Billionaires should not exist.
You’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that there is always going to be someone with the most wealth. And in an economy that is constantly creating new wealth, the peak will also be constantly growing.
This is an incredibly naive and ignorant sentiment.
Total net worth of top 10 richest is ~$1.6 trillion: https://ceoworld.biz/2024/03/15/richest-people-in-the-united-states-2024/
That makes a net worth increase of $64 billion an increase of ~4%…which is the same amount the S&P 500 is up over the past few days.
“Stock market surges following Trump’s victory and billionares’ stocks go up the same amount as everyone else’s” just doesn’t make as good a headline, huh?
This is a big pile of nothing, nice job taking the clickbait and spreading it. The outrage farmers thank you.
It’s only a dilemma if you’re 12.
And what do you do about the fact that this magic wand doesn’t actually exist, and that net worth is just a price tag, not an amount of actual money? The supermarket doesn’t accept stocks as payment.
Also, the vast majority of billionaires’ investments don’t even pay dividends at all, they’re re-invested back into the business for further growth.
I wish people who knew nothing about economics didn’t pretend to have any idea what they’re talking about.
Their “philanthropy” would be entirely unneeded, if they simply paid their fair share back to society
The entirety of the net worth of all billionaires in the US (~$5 trillion), assuming a magic wand could magically convert the figure 1:1 into cash (big assumption being made in favor of your argument), would foot the bill of total US government’s welfare spending ($1.03 trillion: https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS Report - Welfare Spending The Largest Item In The Federal Budget.pdf ) for five measly years.
So even if your definition of “fair share” for them is literally 100% of what they have, the quoted statement is extremely obviously untrue.
Not to mention that’s also assuming that that $1 trillion the government spends is enough to make philanthropy redundant, which it demonstrably isn’t.
One person earning $3600/hr, 24/7, without spending any of it, would take 31 years to become a billionaire.
Why are you using analogies that pretend compound interest doesn’t exist?
Even the best teacher on Earth can only teach so many students a year. You can’t become a billionaire without being able to ‘scale up’.
But, for example, someone who invents something that makes a common manufacturing process just a few % more efficient, can affect millions if not billions of products that millions if not billions of people around the world buy. Even a small increase in profit margin can aggregate to a huge amount of increased wealth.
If you create that level of aggregate value, then you absolutely have earned that aggregate sum.
Also, it is literally not possible to become a billionaire by simply underpaying employees. That’d be the same kind of linear increase used in all of the dumb ‘if you made $X every day for thousands of years (and interest didn’t exist for some reason)’ analogies, so I know the people who argue this do understand that linear growth doesn’t get you there in a lifetime.
P.S. if employees were such an automatic profit source, why does downsizing exist? If labor is a profit source, firing people is throwing money away.
Facebook is that way.
I feel like I got 10 years younger seeing this Facebook-tier image on Lemmy of all places, lol.
It’s both.
Holy shit lol, I know it’s both! I never said it’s not both. I’m just pointing out the common misconception, that people tend to assume the wrong one of the two is statistically a bigger factor. And not just bigger, but much bigger.
“woman sexually assaults minor boy, gets herself pregnant from the assault, no punishment for her and boy owes woman child support for being her victim.”
In case anyone thinks this person is being hyperbolic here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/02/statutory-rape-victim-child-support/14953965/
you said that sentencing isn’t harsher for women of color
Literally never said that. I just pointed out that being the ‘wrong’ sex hurts you more than being the ‘wrong’ race.
White men get sentenced much more harshly than black women for the same crime, for example. That’s a fact.
None of that contradicts the simple point I made, which is that being a woman instead of a man is a vastly larger advantage in the US with respect to judicial leniency, than being white instead of another race, and yet certain biased people always seem to want to imply/argue that the latter is the primary factor, when it isn’t.
As an analogy, it’s kind of like how when people are talking about rape, discourse is typically more likely to center on ‘jumped in a dark alley’ type scenarios, even though the fact is that that is literally the least common way rape happens, and that statistically, it’s very rare for the assailant to be a stranger to the victim.
That’s the majority of them, but ragebait articles aren’t written about them, so you have no idea who they are.
Don’t be so easily manipulated by media.
It’s not really for being a white girl, it’s primarily for being a girl.
Women get 63% lighter sentences for the same crimes as men ( https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/17/1/127/212179 ), while there is no racial gap between white and another race, whether among men, or women, that’s even half that wide ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demographic-differences-federal-sentencing ).
People are really bad at discussing political topics without getting all riled up
Understatement of the century, lol. And social media’s influence has only exacerbated the overall polarization/radicalization, making civil discussion in that area feel like even more of a pipe dream as time goes on.
we can’t know how many also choose to escalate because of these outlets.
But we do know that in general, porn doesn’t elicit that kind of escalation into real life. If this particular category of porn did cause that, it’d literally be a total outlier.
Same with other media, too. Rape porn lovers aren’t statistically more likely to rape irl, violent video game lovers aren’t more likely to be violent irl, etc., compared to the general population.
So I think it’s pretty fair to hypothesize that, if anything, it would reduce the incidence of real-world offense. Just look at the massive negative correlation between the proliferation of porn (thanks to the Internet), and the overall incidence of rape.
Also, I’m familiar with one bit of evidence out of Japan that apparently showed that child molesters consume less porn than the average citizen, which I was definitely surprised to learn, but once you think about it in the context of the stuff I mentioned above, it actually makes perfect sense.
In all likelihood, fictional ‘simulations’ like LLMs will directly reduce the incidence of CSA, if anything. If that’s the case, I can’t oppose such things in good conscience–it’d be pretty narcissistic to put my personal disgust over even a single kid not getting bad touched.
Played it with my SO, reached a certain scene that completely warped the tone of the game (I’m guessing you know which one I mean), and neither of us really have had the urge to play since.
Also, both parents are kinda unlikable as characters imo, lol.
You have no idea what prompted the emotions, you just happily assume whatever will give you the excuse to express your misandry.
I’d bet anything that if you read one of the many accounts of women getting genuinely angry at their SOs, even striking them (which is way worse than striking an inanimate object, by the way), based on what they dreamt the guy did, you wouldn’t be blaming her “fragile femininity”.
For all we know, guy had just received some horrible/devastating news.
The assumptions leading to both the ‘framing’ act and the gleeful posting of it on social media are just a manifestation of thinly-veiled misandry.
Well, here’s an example of the ignorance I was referring to: no billionaire is “hoarding” anything. Their net worth comes from the value of their investments, investments into businesses that function within the economy. And investing into a business, and in turn owning a piece of it, is absolutely not “hoarding” that piece. To define it that way would be to define that owning anything equals “hoarding” it.
Ownership and hoarding are not the same thing. The fact that I have something you don’t doesn’t mean I’m “hoarding” it. That is a ridiculous notion.
You have zero perspective on just how costly those problems are, nor the fact that there is almost no major problem that an injection of funds can fix all by itself.
The US government spends more each and every year than the net worth of every US billionaire combined. Over $1 trillion (which is ONE THOUSAND TIMES the amount of wealth that ‘qualifies’ someone as a billionaire) was spent last year on welfare programs alone.
It’s just not as much as you think it is, in the grand scheme of things.
Until you become more familiar with the facts of the matter, I definitely agree.