Billionaires 7 years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171004002738/https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
Billionaires today:
Billionaires are a political choice as much as homelessness. They are allowed to exist because nobody does anything about it.
They are allowed to exist because they can literally buy their own political system
they can literally buy their own political system
They already have.
There was an article celebrating the fact that we’re on our way to having the first trillionare.
I wanted to die. It’s so insanely fucking disgusting
Dis pos rel’van to beltalowda intres
How is space an adjective in the first one? Shouldn’t it be a noun?
These Anglo-Saxons again, putting random spaces into compound words.
I think it’s because it’s describing the noun.
It’s not describing the noun, it’s part of the noun.
Quick analogy in German:
space billionaire = Weltraummilliärdär
spacefaring billionaire = weltraumreisender Milliärdär
In German, adjective + noun cannot be written together to form a new noun. To form one, only noun + noun can be used. And English is close enough to Germanic languages for that rule to remain the same, I think.
You are correct. In English, when a noun is used to modify another noun (as an adjective does), it’s referred to as a noun adjunct, attributive noun, or, more rarely, an adjectival noun (the last almost exclusively refers to a similar usage in Japanese). While it serves the purpose of an adjective, it’s still technically a noun.
Examples are chicken soup, toy store, race car, and boat lane.
To be clear it’s not about “spacefaring” billionaires but about “spacing” billionaires aka dumping them out an airlock into space as seen in various “The Expanse” scenes.
That’s for the second one though, for the [verb] [noun] combination. The “[adjective]” [noun] combination implies spacefaring or similar, doesn’t it?
You’ve convinced me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/spelling-using-compound-words-guide
Corrected
Yes, correct.
Nouns can be adjectives in Freedom Language™
Why would you go around celebrating untreated and ignored mental illnesses?
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On the other hand, if we all work really hard, go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil… we can make it happen faster for that special someone.
Look at all our WONDERFUL job creators amassing their dragon hoards!
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It’s almost seems like the main thing you need to make money is money
tail -n +2 listAbove | cut -f 2 > DeathNote.txt
Don’t forget you still need facial recognition data.
kamala harris’ proposed tax on unrealized gains seems like a great idea rn
And that’s just the wealth that we know about
A boring distopia is already even a single person having more than a single billion.
Yup, there was that post a while back, like you reach a billion, you get a plaque that says “congrats you won capitalism” and then they start at 0 again
Not even a billion, as soon as you’re in 8 figures you have more than a reasonable person can spend in a lifetime. Cap it at 50 million, every cent more goes towards public infrastructure and welfare
Or we could do away with capitalism entirely. Just saying
Capitalism does have some uses, like which TV you want to buy, but it needs to be heavily regulated.
People can still make TVs without capitalism…
Sure, but what I am saying is it could fit in there.
So what’s stopping them?
The fact that we live under capitalism today? People can grow crops without feudalism as well, but it’s not up to the individual serfs to decide if they want farm for themselves and their community, or for their liege lord. But the very same factories that produce consumer goods with a profit incentive today, can do the same for the benefit of the people tomorrow.
very same factories that produce consumer goods with a profit incentive today, can do the same for the benefit of the people tomorrow.
Yes. Until everyone ends up in poverty, because over time, nobody knows what to make and how much. The longer the supply chain the stronger the effect will be.
For real, like Prestige in Call of Duty
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It’s inherently antisocial. You no longer have to play by the social contract with that kind of wealth/power.
It’s a grave failure with our economic system that billionaires have been permitted to come about
The overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women. Let’s just take the average and say an average American earns $1,475,100 in their lifetime.
The important thing to remember is, in an unequal system where workers have most of the value of their work taken by a single person who the system disproportionately favors, that value is translatable to literal life. They are directly, inexorably going to die having had that value simply transferred to the other person or people who collect that value. Or put succinctly, they are giving up life, and the “owner” of the business is gaining the value of their life.
Another note is that even though most valuations are stock, stock valuations do not exist in a vacuum. The stock market is the realizable increase in productivity value that we all collectively have caused.
