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to create scarcity - making sure you stay exploitable.
Because it’s not about money for them, they’ve already surpassed that concept, it a about power. Us peasants aren’t quite evolved enough to understand that yet.
It’s not just about power. For many, it’s also a way to keep score, to feel better about themselves compared to others. (Not trying to justify; it’s still a sickness.)
Look how much Bezos and Musk feuded over which one of them was the “richest” man in the world. Or, hell, just the fact that they’re still running companies when they already have more money than most countries.
I mean Elon Musk once scoffed and told sponsors to go fuck themselves for daring to pull their advertising from Twitter. I don’t think he understood that it was business and that some businesses run by running ads paid for by sponsors.
It’s like he forgot what a business was…
Still begs the question why they need tax cuts then? It doesn’t give them more power, it doesn’t really give them much more money (in the grant scheme of things).
Billionaires are playing cookie clicker with our lives.
You joke, but that’s close to how the rich see money. It’s a score keeping device.
I’d love to say so, but I wasn’t joking.
The goal is power, and one way to attain it, is to render everyone else powerless
and why shouldn’t people be allowed to play games they find fun?
For the same reason that kids shouldn’t be allowed to play games dropping rocks on moving cars.
It’s also worth noting that we could also use/abuse this tendency, for the greater good. Imagine if rich lists etc were done entirely via tax returns. If you don’t pay taxes, you’re considered poor. It provides the hyper rich with a new way of comparing themselves, via actualised wealth rather than paper/virtual money.
The Gospel According to Luke
18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 21 He replied, “I have kept all these since my youth.” 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Here’s my personal fave:
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.
Exodus 21:20
Most Christians believe the old laws of Israel were abolished by Christ.
Some of us believe he was a philosopher, and verses like this are contradictory to his general philosophy, therefore obviously not part of it.
and verses like this are contradictory to his general philosophy, therefore obviously not part of it.
No, Jesus condoned slavery. Both explicitly by using slavery as a metaphor, and using it in his parables, and implicitly by never once simply saying, “hey guys, maybe humans shouldn’t be seen as property.”
Instead he said things like:
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
(Law that includes separate rules for treating your Hebrew vs Gentile slaves, and how to properly enslave the offspring of your current slaves)
Jesus never spoke of slaves in any way that would suggest he had any problem with the practice whatsoever. And he was certainly in a position to make a statement about it.
The New Testament is also full of pro-slavery sentiment by his followers in: 1 Peter, 1 Timothy, Colossians, Ephesians, and probably others.
Sounds like a pretty dogshit philosopher if he can’t even say slavery is bad while literally surrounded by the practice.
The Gospel according to Capitalism
Greed is good
This one in Matthew feels relevant here too:
19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
It honestly is a waste for a true capitalist. Like, if you have enough money to cover all your expenses, while also having 2-3x your fun money expense, why aren’t you following the capitalist ideal and doing something with it?
Start a nonprofit that suits your interests, buy a company you believe it, spin up scholarships, blow it on a do nothing project, but for fucks sake do something with it!
In France, they’re buying medias to bring about a fascist state and using islamophobia and the fear of the enemy from within to justify an increasingly violent police state.
I guess they are bored and need to ruin something else.
Please! It’s islamphobia and “narcotraffic” (i.e. small-scale pot dealers, who have no future anyway because of racism, classism, prejudice, and Paris-centrism.)
In their eyes, they sort of are. “Investing” your money into stocks gives you the feeling you’re giving back to the world with it, while also giving you the feeling it’s secure, still belongs to you, and is earning you more.
Meanwhile, the people actually living this ideal create trusts for philanthropic efforts. They wave goodbye to the money completely, asking for no return but worldly benefit. There’s not nearly enough people like that in the world though.
Trying to be the fattest camel when time comes to pass through the needle’s eye…
Although I am agnostic atheist, I do wish that heaven and hell are real so that the greedy are given due punishment in the afterlife.
What separates a person’s last dying breath from a baby’s first one?
Heaven and hell don’t need to be real, neither does any other metaphysical concept. When we die, we owe it to the people after us to leave the world in a better place.
I agree with the sentiment though. Fuck billionaires.
It would be better if people stopped fucking billionaires. Really we don’t need their spawn.
I feel like this is part of how wealth concentrates, but idk.
Yes, the mentality behing it is flawed. But those are the people that make it to the top in the current economic system.
Being a billionaire should be listed in the DSM as a mental illness.
Not even as a joke. I oppose systems that create macro wealthy and powerful. Those systems create sociopaths.
