• DaGammla@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Doesn’t work like that. It’s more like fighting a Hydra. If a Billionaire worth $50B dies, like 10 Children are gonna inherit $5B each. So we would have even more Billionaires afterwards.

    • littlewonder@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      How about “the current billionaire class” instead?

      Because you’re right, but the initial comparison is still something worth saying and I don’t mind getting pedantic.

    • urandom@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      They said “2 months”. So you keep doing the work within that time, until the fortune is diluted enough to drop below 1B per person

    • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      From my experience playing Crusader Kings 2 and 3, gavelkind’s a bitch.

      Splitting your enemy’s demesne amongst their successors gives you more but weaker enemies (and sometimes some friends), and leads to infighting and chaos amongst them.

      Nine times out of ten murdering an enemy with lots of children leaves you better off than not murdering them.

      (Of course, though, this scales inversely to the number of successors, so if there’s only one or two proceed only if their stats are lower than your enemy’s, or if it’ll still be a few years before they come of age.)

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      In theory though impossible in practice:

      If we halved the wealth of the current richest person.

      Equally divided that wealth to the 50% poorest household.

      And repeated from their till there are no more Billionaires.

      Musk would end up at 800 mil after having his wealth divided 10 times. While people who had no money to start now have around 50K

      (Broad numbers, Not an accurate calculation)

      • Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        That’s still good, though.

        If the richest people were only 1000x wealthier than the poorest… wow.

        Currently, the richest people could spend the entirety of every penny an average person would make from the day that person was born to the day that person died every single day and still not run out of money before that person died. That’s an entire person’s fiscal existence spent every day for their entire life and it wouldn’t even make a dent.

        So, yeah, I’d take 1000:1

        • Okokimup@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          This is why I think we need to start talking about wealth caps. I don’t understand why the left hasn’t jumped on that.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          I’d hate to break this to you, but…

          500,000,000
          ÷50,000
          = 10,000

          $800 million is over 10,000× wealthier than $50k, not 1000×…

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          Thats what i mean, we theoretically can redistribute the majority of wealth to end all poverty and there would still be enough centralised wealth for the current rich to still live in royal luxury and feel special about.

          Of course there would be massive opposition unless we figure what that does to inflation. So I don’t think it’ll ever happen but its a point that we absolutely could redistribute wealth without eradicating the upper class.

          Instead as an actual solution i think we should count differently and consider all wealth to be a personal cost of a human taking resources from the shared planet. What you consume and possess is what you cost to others. Life is inherently a destructive action.

          By measuring the cost and aiming to keep it low we can allow free access to groups (elderly for example) to a share of industrial output.

          They don’t need to pay with money, society just needs to count the cost of their transaction. Invite for a welfare talk if there is a problem with overconsumption.

          This project is a wip but i imagine that using what is called fountain pen money now could be used to pay classical industry with classical money. The fountain pen money is technically a debt but its the natural debt of human life with no expectation to ever close it.

    • TeddE@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Had this argument a few days ago. Someone said ‘kill all billionaires’ as a low-effort comment, and I noted that whilst that makes a good protest sign slogan, I wouldn’t want to whip up a mob trained solely on that heuristic - I asked them to get specific in what they want to lynch this billionaire for. Not because I want to defend billionaires, but Lemmy is a discussion platform, and “kill all billionaires” is a thought stopper.