So based on that principle, just for fun, let’s convert these fortunes to human lives, to better understand just how much (economically-valued) life force these people have taken from people:
Elon Musk: $262,000,000,000 = 176,259 American lives.
Jeff Bezos: $208,000,000,000 = 141,007 American lives.
Mark Zuckerberg: $203,000,000,000 = 137,617 American lives.
just for fun, let’s convert these fortunes to human lives
Muh capitalism
To take that farther I wonder how many employees they have. How close is the ratio of workers to their life value obtained by the owner.
That’s 18 people who own about a tenth of the US GDP. Something needs to be done, and soon.
That’s 18 people who own about a tenth of the US GDP.
Okay, sure. But that’s bad analysis. GDP is annual and net-worth is lifetime total. That’s also global wealth, not US-domestic (four of them aren’t even American).
Agree with the sentiment, but we should really be talking about global wealth not national income.
Something needs to be done
Well yeah it’s not apples to apples, I was just going for another massive dollar amount that was recognizable to give a sense of scale.
Including 14 inn the US.
How many security guards can one of these assholes have on duty at any one time?
Dont y’all have assault rifles and semiautomatics on you at all times and you are all about being against tyranny? WHAT GIVES?
My thought too. Don’t they have slogans like ‘don’t tread on me’ and such? I am pretty convinced you don’t get that kind of wealth without standing on everyone you can.
That is a gross generalization. As I’m writing this, I am at least 30 feet from both my AR and my sidearm.
If my math is correct and we taxed everything over 100 billion at 100% we’d get over 900 billion in taxes. Nearly a trillion bucks if we limited these assholes to a measly 100 billion.
A trillion bucks, but not in cash; in shares of those companies. Try to sell it all for cash and you tank the share price. People lose their jobs, pension funds that own shares in those companies lose value.
That’s the trouble with taxing wealth. It’s not liquid like income. All that net worth is tied up in the companies and not easily accessed.
I’d be okay with the govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice in how these megacorps operate, and that voice would get bigger the larger the company becomes.
Sovereign wealth fund baby, time to get Nordic
govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice
How would a public get a voice? The government would have a voice.
In theory, the government is elected by the public. Not a given these days, I know.
1% tax on all registered securities, payable in shares of those securities. The SEC just confiscates 1% of every position, and conveys them to an IRS liquidator. The liquidator sells them off in small lots over time, comprising no more than 1% of total traded shares. Securities with negative values are returned.
Once completely phased in, natural persons will be exempt on their first $10 million in registered securities. Corporate-owned securities will not be exempt: the are taxed from their first share.
We tax only the problematic portion of their wealth: their wealth-generating assets. We auction those assets off to the general public.
You sound like you know what you’re talking about, and convey it with spectrum-like precision. I throw my hat and my heart entirely to making your dream come true. Hoo, hoo (hoo-oo-hoo)
Is this inflation corrected? Cause an arbitrary line across 7 years of inflation is gonna be crossed…
No, thats a good point because its not inflation corrected its just an archived page. A dollar in 2017 is worth 1.28 today. So yes, in today’s dollars there would have been 4 people above 100 billion in 2017.
I don’t think we had 250% inflation in the last 7 years
We certainly didn’t have a 250% increase in wages or median wealth in the last 7 years
They are parasites and criminals
These sorts of stats are misleading and can erode the footing of the argument you are making. Showing the numbers adjusted for inflation is damning enough.
We’ve had around 60% inflation over the past seven years, does it explain all their increases? No.
But not including that information and saying “but number is bigger!” Just makes your argument look weak when it could be statistically sound.
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I think it should be legal to murder a billionaire. They either have to pay for private security they can’t fully trust and always worry about being killed, or they can give away their money until they’re under a billion.
Guillotine is such an offensive word. I like „social scissors“ better.
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Hey, look, I found the thing the US is still number 1 at!
There are probably several Russian Oligarchs missing from this list because their wealth is mostly dark money. Rumor has it Putin is the wealthiest man in the world and has been for some time.
How has musk maintained his companies’ valuations? Particularly Tesla.
Blatant fraud
