We naturally put millionaires and billionaires in the same general class of person, but the only reason to do that is because the words are similar. Since these aren’t numbers we can actually visualize, it’s important to understand what a billion of something is. To travel a million inches, you’d have to travel from the Southern-most tip of Manhattan and go to the Bronx. To travel a billion inches, you’d have to fly from New York to Shanghai twice. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. A million ounces is about the weight of a train car. A billion ounces is 4.5 Eiffel Towers. Use these to conceptualize what the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is, and the absurd amount of wealth we’re talking about.
a millionaire’s current net worth is at least one average person’s lifetime earnings. a billionaire’s current net worth is at least a thousand average people’s lifetime earnings. to give a comparison of the scale specifically with money
“[I]t is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which — in addition to its nutritional deficits — is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor — especially with children to support and care for — is a perpetual high-wire act.”
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
Keep in mind then, that if you got paid $1000 an hour, 10 hours a day, five days a week, every week, all year, it would still take over 400 years to make a billion.
You want to make one billion in a human lifetime? If you made $10,000 an HOUR, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week, all year, it would take you 41 years to hit a billion.
(And that’s not counting, ya know, money you spend to stay alive on food or rent or anything. )
Jeff Bezos currently has 140 billion dollars.
If the Median American family earns $50 K a year and a “Working Lifetime” is 50 years (18 to 68), that is $2.5 M total. $1 B is the lifetime earnings of 400 families.
Stop idolizing the rich! They. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck. About. Anyone. But. Themselves! The rest of us are just ants on a hill and they are the spoiled, psychotic little pieces if shit children with magnifying glasses. They are so conceited and sadistic, torturing the rest of us is the only thing which excites them. If they cared about anything but themselves, they wouldn’t be hoarding money.
say what you want about elon musk but you gotta admit it’s extremely funny that the rescue team got those boys out before elon could even finish masturbating all over his shitty little escape pod
like he was hemming and hawing over what kind of music to load it with and the thai rescue teams just. got the job done normally. without him. he contributed jack shit and his shitty little submarine was rendered useless by completely standard scuba gear and a few determined workers.
dude tried playing the white savior just got blown the fuck out by people who actually cared about what was going on
hey wanna hear something even funnier, imo?
one of the key pieces of tech in the rescue was the heyphone, a 20-year-old caving radio used by the British diving team who made first contact with the boys.
If you look into the heyphone, you’ll find out that it’s 1. ancient by tech standards, 2. initially designed/assembled by a team of dedicated volunteers from the British Cave Rescue Council and 3. easy to make and fix on your own because the creators (who really wanted better and safer caving equipment) made the specs freely available online.
so in other words:
elon musk’s e-vape spaceship submarine got beat out by a fuckin tech dinosaur, which was still viable SPECIFICALLY because of the altruism of volunteers working not for personal profit and glory but for public safety. that’s symbolism babey!!!!!
Related to this: one of the world-leading companies in the portable communications space (i.e. radios used by rescue services and in a whole lot of other industries) is a NZ company whose founder left it fully-owned by a charitable trust, with all profits re-invested in R&D or donated to charitable and educational causes. They also, at least in the mid-2000s, paid summer interns *very* well (which is how I know about them; a friend did one there years ago.)
The exploitative/extractive nature of high-tech companies, and Elon Musk’s personal wealth-building from his own companies, is entirely a choice.
tora42's nonsensne 