• AvaMadison_27@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    Imagine how different the world would be if billionaires competed to solve problems instead of competing to become richer. What a world that would be!

    • Glaedr304@lemmy.world
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      34 minutes ago

      To be honest, I think the billionaires think they are solving problems. I also think that they believe if they had the money they could do more good with it. They are obviously wrong.

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    I knew there’d be folks in here claiming it’s “fake money.” They can liquidate when they want to, it’s not “fake.”

    • Gravitywell.xYz@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      Not only is it real money when its invested, typically the rich can just borrow against those shares instead of having to liquidate anything to pay for things.

      For example when they need $40b to purchase a website or media corp to use so they can have better control of the narrative, they just get a loan because everyone knows they’ll be able to make the payments, instead of selling enough shares to tank the thing that inflates their networth beyond all reason.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      3 hours ago

      They can liquidate part of it. If they liquidate all of it then most will disappear into thin air.

      If you’re Elon Musk and own a large part of Tesla and SpaceX and you sell all your shares, both companies crater HARD.

      Just remove stock from anyone who owns over 1% of any publicly traded company and nationalize all index funds’ assets (yes, that includes retirement funds). Problem solved.

      Or just cap total wealth at ~5 mill, indexed to the median income so there’s no need for legislation like with minimum wage.

  • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 hours ago

    Correct (when it comes to billionaires; Sam Altman and his ilk intentionally caused the RAM shortage by buying RAM their companies are not using and should be held accountable).

    Billionaires would be impossible in a properly civilised society, which would implement progressive taxes so that anyone with a wealth above, say, ten times the median wealth of the population or 25 times the wealth of the poorest person (citizen or not) in the nation (whichever’s lowest at the time) are taxed to the point that their wealth can increase no further, with the resulting income being invested on public services so that personal wealth is irrelevant except for luxury items.

    • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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      4 hours ago

      Quit making perfect sense. You’re making the capitalists nervous and ruining the hopes and dreams of all the Questrader’s out there. /s

  • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 hours ago

    That’s not how net worth works. Being a billionaire != having billion $ in a bank account.

    • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 hours ago

      They’re still financially obese parasites whose wealth should be taxed until it doesn’t exceed a reasonable amount (say, ten times the median or 25 times the lowest, whichever comes first), though.

    • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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      4 hours ago

      Yeah, most of it is all smoke and mirrors but they all own media companies which make it seem more than it actually is.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      People have this contrary view that billionaires actually have all this liquid wealth, yet that same money living in the stock market is fake. And this causes no cognitive dissonance.

      • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        It’s not “fake”. They can liquidate. Bezos liquidated 10 billion in stock to push his cock-rocket vanity project over the finish line. They can do it when they want to. The same way they can do it to pay taxes, if we make them. No, it’s not “fake money”.

  • Xanthobilly@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    He bankrolled a longevity company called Retro Bio to the tune of $150M. It’s lunacy and the money would be way better spent by the NIH as tax dollars.

  • ManWithThe105IQ@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Billionaire hate is low IQ. I get hating specific people that happen to be billionaires (sam altman etc) that are objectively harming you, but a billionaire isnt harming you by mere virtue of being a billionaire, nor do you deserve their earnings by mere virtue that you have less money. People are actually angry at things like inflation and being unable to buy a home, but these things are caused by things like eternal desert wars, government spending and printing money, infinity H1B Indians in white collar industries etc, not by a guy making a toy that a billion people buy for $1.

    • homosapien@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      54 minutes ago

      being a billionaire means being a thief as one has to exploit the surplus labor value of his employees to earn that much

    • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 hours ago

      There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.

      - Christopher Hitchens

      People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

      - Stephen Hawking

      IQ is no measure of intelligence, EQ is no measure of emotion either. But craving for IQ and EQ is symptom of a shallow and feeble character.

      - Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

      • ManWithThe105IQ@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        The reason you are poor is not because a lot of people bought an XBox from Bill Gates. There is no rational system in which you and someone like Bill Gates arrive at the same income, or deserve the same income. Inequality is good as ling as you dont suck. If you do, must suck to suck. Now, are there actual issues that exist? Yes, things like inflation exist. Yes, the new eternal desert war is an economic problem. Not all economic hardshipnis caused by merit, bit the part that is, is good. Its good that in a perfect world, someone tha is lazy and 80 IQ has less purchasing power than someone that creates and runs a large company that employs thousands of people.

        • Necronomicommunist@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          I can only assume the 105 IQ reference in your username is accurate. Just barely above average, but apparently enough to give you an inflated and misplaced sense of intellectual superiority. It would certainly explain the confidence with which you mistake your own ideological assumptions for economic analysis.

  • ManWithThe105IQ@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Id rather have billionaires keep their own money and reinvest in creating businesses that employ people, rather than giving 400 million people a Big Mac meal once each.