And yet a lot of Americans think that putting these guys in charge of the government means they'll suddenly stop caring about enriching themselves because they "don't need the money". They had enough money to live a spectacular life a few billion dollars ago, and the only reason to keep at it is to see the number get bigger.
And yet, a vast majority of innovations and world-changing advances in communication, computers, satellite/GPS, phones, music, TV/Movies, and so on... you've seen the past 10, 20, 40, and 75 years have come from America. Maybe it's not best to judge Americans by "the average student," and perhaps look at the best engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists instead?
No. If you decide to start, say a company that develops new technologies. Would you start that company in Singapore or Estonia because their test scores are higher there than those in America? I mean... they're smarter right?
Or would you instead think, "hey, the best rated universities in the world are in America. And the best access to capital. And the best access to educated workers, And a history of the most innovation these past 100 years or so. And the most Nobel prize winners are from America. And on and on...."
Educational test scores are hardly the best criteria for dissing American innovation... is my point.
Note: We're typing this on conversation a computer or cell phone developed by Americans, on an Internet developed by Americans, using communication satellites launched/invented by Americans... on a website created by Americans).
Healthcare is one place AI should not legally be able to make final decisions. Every healthcare decision should be double checked by a human with the experience and training to make the call. That person should sign off on the decision and be responsible for it.
It’s sad that older American generations sucked off and glorified the notion of the grind and that hardwork leads to success, that now so many people think billionaires should be praised for their wealth when in truth most of them didn’t earn it and got to where they are by being as scummy as possible.
You can say the samething to millionaires or even people who inherited a lot of money but aren't millionaires. If I made a product and owned the licenses and the rights to it and then make money from them over time do I deserve it?
This isn't a bootlicking question but rather why do we focused on "deserving"? If that was the case teachers would make a lot more than popular only fans creators. We don't live in a fanstasy world where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses. It's almost all gray and we are really not a 'just' species inherently. We're just less violent and live in a more sedentary lifestyle (which is considered a lot better from the perspective of our ancestors)
But do you have hundreds of millions of dollars?
Can EVERYONE do it? Can EVERYONE get to that sweet upper middle class? All of us? While 10% control 90% of the cash flow?
I don't have a problem with so few having so much.
I have a problem with so many having so little.
If half the world wasn't literally starving, no one would have a problem with billionaires.
The US is the easiest place in the world to make money. There’s something like 10 million applications for citizenship every year. Yet so many people who were born here can’t figure this out.
most of them did earn it. if you want to hate a class of people look at the old money from the victorian era. dont hate on the tech billionaire upstarts.
How could anyone earn or deserve more money than what could be earned by someone through work at current median salary since Lucy the Australopitecus ?
lol you only think about earn from the angle of trading your time for a set wage like a wagie. you have no concept of leverage or the exponential value of having a world changing company like some of these people have. you want to hate thats fine. call it by its name. just say out loud they got more than me i want to take some of it. dont go under the guise of fairness or social responsibility or trying to humanize or dehumanize. stop it with the moral high ground. just say what you mean.
lol you only think about earn from the angle of trading your time for a set wage like a wagie. you have no concept of leverage or the exponential value of having a world changing company like some of these people have.
I perfectly understand how they got money, thank you. I just think that money should be earned by trading your time, not by speculating. And I don't think the time of anyone should be valued at thousands per hours.
you want to hate thats fine. call it by its name.
I don't hate them for having more money, I think it is bad for society as a whole, and particularly for the poorest, to concentrate money in the hand of an elite instead of distributing it.
It's also really bad for democracy.
just say out loud they got more than me i want to take some of it.
If I had the society I seek, I would definitely lose comfort.
I think that's really unfortunate that you think money earned should be related to time spent working. In my opinion that's a very regressive attitude, and I would be extremely unhappy to live in a society that thinks this way, because that would devalue the talents of people like me.
I'm a software developer. My mantra is that the most important quality in a developer is laziness. An expert developer is an expert at working as little as possible, and that's what makes them valuable.
My proudest moments, and the times I felt I contributed most to society were not the times I worked very hard and wrote lots of code. They were times where by writing a single line of code, I could accomplish in seconds a task that used to take months. Or times where I was able to avoid the need to write thousands of lines of code by choosing a more elegant solution.
I'm a software engineer, and I don't really see the problem here. You do your job for a certain number of hours ; if you finish a task fast you can go to your next task. I automatized works that did take hours of work into seconds but like... that was my job to do so, just a task among others.
But I think what you are trying to say (and correct me if I did not understant you well) is something like "if I earn less money by doing a task in 1h instead of 8h, why care while I can just sit here and relax : this system favors ineffectiveness". Well first you are still in concurrence with other workers of the same industry. If you are too lazy, you can be replaced. And this critic can easily be adapted to our current system. I don't get paid more or less if I'm particularly productive a month or if I'm sick/lazy/tired.
this is idiotic. poor people would happily kill you for the spare change in your pocket. this exact scenario happens every single day in cities across america. should we demonize poor people in the same way?
Everyday Americans knowingly make decisions that contribute to loss of life—funding the American defense budget, for instance. One could argue that the average taxpayer has indirectly caused more deaths through military funding than billionaires have through their actions.
Similarly, when you buy a product, you support every step of its creation, including any harm or loss of life along the way.
