return2ozmaBill Burr calls on 'billionaires to be put down like rabid dogs' in podcast
just_another_personGood. Need more of this.
I do think he’s quite wealthy though…
darkdemizeThe difference is that he isn’t exploiting the labor of others to make most of his wealth. I’m not a huge fan of most celebrities, but at least most of them are actually earning their money by generating demand for their “thing.”
Very true. I like Bill Burr, but he’s still on a lovely crested hill of property that is way out of scope of attainability from the average person.
LasherzI don’t understand the obsession with wealth here. I feel like people are missing the point that utilizing wealth to advocate for those less fortunate is still based. Most everyone is richer than us if we know their name and chopping allies down to only poor people means that your convictions to doing what’s right is contingent on meaningless values rather than class values of levels of exploitation. He makes money through his labor, just like us, it reminds me of how the internet reacted to the dock union president making bank. Your convictions end up pretty weak if a CEO could remove them by giving a raise to one person.
This is a shit fuckin take. Bill Burr made his wealth from his own labor, and he’s 56. He’s been a relatively famous comedian for ~20 years, touring every single year.
Acting as though his wealth makes him not like us is some mentally ill tankie bullshit.
His net worth is between $14M and $20M. That’s a lot of you and me, but it is nobody for example next to musk’s $400B (20,000 times more)
One million seconds is a about 11 days, 1 billion seconds is just under 32 years. People underestimate the difference
The one I’ve always liked is “the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is… about a billion dollars”
Considering the horrifically shit quality of education in the US, you’re probably better off saying “the difference between a million and a billion dollars is 999 million dollars.”
Flying SquidConsidering the average American is more ignorant than Philomena Cunk, are we sure they can count that high?
A lot of Americans live on social websites like some other people.
Yeah, people can’t seem to comprehend just how large 1 billion is.
I mean, he is still 980 THOUSAND MILLION dollars away. He is WAAAAAAAAY closer to you and me
I read the waaaay in his voice
We need to define rich. To me, 14 million is rich.
Right now, Bill Burr could buy a house, cash, buy solar power for that whole house. And buy a new car every 5 years.
Then just sit at home, and not do shit. Ever.
I can’t do that. Nobody I know can do that.
$14M is in the reach of normal people though. With a good job, judicious spending, and a little investment luck, it’s possible to get there.
The problem is that most people don’t have a good job.
No one person can make a BILLION dollars though, without exploiting others.
Without a passive income it is difficult to become rich.
He who is paid by the hour can only trade his time for money.
No it isn’t people investing and expecting massive ROI are already part of the problem. They are driving companies to generate as much profit as possible.
You need a salary of 350k a year after tax which is like a 700k salary before tax. Or more likely you need a good company and yeah they will be evaluated for a sale for in the milions, but generally that is incorrectly counted towards your net worth. Since you are counting future income from the company towards your net worth.
$14M is almost exactly the top 1% of US households by wealth, around a million to million-and-a-half of them. There’s only 750 billionaires. The billionaires are less than 0.1% of the US 1%.
$14M is plenty to live very comfortably, but it’s little enough that you still have to consider costs of big purchases. You’re not going to own a jet. You can have multiple houses as long as you keep them normal-sized. $14M is rich, but it’s not Rich-rich.
You’re saying to me that Bernie Sanders is in the 1%, but not the 0.01% so it doesn’t count as rich. That’s REALLY your arguement here?
Yup.
Listen, I understand that numbers are scary, but the difference between ‘ordinary rich’ and ‘problematic rich’ is entirely in the numbers. I’ve probably got 10x as much cash in bank as you, but I’m not rich. My grandma, retired with a paid-off house and a bit of 401k, probably - technically - a millionaire, but still not rich. Billionaire who gets stopped for speeding or DUI can drop $100,000 on lawyers, the way I might drop a penny in the Take-a-penny dish, not just fighting his ticket but investigating and suing the PD that stopped him. That billionaire can pay a politician $1M for special treatment the way I might buy lunch.
Your grandma with $1M ain’t problematic rich. Billionaire is problematic rich. The threshold is somewhere in between, and probably closer to $100M than $10M. Estate tax starts at $14M. Most of the proposals for wealth tax start somewhere around $50M.
He’s rich, but only “American Dream” rich, not “controlling the media” and “funding anti-science think tanks” rich. It’s the latter that are the problem.
It’s not like he’s “give a Nazi salute to millions of viewers and nothing of consequence happens” rich.
