return2ozmaWhat are your thoughts on billionaires?
over_cloxI’m hungry.
LibbThey need to regularly take a shit, like everybody else. They just use more expensive toilet paper I suppose.
Except at their offices where they but the thinnest 1 ply air they possibly can.
Haha, those silly billionaires are just like me! Haven’t we all bought an election or two?
A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn’t have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn’t just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That’s how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people’s eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other’s situation.
Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
Though I have known business owners who have made less than their employees at times, it’s always been small 2-10 person businesses, and in a hard time when the owner was trying to weather the hard times with their own equity (ie paying the company to keep people employed). But that’s only a small amount of time, and never a business that the majority of people in the county knew the name.
As for businesses with shareholders. Hell no. Never would happen.
Business owner here who’s best employees earn at least as much as me: an often overlooked fact is the risk of invested time without equal payout for founding a business and ally the time until it eventually all works out.
All the employees at my age bracket already bought a house, and although my business starts working out now, after 10 years invested, my kids don’t play in their own yard yet.
We need people creating ethical business and they need to earn quite a lot more money after all that first to catch up money wise and then to justify the risk. Of founding at all.
Most employees forget that for all their economic security there was somebody before them taking the risk and pay cuts to make that a possibility. Which is understandable, but sometimes a little sad. :/
I’ve had one supervisor in a large enterprise company make less than me - and they were damn good at their job. I was also told at another job I applied for (different firm) that I couldn’t realistically request to make more than the manager.
CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can’t spend this much money. They can’t spend the money fast enough.
They hold on to this much money to keep score.
NGramHonestly, I try not to think about them. It’s an inherently selfish and self-serving class and they’ve got enough money to pay people to think about them, so I’m not going to do it for free.
Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.
At least in most democratic countries you can’t just bribe the politicians legally. That helps a lot.
Used to think: wow they’ve got a lot of money. Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth.
If they got there by making a company that other people now value a lot: impressive.
If it’s a royal family member/inheritance/…, less impressive.
Overall: don’t think about it often.
Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.
I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn’t mean it doesn’t still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.
Oh, yes. But at a certain point it stops to make sense to count.
Baradar is the leader of the taliban. He can walk into any afghani home and take whatever and whomever he wants. No repercussions, no need for exchange of money. What’s his net worth?
I value those things more: freedom to live, freedom to express, freedom to fart in front of the most of wealthy people.
Let them play their “maximizing net worth” gsme.
I think you might misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the only way to attain power is through wealth. Im pushing back against your idea that since an individuals wealth isn’t cash, it’s not worth accounting for. It may stop making sense to count, but only in the sense that it literally becomes incomprehensible to, and at that point it is long overdue to say it is too much. The vast power those people have is due to their net worth. Because someone else has vast power without the wealth doesn’t contradict that fact.
Also I don’t really see why you’re tying up your freedom with billionaires, as if it is a binary choice between billionaires and personal freedom or no billionaires and tyranny. That’s a bit of a strange equivalency you draw. In any case, and in practical terms, you* probably don’t even have the freedom to be in the presence of the wealthiest of wealthy, let alone fart in front of them.
*assuming you are not ultra wealthy or somehow related personally to a member of the ultra rich
Im pushing back against your idea that since an individuals wealth isn’t cash, it’s not worth accounting for.
I’m argueing that it’s a privilege that it can be accounted for. The power of wealth is limited, and doesn’t extend to limiting my freedom.
In many, maybe most, historical and contemporary societies, that’s not the case.
In fact, they are far more equipped to seize things like your land, your data, your means of subsistence, than you are to defend them.
The opposite, quite in fact. I still live in a country where there’s rule of law, and democracy. That shit rules 👍
I don’t think it’s a false equivalency: my point is, that fact that it can be accounted for is neat! What’s Ghadaffi’s net worth? It doesn’t even make sense to ask the question, as he can sentence thousands to death on a whim.
Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?
Wealth is not the same as having cash, that is true, but it’s effectively the same thing. They have cash on hand for any immediate need but if for some reason they need 200 million, it won’t take them long to cash out stocks or sell some property.
Or, more likely, just borrow the money. Then they get to keep everything they have.
Tax them.
We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later
Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order
MegaUltraChickenMedium rare with a little bit of butter and thyme.
