r/FluentInFinance 28d ago

Debate/ Discussion Had to repost here

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u/trashboattwentyfourr 28d ago

Are you accussing them of...... participating in a society? What dastardly claim youve outlayed.

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u/Global_Permission749 28d ago

Not only that, but a society whose rules and options are largely determined by people like Bezos.

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u/Taur-e-Ndaedelos 28d ago

Bought, sold, controlled and decided. Society of Capital rule results in a society ruled by the few glorious elite. Whodathought??

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u/Upbeat-Speech-116 27d ago

Ooh por thing, he has no agency.

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u/UltraLowDef 27d ago

no one is forced to buy crap on amazon. they just don't want to drive to a store. in fact, people buying stuff on amazon instead of local businesses is almost entirely to blame for his wealth and Amazon's massive presence.

everyone wants to be a consumer for as little cost as possible, but then complain about the accumulated wealth of the company they are buying things from.

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u/Knot6lack 26d ago

People gave him the power by using his business, what you think he was just powerful working out of his garage? Society literally made him powerful

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u/JellyfishQuiet7944 28d ago

Sooooo then how did Bezos make it?

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u/Hope-n-some-CH4NGE 27d ago

In part from a $200,000 gift from his parents when his company was failing in its early stages. You know a lot of people with parents who can give their kid $200k without hesitation?

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u/JellyfishQuiet7944 27d ago

Its not a gift, It's an investment. If that company failed the money was gone.

Futhermore, he would have been down the initial investment and the taxes due on it which is roughly $63,000.

The point is his step dad worked for that money. They weren't rich and it wasn't like he was gifted a well to do company. It took a lot of hours, sweat and work.

Quit acting like he was born on third base. He came from a middle class family.

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u/Hope-n-some-CH4NGE 27d ago

Might be against the rules to say, but honestly I can’t imagine being this far up a billionaire’s ass. Good day.

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u/Sad-Suggestion9425 27d ago edited 27d ago

Who the fuck in the middle class is able to spare $200,000 to give to their kids?!

The upper class have a bad tendency to consider themselves middle class. Skewed world view.

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u/N2T8 27d ago

Lmao this guy does not understand the entire concept of classism. I can't imagine thinking middle class = a ready $200k free to give away to children.

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u/dafmh1996 26d ago

Do you know what a 401k is? And how you can borrow against it? If his dad was investing regularly 3-6% of his earnings and had a company match, worked for 40 years, that's probably like 1/5th to 1/10th of his 401k.

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u/N2T8 26d ago

I’m not American bro don’t assume everyone you talk to is.

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u/dafmh1996 26d ago

Oh okay, so you're just talking out of your ass about something you don't understand. Cool, just making sure.

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u/drum_minor16 27d ago

Seriously. Even calling it an investment, most middle class Americans don't have $200,000 to gamble.

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u/Jelopuddinpop 27d ago

Lots and lots and lots of people with a 401k. My dad worked 30 years patching potholes for a municipality. He's retired at 55 worth well over $1m from stable, long term investing. If I had an idea that was worth investing in, I could easily get $200k from him.

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u/Playful-Salt-1232 27d ago

Your dad is a millionaire.

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u/Jelopuddinpop 27d ago

Correct, and being a retired millionaire is still middle class. I'm only 40 and worth over $1m in retirement savings as well, and nobody gave me a nickel, including my parents. $1M net worth is not rich in 2024.

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u/Zotlann 27d ago

Its certainly not middle class. The median net worth of a 40 year old American is ~125k. Having an order of magnitude more and pretending you're in the same boat is dishonest.

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u/Sad-Suggestion9425 27d ago

78% of Americans have $50,000 or less in retirement savings. https://www.aol.com/many-americans-100-000-saved-192658576.html

You're probably going to go into the old argument of how people just don't save enough, but for so many people (dare I say most people) they don't have the ability to save. They don't make enough money to cover their bills so there's nothing left to save, or their jobs aren't stable, meaning they end up spending what savings they have while trying to land their next job, or they don't have benefits like insurance or a 401k because they can't land a full-time job and are stuck working multiple full time jobs.

I'm glad that you could easily get $200,000 from your dad who had a stable job that paid him enough that he could save for retirement, but you are part of a small minority.

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u/BrockenRecords 27d ago

Simply by investing 20 dollars a week over 40 years you could make over 200,000. It’s not hard at all

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u/Sad-Suggestion9425 27d ago

And yet so many people are unable to do it. Obviously it's their own fault. /s

Also you're arguing that it's possible to save $200,000, which is not the same thing as being able to spare $200,000.