It is, as various types of sociopathy.
Hypothetical situation, you are a normal person you’ve likely struggled all your life with bills and debts and then one day you randomly find yourself a billionaire. Perhaps you inherited it, or won the lotto. What would you suggest a person in that situation do? This is would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, , you could finally not have to stress about money, but in order to save your soul should you give it all away to charity and go back to your normal life as though nothing had happened?
Edit: I was legitimately curious what the ethical solution would be if one were to find themselves in that exceedingly rare situation that I described. But okay looks like I ruffled a few feathers by asking.
Honest answer? Call up a fiduciary firm in LA, NYC, London, Tokyo, or Paris, whichever you are closest to. Demand to speak with a partner. Let them know that you are working with 11 figures liquid, that will get you a senior partner. Set up a massive trust with the entire lump sum, there y ensuring the best ROI you can get. Split off $5 million blind and bridge trusts for yourself and any family and friends you want to help. Turn the rest of the money over to a board that must be made of 2 fiduciaries one from a NYC firm, one from a firm in any of the other aforementioned cities, and 3 data analysts. 2 must be from Oxfam, the third must be top of the field. Those 5 board members then run “The Sovereign Trust for Humanity’s Poor,” which then use a percentage of the ROI to set up trusts for the poorest people in the world first. Not for their government, or some other organization. They get life changing money to spread around their community.
Add in stipulations that trust beneficiaries are NEVER allowed to have more than $50,000,000 in wealth at any time, and that they should pressure their governments to create a maximum wage.
One can live their entire life with a lot less than a billion. Even putting 99% of it away to a good cause leaves 10 MILLION. Again excessive for a lifetime.
Spend all but a reasonable portion on materially, directly improving the world
Then retire on a million
I’m with you, but a million ain’t enough anymore to retire.
I have ambitions that, if realised, could generate income, but I don’t currently have enough cash to invest into. Game dev and music, particularly. I’d start a dev studio and actually hire talented artists, for example, so I don’t have to rely on my poor skills. Will it make lots of money? Who knows. But it’s better than sitting on a hoard and living on interest.
What would you suggest a person in that situation do?
Not become a CEO of multiple companies and aggressively lobby the government in order to reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay.
I would suggest this person pays off their bills, buy a house, and invest it. If they feel the need to continue working and spend some time figuring out what they need that’s understandable. If they immediately spend a million dollars to try to get another 2 million dollars that’s a mental illness.
Keep in mind the billionaires people are talking about have never struggled will bills or debts. They were born obscenely wealthy, spent they entire lives obscenely wealthy, have more money than they could ever spend on their lives, and spend most of their time trying to get more. It’s an illness. If you or I suddenly inherited a billion dollars we wouldn’t work another day in our lives.
The difference between not stressing about money and having a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
My theory is that when you get that first Billion with a B, something fundamental breaks in the human brain.
They don’t think like us normal folks anymore, even multimillionaires are “other” to them.
I’m poor now but one day soon I’ll be a billionaire and then those poors better watch out!
Amassing wealth is an obsession. These people get a dopamine rush anytime their line goes up. Which is how they got there in the first place. At some point, the value doesn’t really matter anymore but the obsession remains.
Greetings, your most experienced armchair psychologist
At a certain point, money is not about wealth or what you can buy with it but rather about power. And in life’s twists, those who amass a decent amount of wealth and power come to believe they are “chosen” because of how society treats them. The poors worship the rich. if we were living in a sane society, these amounts of wealth would be looked at disgustingly by society. Shit is beyond fucked and I don’t think anything can unfuck modern society.
if these people were any kind of Christian they would be worried about the end of their mortal lives. Instead they are speedrunning everything Christ taught us NOT to be.
You’re assuming they’re saving at all.
A lot of billionaire wealth is tied up in assets that is only a “savings” if it’s converted to cash, like stock options.
Amazon stock is $200 a share, Bezos has 908,804,311 shares. $181,760,862,200 in stock.
https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/amzn/ownership
But that money doesn’t go anywhere unless he sells it. Stock market is closed Monday for memorial day, but let’s say he does nothing on Tuesday morning and decides to sleep in until 11:30 AM, shit, I WOULD. In that time the stock goes from $200 to $214.
Bezos “makes” $12,723,260,354 while sleeping.
When you have that many stock shares, the wealth is self perpetuating… but it’s not “real” until you sell it.
What happens if he’s sleeping and the price drops to $180 because of more stupid Trump shit. Now he’s “lost” $18,176,086,220 overnight.