Same as that guys from yesterday. I would prefer a guillotine, but You gotta work with whatcha got.
AliceI dont think about them
ThtevenThey’re a cancer on society.
NOT_RICKAsking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…
Is ok to ask for an AMEN now and then.
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
Yes this could fix it.
But we’re here because of the exact same reason that if that law was magically on the books, it’d be rewritten or repealed almost instantly.
Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.
Abolish with prejudice
SusagaForbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.
Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.
I’d be willing to bet that Smaug caused less death and destruction than many (if not most) billionaires
BlisterexeFyi that math was heavily contested, i agree with the sentiment but a literal mountain full of gold, assuming the market wouldnt crash, would make him the richest person on the planet.
We don’t actually know the size of the hoard, though. We know it’s big enough for him to sleep in it, and we know the Arkenstone was worth one share of it, but we don’t have specific numbers (at least, none I can see). Any valuation has to be an estimation, and any estimation will be contested.
Also, the value of gold today is 75 times that of what it was in the 1930s, which makes it even harder to put a price on Smaug’s hoard.
Regardless of the specific number, there is a certain level of wealth and greed that makes it morally good to shoot someone through the heart. Smaug is not the only one to have hit that threshold.
Bard the Bowman was to blame. He gave love a bad name.
I don’t have an opinion on billionaires specifically. I don’t care if they take home a billion dollars. What I do care about is the ratio of top earner income with median income. It should never exceed 10-30%
Should, and reality are a couple orders of magnitude separated.
That is what the graduated tax system should be fixing
audaxdreikI’m always thinking about how bad humans are when thinking about numbers rationally. Of course we understand what a “billion” is, we know how many 0’s it has and can do basic mathematical operations on it. But how much is it really? One of my favorite analogies for putting it in perspective is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/…/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less.
RobotToasterLike most parasites, they have an important place in the ecosystem.
Ticks for instance are a source of food for several species.
Boomer Humor DoomergodIn the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew
Bill-ion-aires!
Mickey7Seems logical if there was a law that the average worker had to be paid a percentage of what the top people get paid. I thought that Japan had something like this.
Leeches. Fuck em.
ALQBillionaires shouldn’t exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.
sexy_peachToo much power
Their an abomination. An exploitation of a system that values exponential growth more than inherent human values. In a world where public infrastructure is collapsing and there’s homeless people on tbe street, individuals should not be able to amass such absurd wealth only for their own self enrichment.
jordanlundIn terms of scale, from the person at the top making xxx times the person at the bottom, they’ve likely always been around.
“Robber Baron” is the ye olde term.
Google tells me John D. Rockefeller peaked at around $1.4 billion in 1937. 1.5% of US GDP.
www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47167
The average wage in 1937 was $890 a year.
time.com/archive/…/personnel-above-average/
So Rockefeller, at his death, had amassed as much wealth as 1,573,034 average people would earn in a year.
In order to hit 1.5% of current US GDP (27.36 trillion), Bezos or Musk would have to hit 410.4 billion. That’s how wealthy Rockefeller was.
1.2 Musks. 2 Bezoses.
It’s not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it’s the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.
They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That’s entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.
Just look at smoething like the “tea party” movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.
If you invest in the sp500, you’ll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that’s what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.
With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It’s going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.
If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you’re a millennial or younger, you’re going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.
How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won’t do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.
How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.
In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.
Don’t know them, don’t care about them.
in the (translated) Words of Knorkator:
*The world doesn’t need billionaires imagine how beautiful it would be without you! Empathy and reason instead of greed and scam fresh air, green forests, clean seas.
The world doesn’t need billionaires and we will even achieve this without guns: No, we won’t kill you and we won’t imprison you, on the opposite: you will be millionaires!*
Knorkator - Milliardäre
I respect some of what they do but they should be taxed more and the top ones a lot more.
I under stand the human desire to compete in wealth as a [genitalia] measuring contest, but there should probably be a cap somewhere…
Maybe a cap at somewhere between 500K and 10Mil, I’m not sure where, but someone else fancy enough to write laws should maybe figure it out… cuz any amount higher kinda make no sense.
Oh and redistribute the excess as a UBI that everyone would get.
I don’t like the bandwagon of “kill billionaires”. Like why need to kill when we can just seize excess funds that they don’t need and redistribute, everyone can just chill.