ObjectivityIncarnate

$10k would definitely not make me stop caring about whether I lose my job, lol.

An asset appreciating in value does not deprive anyone else of money in their wallet.

If you bought a rookie baseball card for $5, the player had a great year and now the card’s worth $100, your net worth increased by $95. But who is down $95 as a result of your card becoming more valuable?

Nobody. Wealth is not zero sum. And the vast majority of increases in wealth among the wealthiest is newly-created wealth. You literally can’t become a billionaire in a human lifetime simply by short-changing your workers. A linear increase like that just will not get you there.

Also, wealth in the form of purchased investments into businesses that run within the economy, is literally the opposite of hoarding. If you buy things with your money, you’re not hoarding your money.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and magically convert all that net worth straight across into that amount of cold hard cash, it wouldn’t pay for a measly $10k UBI for all working-age Americans for more than two years.

Then what’s the plan? That 10k costs over $2 trillion.

Imagine someone coming up to the counter to inform the barista that someone took a 20 oz shit

No, the explanation that involves conspiracy is not the simpler explanation.

Grow up.

The issue with Billionaires now is that money isn’t in the economy.

Again, the baseball card growing in value by $95 took $95 away from no one. No one is deprived of cash in their wallet as a result of another person’s purchase appreciating in value.

Also, their net worth is not cash sitting in a vault, it’s investing into businesses that are running within the economy. It literally all is actively in the economy. You literally can’t become a billionaire without doing that. Saying/implying that billionaires “hoard” wealth is deeply ignorant.

That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything.

Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn’t contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer–if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.

As a small example, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can’t buy peace.

The premise that merely having more than you need is inherently unethical is completely arbitrary, doubly so when only applied to those who have the most.

I live a fairly simple and frugal lifestyle. The amount of money where I am living at the standard of living ideal for me, and my “savings are enough to ride out life in comfort”, is likely a much lower number than most others in the US.

Does that make me more ethical than those others? I don’t believe so.

What happens when something already owned grows in value past the arbitrary maximum? Net worth is, after all, a function of how valuable everyone else thinks the stuff you own is. It’s a price tag.

If you buy a rookie baseball card for $5, and the player has a great year and now your card is worth $100, did you deprive anyone of $95 by continuing to own it?

could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.

There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.

It’s just not that simple.

The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.

Big “in this moment I am euphoric” energy, lol

Despite the current wealth inequality

It’s not “despite” the gap, because the gap itself does not cause poverty. If the poorest person in the US made $75k/year (in other words, poverty completely eradicated), the size of the gap would still be pretty much exactly the same (after all, the difference between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the difference between 75k and hundreds of billions, which is the current net worth of those with the most wealth).

After all, 50 years ago, the gap was significantly smaller, but the overall incidence of poverty was much higher.

Someone’s always going to have the most. And new wealth is constantly being created. And net worth is a valuation, a price tag, not an amount of cash (which is the primary reason it can go up as fast as it can–cash money simply can’t do that). Given these facts, expect this gap to always exist (and almost certainly continue to widen), even after poverty is eradicated.

Looked it up:

McDonald’s double cheeseburger hasn’t been a dollar for over 15 years (started in 2002, and in 2008, the McDouble replaced it, which had one fewer slice of cheese). And the McDouble itself stopped being a dollar in 2013, over a decade ago. Bit more than “a few years ago”–I think Covid screwed up everyone’s perception of time more than usual, lol.

That said, I get lunch at work several times a week at Wendy’s and always pay less than $5, not too bad all things considered imo.

Yeah, the gap between the wealthiest and everyone else literally does not matter at all, when it comes to ‘motivation for revolution’.

The overall level/amount/condition of poverty is what matters. And let’s be real, things are not nearly as bad in the US today as they were in France before the French Revolution. Not even close.

Fact is, if you magically bumped everyone up so that no one was making less than $75k a year, the wealth gap would be essentially identical to what it is now, because the gap between zero and 75k is nothing compared to the gap between 75k and hundreds of billions. But no one would be suffering in poverty, so would anyone care about the wealth gap, then? I seriously doubt it.

The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.

It’s not that deep.

People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more ‘corporately controlled’ before deciding to join a new platform.

Dogecoin is also not his. It came into existence in 2013. Elon’s first tweet about it was in 2020.

If anything, you could reasonably argue that both that department name and his interest in that particular cryptocurrency are based on his affinity for the same original meme. But neither the meme nor the currency belong to him.

named after the cryptoscam

“doge” became a meme in 2010, long before cryptocurrency was a thing the mainstream were even aware of, let alone the one named after it.

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.