Maybe you should read “saving” as “hoarding”. The skeet (tweet?) Is making a point about their odd motivation to continue to accrue unimaginable wealth far beyond the point where the costs of their wildest dreams are trivial. The whole while having the ability to literally end world hunger many times over after subtracting those costs.
Well, that’s what I’m saying, beyond a certain point, the wealth accumulates itself with no active intervention on his part besides making sure the stock price doesn’t tank.
But that’s the whole point about “world hunger” too. It’s not like he can liquidate 900 million shares of Amazon at $200 a share.
Estimates are it would take $40 billion a year, EVERY year, to solve world hunger.
https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
So to solve world hunger for 1 year, Bezos would have to sell 200 million of his 900 million Amazon shares at $200 a pop.
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Nobody has the money to buy 200 million Amazon shares at that price.
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As soon as he sold a fraction of that, it would flood the market and the stock price would crater.
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When it became clear Bezos was the one flooding the market, everyone else who had Amazon would panic sell, tanking the price even harder.
You don’t even need to sell, you can take a loan out against an asset like every rich asshole or nation…
I refuse to accept that the most powerful people in the world are so helpless.
There’s a myriad of ways to handle covering wealth into purchasing power. The wealthy falling to do anything about the evils in the world is part of what makes them evil. They aren’t even trying. They use arguments like yours to throw their hands up and claim they’re helpless and that the system would fail, that the world would be worse off if they did anything at all.
You can take out a loan, but nobody can loan $40 billion.
Even getting 3.3 billion every month for a year would be challenging.
Sigh… Look, the point is we don’t let people off the hook because it’s hard to do something. It’s hard to go to work 40+ hrs a week for 40 years and they ask that of every single one of us.
They have the power or they don’t. If they do, and choose not to act or even attempt, they’re complicit in the world’s problems. If they don’t, and they’re relegated to continuing to sit and amass wealth, then the system itself is broken and must be raised.
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And selling could have important impacts on the company itself in certain situations
Thank you - well explained.
It’s also interesting to think of the stocks that the various oligarchs and politicians control or own as a backdoor for institutional capture. You want Trump on your side and his administration making decisions that benefit you and your companies? Easy - just buy some of his BS stock and use it as leverage. You won’t even have to push it - he’ll do what you want because that’s how his underdeveloped brain perceives existence - as a series of quid pro quo agreements.
Of course, it’s not just stocks. He’s created so many other avenues to bribe him. It’s bonkers.
I’ve always wondered - Who would he sell the stocks to? Is it a peer-to-peer system or is there a kind of centralised bank involved that pays out and assumes ownership of the shares? Is the price definite or do they have to auction it off, meaning the value is more of a guideline?
there are stock liquidators who specialize in the process, you’d outsource it to distributed buyers
They just like sitting on a Dragons hoard.
At least in D&D no dragon hoards that much, and the chromatic dragons have a legitimate reason for it.
The wealthiest dragon you’ll encounter in any fantasy setting, we aren’t talking about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk where the real life billionaires are dragons, is an ancient red wyrm. They will have 1.5 million to 5 million gold pieces of treasure. 1 gold piece is ⅒ of an ounce of gold. Therefore the absolute wealthiest dragon in all of D&D and Pathfinder is only worth about $1,200,000,000, and that is only one of them. 99.99% of all other dragons would be worth less than a billion.
The chromatic dragons have to eat their hoard just before they die. If they don’t have enough gold to pay Tiamat, then she eats their souls.
Also, gold is a nice soft bed according to every metallic dragon I have encountered.
I think once your net wealth hits 100mil, it should buffer overflow to NaN and you have to start over.
In a way.
This world IS hell and them gaining larger and larger parts of it for their own benefit…
Capitalists are demons. Or might as well be, outcome’s the same in the end.
Maybe that’s just it. They’ve accomplished something, but ultimately they know it’s meaningless. So they try to find a context where it has meaning.
Some of them find that meaning in charity, helping large portions of humanity.
Others realize that the only circumstance where the distinction between a billion and a hundred million matters is if the world is absolutely going to shit.
Just like the president, who now has more executive powers than ever, still doesn’t run things the way you think they do. They have an inner circle. It also could be thought of in a way like other countries inside of the empire don’t really have sovereignty. Also, you could rethink the whole idea of a dictator. I mean if the capitalist class wants to defend themselves, they’re going to obfuscate their involvement. Like, you need a fall guy and the fall guy is a gambler. And sometimes he comes out winning and sometimes he gets beaten up in the street.
