s £3600 per hour. That’s my monthly salary.
To hit that 32 year time line you would be getting that 3600 an hour, but you would be working 24 hours a day every day.
If you did 8 hours a day mon-fri at that rate you would earn 576,000 a month.
To get your 1bn at that pace you would have to work for 144 years.
Alright, no offense, but that has to be the least useful visualization of a billion I’ve ever come across. I already have to do the math every time I want to calculate how many minutes there are in a day and you want to use the number of seconds in 32 years as a reference?
“If you put it all in one dollar bills it would weigh ten tons”. There. Fixed. You immediately picture it now.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons, which is not quite as intuitive, but it’s a lot heavier, so it still has an impact, I suppose. That’s about as heavy as a small battleship, if that helps.I simply picture a typical ten-ton object that has a similar density to dollar bills (just pick one among the many that you likely have nearby) and then imagine that it is itself made of dollar bills, and voila: An intuitive understanding of the nature of wealth.
No individual should have a… um… typical ten ton object made up of dollar bills, I guess. That seems like too many dollar bills.
Wait, I wrote “one dollar bills”? Sorry, ten tons is in hundred dollar bills.
In one dollar bills it’s a thousand tons, which has the same problem as the coins. Harder to visualize. I could update it, but at this point the correction is more interesting anyway.
It’s telling that nobody immediately noticed. Brains are squishy and don’t like counting too high. Or too small. The giveaway here should have been “wait, a coin is 875 times heavier than a bank note?”
And yet, not even I noticed, and I looked it up in the first place. Dumb squishy brains
I think the seconds analogy hits harder. Especially comparing 1 million to 1 billion (11.6 days vs. 32 years).
Your 10 tons doesn’t do much for me. A few F250s? A dump truck or two? Maybe do the comparison to a million idk.
But your comment came off pretty arrogant and condescending (“There. Fixed it. You immediately picture it now.” Not really man.)
Regardless the way people picture and grasp large numbers is certainly Subjective. The seconds analogy hits harder for me.
Well, that’s ten metric tons, so by way of removing three zeroes a million is ten kilos. The metric system wins again.
It also helps a lot in grasping why billions are a deceiving quantity, because increasing orders of magnitude gets weird. It’s just that the other units are a bit small so they paint a worse picture.
But still, how in the world does one not have an intuition for ten tons but goes to a specific pickup truck as a more relatable quantity? Is this why Americans keep measuring things in cups and football fields? I mean, if seconds work better for you that’s great, but… F250s? Seriously?
What’s your mental picture of 10 tons?
And how in the world does someone not have an intuition for time? How do you get to your apparently very heavy duty job on time?
It’s not an intuition for time, it’s an intuition for a cumulative quantity over time that’s the problem. I know 32 years is a lot. I don’t know if a thing a second for 32 years is a lot. If you gave me a thing a second for seven years or a bunch of stuff now I would need to whip out a calculator to figure out if it’s a good deal.
As for tons, well, you get that a ton is heavy, A car is a ton-ish, you probably know that. And one order of magnitude is still intuitive. Ten tons is ten of a heavy thing. You see ten ton things that say “ten tons” on them in real life. Trucks, cranes, that type of stuff. And it’s an absolute quantity, not a flow, so… you know, ten tons. If you use kilos like a normal person you also know how many of you ten tons is, because you know a 100 kilo person is a heavy person and you know how far from that you are. Again, the wonders of the metric system. I can tell you ten big people or twenty small people are a ton, so a hundred big people or two hundred small people are ten tons. I know what that looks like.
Anyway, at this point this conversation is fascinating mostly because it’s showing me that losing the scale intuition from the metric system makes you intuitively parse things in Ford pickups, and that’s more interesting than any of the possible ways to make people figure out the difference between a single digit multiplier and orders of magnitude.
“I don’t know if a thing a second is a lot”
So you’re just an idiot who has no grasp of how time works and your coping by saying “metric system”
There’s no metric time system. Everyone in the west uses the same clock. If I give you a brick every second of the day from sunrise until night, will you have a lot of bricks or just a few? That’s all you need to know for this analogy to work.
And regardless of if you use the metric or American system, most people don’t have a good grasp of the weight of big things. You don’t either. You say a car is about 1 ton, the average car is closer to 2 metric tons. Now your mental picture is only half accurate.
Your crane example is even more hilarious. Cranes are rated by how much they can lift, not how much they themselves weigh. A 10 ton crane , by necessity of how gravity works, weighs a lot more than 10 tons, but it can lift a stack of steel beams that weighs 10 tons. Also, how many cranes do you see every day that are rated for 10 tons? Do you work on large construction projects?
As for the groups of people, let’s play that out. I’ll just agree that I know what a group of roughly one hundred people looks like because this reply is already getting long. Now if I show you a group of pallets that are stacked with money that is the same mass as the group of people, how much money is that, how big are the stacks of cash? Do you know what 1 ton of cash looks like? Let alone 10?
This guy used rice to visualize the difference between one million and one billion and I thought it was pretty effective.
The fun part about that one is that Bezos himself is now reported at about one third more than reported in that video, so… that pile is too small now.
But also, if you’re gonna use visual aids that’s cheating.
If anyone ever wanted evidence that humans are too stupid to survive 1000 more years, they should read your comments.
Yeah, I think I’m exposing your stupidy pretty effectively, right? I’m killing it with the visualizations today.
“hey I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid. This other completely subjective way of saying your point is infinitely better even though it’s incredibly easy to find issues with! I’m way better at communicating than you, despite the fact that it takes two seconds to find and point out the flaws in my communication”
“I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid” is the best thing anybody has ever said to me. I’m making that into a t-shirt. A bumper sticker. I’m screenshotting that and using it as a wallpaper on my phone.
“When the revolution comes, where will you hide?” will always be the classic.
Sadly, the answer is “in my well-stocked nuclear bunker where I can survive for years and defend myself against the hoards with armed drones” now.
Or rather the answer just as easily could be “Tied up in a closet while my security detail decided to beat my ass and take all of my shit. Since money is now worthless and I have nothing to pay them with”
A millionaire and a billionaire? That’s a huge difference. At this point, if someone is 55 and wants to retire at 68 and not be 70 and working at Walmart, they’re going to need to be a "multi-"millionaire.
Idk, I’m much younger, and my retirement plan is the same as everyone else my age: walk into the woods when I’m ready or die in the water wars later when I’m not.
But I still feel bad for the elderly forced to work because a retirement home with medical support, i.e. assisted living, is too expensive and your kids can’t help you because they’re barely surviving too, and that’s while working, and you can barely work, but assisted living is 4-12k/month, so you work and hope you die before you become a burden on your children and grandchildren.
Anyway. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is vast. One million seconds ago was last week.
One billion seconds ago was fucking 1991.