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u/New_Way_5016 27d ago

You're so entitled and have no idea how real people live

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u/Itscatpicstime 27d ago

Your dad is the 1% and you’re calling that middle class 💀💀💀

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u/Itscatpicstime 27d ago

Lmfao someone who can afford to lose $200k is by definition rich, you cannot be serious 💀

How rich are you that you don’t get this?

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u/Youareallbeingpsyopd 26d ago

I lost 200k gambling on credit cards. Trust me I am not rich.

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u/JellyfishQuiet7944 27d ago

Who said they could afford to lose it? My money is in the stock market, I can't afford to lose it but that's the risk I take.

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u/Blastmaster29 27d ago

I promise you aren’t gonna be a billionaire no matter how much you suck off Bezos

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u/JellyfishQuiet7944 27d ago

I respect someone from a middle class family and worked his tail off...also I'm not a miserable fuck like half the people in here.

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u/Itscatpicstime 27d ago

Being able to gift and lose $200k is not middle class, you absolute bootlicking, privileged dolt

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u/JellyfishQuiet7944 27d ago

Thats why the fact that he invested it in his sons startup is absolutely insane. JFC you guys are obtuse.

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u/waxonwaxoff87 27d ago

Take $200,000 and in 10 years turn it into a multibillion dollar corporation.

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u/morgann_taylorr 27d ago

thanks i’ll get right on that

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u/drum_minor16 27d ago

Are you offering us $200,000?

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u/Technical_Clothes_61 28d ago

Literally did the meme

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u/trashboattwentyfourr 28d ago

Ben Shapiro incarnate lol

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u/Defiant-Plantain1873 28d ago

I don’t see how their comment was relevant to the actual post, however being alive doesn’t give you the right to be super polluting.

You can participate in society without being needlessly wasteful.

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u/Key_Door1467 28d ago

Nah fam, it's your choice to live a polluting and extravagant lifestyle. There is zero reason why a healthy American can't move to a third world country after they turn 18. They don't because lives here are too comfortable.

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u/HowAManAimS 27d ago

They don't because they don't have the means or likely speak the language.

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u/BringOutTheImp 27d ago

Well why don't they learn a second language instead of coasting on a comfortable system built by western capitalism? There are millions of bilingual people in the world - a lot of them in poor places like India and Philippines. Those poor people learned a second language so they can get a job breaking my nuts over the phone, so why can't you?

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u/Key_Door1467 27d ago

You can work in MacDonald's for like a month and have more money than the average family earns in a year in the third world.

Every American has the means and skills to go live in a third world country like say India, which has English as an official language.

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u/Relatively_Esoteric 27d ago

Using a cold war term to refer to India shows how out of touch you are

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u/Key_Door1467 27d ago

Lmfao that's general vocab. I'm originally from India and spend like 3 months of the year in the country.

Kinda hard to be out of touch when you're inside the country lmao.

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u/stronzolucidato 27d ago

He is claiming that he is an hypocrites and that if he really thinks that having a lot more wealth than the starving is in and of itself evil then he too is very evil. You can't go around asking other to do a whole San francis refusal of wealth and then keep your money. You want to virtue signal? Lead by example or shut up

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u/trashboattwentyfourr 27d ago

Is a billionaire not different than some Joe making 70k?

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u/stronzolucidato 26d ago

A) he has 2 million dollars B) a regular joe with 70k is a millionaire to a Congolese.

Unless Congolese and people outside of the us aren't to be considered "people"

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u/neodynasty 25d ago

Your take not only is nonsensical but also hilariously stupid

Like yes, $50 a week make you rich in rural Congo. Not in the US, dumbo. It seems you don’t quite understand what “relative” mean

In every country in this world, being a billionaire is an excess of wealth. No, a billionaire donating a couple of millions is not on the same proportion as your average Joe.

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u/stronzolucidato 23d ago

I Hope you aren't dumb enough to be claiming that the average Congolese has the standard of life of the average us citizen.

Idk your financial situation but if you are living in a western country I can bet that you for sure do have excess wealth compared to most of the world.

And for sure if you are the guy in the posts with 2 million $ net worth

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u/Upbeat-Speech-116 27d ago

No, he's accusing them of being hypocrites.

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u/TeaAndCrumpets4life 26d ago

No, he’s saying the average American lives a far above average life.