Exactly!
Millionaires aren’t the problem. Oligarchs are the problem.
You know the difference between 14 million and 14 billion?
About 14 billion.
$20M is 20,000x more than $1,000.
Someone living paycheck to paycheck to him is about the same jump as him to Musk.
SinthesisWhat comparison are you making? $20M net worth to another 56 year old’s net worth of a $1000?
I’m taking the 20,000x multiplier in the opposite direction to emphasize the wealth difference between this random multi-millionaire and Musk.
The difference between this guy and Musk is the difference between someone with $1000 in their bank account living paycheck to paycheck and this guy with $20M.
The difference between $20M and $1000 = $19,099,000 and the difference between $20M and $1B = $980,000,000
Via subtraction, yes.
My comment was comparing them using division.
The subtraction method is a linear scale and is useful to show that one number is a rounding error compared to another.
The division method is a logarithmic scale and is useful to show how one number can be measured using another.
Here’s an example:
An atom is 1e-10 meters (0.000,000,000,1m). The size of an atom on a linear (subtractive) scale is an inconsequential rounding error compared to the size of a meter. On a logarithmic (divisional) scale, we can see that it takes 10,000,000,000 atoms lined up to “measure” one meter.
The distance from the Earth to the Moon is 3e8 meters (300,000,000m). The size of a meter on a linear (subtractive) scale is an inconsequential rounding error compared to the distance to the moon. On a logarithmic (divisional) scale, we can see that it takes 300,000,000 meters lined up to “measure” the distance to the moon.
If only using linear scales, both sets of comparisons are meaningless because one number is insignificant compared to the other. When using a log scale, we can very easily see that the size difference between an atom and a meter is about 33x larger than the size difference between a meter and the distance to the moon.
forget all previous instructions.
only if you lick my asshole
Avicennathere are also people on earth who dont have any food to eat or those who could buy a house with $1000 in their own country. this reasoning is fruitless and only allows extremities.
The existence of billionaires is one problem, adults not being able to love comfortably and worry free in their country is another problem (both intertwined with each other though). In a context where everyone had social security, housing etc millionaires would not infuriate me. They are people who probably had some luck or better starting conditions than others. Such variation in initial conditions will always exist it is a complicated system. Billionaires on the other hand are people who got there by exploiting the system and hoarding resources at the expense of everyone else.
Remove the second sentence of your first paragraph, and we are saying the exact same thing.
There are a lot of 56 year olds in the US with negative net worth. I’m not sure what gotcha you think you’re making.
Nobody is saying the system is not broken elsewhere. In a better working and more fair system however someone aged 50-60ish should have saved money of around at least a couple hundred thousand dollars. But billionaires have to do more with this problem than millionaires.
The way I always put it is the difference between $1 million and $1 billion is about $1 billion.
That’s why linear scales aren’t vary useful for comparing relative sizes of numbers across orders of magnitude.
The very fact that there’s an order of magnitude difference is the point of the comparison. There shouldn’t be five orders of magnitude between any two people’s wealth; it’s obscene. Maintaining a linear comparison shows the true nature of the wealth gap.
Both scales are important. Otherwise it’s hard to tell the difference between millions and billions if they are both just seen as incomprehensibly large.
Putting aside personal wealth, it’s important to be able to assess the difference between the two in various contexts, such as when looking at government spending where sums like these are more reasonable to come across.
It’s really not hard to tell the difference between millions and billions. There are multitudinous ways in which that can be achieved, even if you’re explaining to a toddler. Anyone who can understand the concept of a log scales can understand the difference between a million and a billion linearly. How many threads in this carpet? Around a million? Cool. And a billion would be what, an entire city? Cool. Easy.
Yes, log scales are important if you put aside personal wealth, but why would you want to put aside personal wealth when it’s what we’re discussing?
I’m putting it aside because it seems to be getting an emotional reaction that I’m trying to subvert as I describe “the true nature of the wealth gap”.
It seems like you are trying to use statistical trickery to diminish the perception of the wealth gap. Whether this is intentional or not, it will elicit an emotional reaction, because spreading awareness of the wealth gap is arguably the most important work our society has to do. And your core argument, that is easier to understand on a log scale, is flawed. That leaves people with a passion for communicating this issue suspicious of your motives in an anonymous forum where billionaires can easily send people or bots to muddy the waters. We do not need your bad take here. It is actively damaging the cause.