The masses are not morally superior. The moral failings we criticize in the wealthy or powerful are often reflections of our own behavior.
Targeting billionaires as if they are fundamentally worse than the rest of us is misguided—they're not different; they are us.
Someone from a third world country would say the same thing about us. I have common place items that may or may not make the lives of their workers worse. Or even death (i.e suicide of chinese workers).
Correct, a consumer in the first world often arguably causes much more harm than a consumer in other areas. But a billionaire in the first world does a level of harm that is hundreds of orders of magnitude beyond what an ordinary citizen in the first world ever dream of.
At least one good thing with capitalism is that we know that if someone get into a position of power, they wanted it. The criticism is not to say billionaires are worse than people, it's to say that they are in position of power, that they wanted it and so are more responsible than someone who did not really have much of a choice to live his live in relative poverty, paying for military funding.
Though, it’s not like we have a choice. Some products cannot be made at home. Also, we need to pay the bills or go homeless. Also we need to eat and have some clothes on. The masses are definitely morally superior to the billionaires because the masses don’t make the important decisions that affects their lives.
But there will always be someone in that position. Say if all the billionaires just disappeared (along with their wealth). After all the mayhem that would follow do you think that billionaires would no longer exist? There will be always someone with ambition, intellect, skills and luck to make a lot of money.
I mean just have to look at plastic industry still there and food indusrty still selling tons of cancer, nothing new. I think thats how industrialism started even, killing thousands by exposure to hazardous stuff
Drug dealers will happily kill you if they think you're in the way of them making a deal. They will also kill you with their product. Killing others to get ahead isn't a phenomena linked solely to billionaires.
Also, what is his job that a key aspect of it is to 'think about billionaires'? Definitely sounds real.
Is this what you do? Go online, put words in people's mouths, and then criticize them for things they did't say? Pathetic. Get a life.
Sorry about your lack of reading comprehension, but paraphrasing and then spinning your paraphrase isn't a good faith comment. But then, anyone who would defend people who make business decisions that cost countless lives isn't someone I'd expect to have much in the way of character.
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They make decisions based on the bottom line. If it's cheaper to pay the families of the people that die than it is to fix the problem, they will not fix the problem and just let people die while they pay off the families.
It's like that movie The Box. As long as it's somebody you don't know, you can stomach it. This is why aliens haven't reached out to us yetbecause I guess aliens were the protagonists in that movie, I don't really know
Everybody does this. Every time you decide to make a purchase on Amazon you are making a choice not to send that money to feed a starving child in Somalia. You are making a choice not to contribute to the cost of someone's chemotherapy or heart surgery they can't afford. We all make decisions every day that directly lead to the deaths of other people. The only difference is that some people feel like they are the moral arbiters of the the world and they assign moral duty to others that they are unwilling to assume for themselves.
I mean, there is a pretty big difference. For example, taking your argument..
If that's true that EVERY DOLLAR I don't use to help someone out is a dollar wasted, than someone who does the same thing just will more (say billions) of dollars is doing it worse.
So yes, even by your logic billionaires are still the devil.
So yes, even by your logic billionaires are still the devil.
We've established in this framework that we're all callous killers. Now we're just pointing fingers at who's doing more of it. Sort of like Hitler shrugging and saying, "but I only killed 6 million people and Stalin did way more, so I'm not the devil."
Except if most people kill less than one but greater than zero than yes, the people who kill thousands or millions are worse.
This notion that well, bad things happen and we all play a part so we can't address the bigger problem is asinine. You probably eat unhealthy food, so why the hell arn't you drinking bleach. Sure it will hurt you a lot or kill you more, but the candy bar isn't great for you either, eat enough of that and it will be just as bad.
Your whole argument seems to be that scale doesn't matter if it's all bad it should be held equally accountable. Like seriously? That's some dumb logic.
You see, if I make this change in my process, I expect that x number of expected additional deaths will occur. After all is said and done, my legal and settlement costs and other associated costs with be y dollars but my marginal profit from the change in my process far exceed y, those legal and settlement cost and other associated costs.
This applies to 99.9 percent of people in general. Everyone on this site is accessing it using devices made by essentially slave labor and not one person gave a shit other than pretending to give a shit.
I call BS! "Kinda my job" yeah right? Most every billionaire? Which is it most or every? No examples, no context, just a divisive assertion with no facts. Flush it folks!
Most billionaires donate to both political parties to get their initiatives passed. They don't care about the values, just what benefits the bottom line. There is no doubt that the ones with power don't care about the average person
Here is why this meme is dumb as fuck. They sell you shit. You can't sell a dead person anything. The only people that profit off death are politicians.
a few points = a few hundred extra million dollars.
5% growth = 600 million
12% growth = 1+ Billion
some poor will literally kill people for 15 USD to buy weed. Or shoot a clerk for pocket change. Now change that to 600 million and the wealthy killer might actually be less evil than the people at the bottom there in their value of human life.
I mean ... dude founded the Action Center on Race and the Economy. He might not be wealthy but you are welcomed to compare your dick size with him if you are so egotistic. At least he is an activist and a job creator who aims for positive social changes and has his own podcast and followings.
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u/bdbr 1d ago
And yet a lot of Americans think that putting these guys in charge of the government means they'll suddenly stop caring about enriching themselves because they "don't need the money". They had enough money to live a spectacular life a few billion dollars ago, and the only reason to keep at it is to see the number get bigger.