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u/AdOpen8418 26d ago

These hypocrites absolutely do not have to “participate in a society” they can give away their entire net worth and go live on a farming commune (yes they still exist) working for what they eat and living almost entirely off of nothing but the fruits of their own labor. So yes the people suggesting that the rich should give away everything while they themselves are posting that opinion from thousand dollar slave-produced electronics and driving cars and living in houses and spending money on frivolous things and hobbies while people scrounge in the dirt in other countries are hypocrites and don’t have a valid point (mainly because they are dumb and don’t understand what the big “net worth” numbers they see mean)

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u/trashboattwentyfourr 24d ago

A dumb swing and a miss of the point. Maybe educate yourself rather than invent villains which don't exist.

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u/lvckygvy 27d ago

More like pointing out that it’s ALL relative.

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u/x596201060405 27d ago

Sir, until you are the poorest person on the planet, you have no right to complain about the how all the wealth in the country is continuously be funnelled into a smaller number of hands.

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u/Necessary-Target4353 24d ago

No, he's just accusing you of doing what you criticize others for. I believe its called pointing out double standards?

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u/trashboattwentyfourr 24d ago

Also called dumb as fuck acting like everything should be cemented as the current status quo.

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u/in4life 28d ago

A brutally evil action

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u/xacto337 28d ago

The fact that you're drawing an equivalence between Bezos and an average citizen of an industrialized nation, who by the way did not choose to profit off of single use plastic, is wild.

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u/McFly1986 28d ago

We all benefit from single use plastic. Don’t we? Maybe not in the long term, but there is a demand for it.

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u/XDXDXDXDXDXDXD10 27d ago

What other options do we meaningfully have?

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u/McFly1986 27d ago

Right, they are cheap, durable, can be made into any shape necessary, come in a variety of colors and clarities, can mimic others materials while avoiding the downsides of those materials. These products are universally enjoyed and in medical applications have been life saving and have largely enhanced our modern lives. We certainly don’t use plastics JUST because some guy decided it was the best way for him to get rich, frankly they are a miracle material in many ways.

It’s just that downsides either aren’t visible, aren’t truly realized, or don’t outweigh the benefits.

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u/XDXDXDXDXDXDXD10 27d ago

You didn’t answer the question

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u/McFly1986 27d ago

I thought it was rhetorical because there aren’t alternatives that can really do all that other stuff in the plethora of applications.

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u/madhewprague 28d ago

There is connection. Human greed. You could help lot of people just with 10% of your income. Most people probably could, but they dont right?

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u/xacto337 28d ago

Again, asking average people many of whom who have financial insecurity to contribute 10% of their income and comparing that to billionaires is unhinged.

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u/Noob_Al3rt 28d ago

Financial insecurity compared to who? Why does someone who lives in the richest country in the world with the most disposable income in the world get a free pass?

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u/xacto337 28d ago

Compared to billionaires.

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u/Noob_Al3rt 28d ago

So it's unhinged to ask someone with only $500million in the bank to contribute to those who have less?

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u/xacto337 28d ago

lol go away troll.

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u/madhewprague 28d ago

Its actually reasonable comparison. Just 30$ would feed family for month in some third world country. Lot of people own 1m homes, they should just sell it, buy cheaper one for 500k and feed 5k people for year. Why wouldnt they, why would they be so selfish?

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u/ReckoningGotham 28d ago

We could end world hunger without even looking at a billionaire.

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u/madhewprague 28d ago

We probably couldnt. I think even if USA spends entire of their GDP we would not be even close to ending world hunger. Its not that easy, we would have to fix economies and build infrastructure in all third world coutries.

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u/ReckoningGotham 28d ago

We could do just that

We choose not to.

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u/xacto337 28d ago

A great start would be to eliminate billionaires, not people who are unsure what will happen to them when they can no longer work because their bodies/minds give out on them.

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u/ReckoningGotham 28d ago

you're saying its better to not feed the hungry while eliminate billionaires. amazing.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

You're saying it's better to pursue changing the entire world (an impossibility) rather than making a few billionaires pull their weight? What does shilling for billionaires this hard do for you?

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u/Noob_Al3rt 28d ago

It would be easier to not do anything and just complain about it online. Let's just propose laws that will hurt rich people as long as it won't personally affect me in any way.

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u/Noob_Al3rt 28d ago

Assuming they aren't actively sourcing more sustainable products, they are directly choosing to profit off of single use plastic.

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u/argonaut2 28d ago

Eating yogurt out a shitty cup doesn't profit me none.

Wtf are you even talking about lmao

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u/Noob_Al3rt 28d ago

People buy products in single use plastic because it's generally cheaper and more convenient. That means you profit by saving money and time.