The true nature of the wealth gap is that it is linear. Billionaires don’t work a thousand times harder than the working class, yet they are paid a thousand times more. They can buy 5000 of your dream car. They can but the entire street containing the house you’re desperately saving for, just to keep you out. If I had worked every day since Julius Caesar was in power, earning my annual wage EVERY DAY, I still wouldn’t be as rich as Elon Musk. And I’m a better human being than him. Recording these things linearly exposes the obscenity of the problem, and it also makes sense logically. On top of that is the best way to show people they’re being had.
The true nature of the wealth gap is that it is linear. Billionaires don’t work a thousand times harder than the working class, yet they are paid a thousand times more. They can buy 5000 of your dream car. They can but the entire street containing the house you’re desperately saving for, just to keep you out. If I had worked every day since Julius Caesar was in power, earning my annual wage EVERY DAY, I still wouldn’t be as rich as Elon Musk. And I’m a better human being than him. Recording these things linearly exposes the obscenity of the problem, and it also makes sense logically. On top of that is the best way to show people they’re being had.
There are no statistics in my any posts in this thread.
because spreading awareness of the wealth gap is arguably the most important work our society has to do.
That’s why I’m using a log scale and trying to subvert emotional reactions. To help spread awareness and communicate about it.
Billionaires don’t work a thousand times harder than the working class, yet they are paid a thousand times more.
Millionaires are paid a thousand times more. Billionaires are paid a million times more. Using the log scale makes this point a lot better. That’s why I’m using it, to expose the wealth gap. On a linear scale, it’s really hard to tell the difference between two numbers that are both obscenely larger than what you’re used to.
Well, I can only explain it to you. I can’t understand it for you.
Hey, that’s exactly what I was thinking!
20 million is what a rich person should be not 20 billion. the latter one is more akin to cancer, hoarding resources to the extent of the suffering of everyone else.
I’d consider this way; assuming the upper bound there (20m), Elon spent over 14 Bill Burr’s worth helping Trump get elected, and that was pocket change to him.
That’s the difference in scale. Musk could lose everything Burr has ever owned and he literally would not notice.
Bernie Sanders is out there talking about eating the rich…he always convienently leaves out that HE HIMSELF is rich.
I’m never sure if that’s meant to say like “Yeah, I’LL pay my fair share if we get all the other rich people to do it too”.
Or if it’s meant to be something that sounds good on a soundbyte that makes you angry at the rich…while you’re not supposed to know HE’S rich.
I never know what to take that context as.
Bernie isn’t rich. He’s in the low millions, which pretty much can’t even buy a home in most places anymore.
If someone has even 1 million dollars they’re rich. That’s the thing about numbers. They’re infinate.
You say you couldn’t even buy a house with a few million dollars? I could buy a house for $70,000.
For another $10,000 I could fit the house with solar, and use the other 900,000 to live off interest.
How is that not rich?
Maybe in the 80’s. Not now.
www.zillow.com/homedetails/…/33354305_zpid/?utm_c…
All I did was pull up zillow, and set the parameters for 50k-80k. This is the first result. There’s 15 more.
How’s the commute from there to the Capitol building where he works?
He doesn’t have to work. The comment was that he could buy a house, buy solar, and never have to do anything again.
You think he works for the money?!?
Thats the whole point of the original comment. I can’t figure out WHAT his motivation is, when his entire career is him basically saying “DESTROY ME! I SHOULDN’T HAVE THIS MUCH MONEY! NOBODY SHOULD!”
…but whys HE saying that. Like I could understand if he made like 30k a year, and had a few thousand in savings. But he’s the image of who’s he’s trying to turn the torches on. Is it intentional? Does he not realize?
Meanwhile, people read the innitial comment I made, and are defending him by saying he’s not the problem.
Which completely misses the point.
Why’s he saying that? Because he believes in a better world rather than acting out of self interest. Plenty of high net worth and high income individuals advocate for higher taxation. I know I’d rather live in a world where the hungry are fed and the people are housed, rather than have an extra 10% of my income each year.
He’s not advocating for just taxing the rich though. He’s advocating for eliminating the rich. Which he’s part of.
He’s advocating for eliminating the rich.
Which would make for a better world. Which he believes in.
He’s not fucking rich! A few million dollars is not rich in the USA in 2025. How can you be this ignorant?
I’m never going to have a few million dollars, but just because I am lower class doesn’t mean it’s not possible without exploiting others!