"Greed is not the issue here" - actual dragon sitting on literal pile of gold.
Billionaires are greedier than dragons. The richest greediest dragon in all of fiction is Smaug, and he has an obscene amount of wealth. I've seen estimates of his wealth ranging from 5 billion dollars of gold on the low end, all the way up to 15-20 billion dollars of gold on the high end.
However, Smaug is an incredible outlier. He's basically the Musk of Dragons. The absolute most gold you'll find on a dragon in any video game or ttrpg is 5 million gold pieces. That's only if RNGesus smiles on you, and rolls as high as it could. The average is more like 3.5 million gold pieces of wealth.
1 gold piece = â…’oz of gold. So we are looking at 350,000 - 500,000 oz of gold for the upper 50% of all red elder worms. Any other dragon type doesn't hoard that much.
That comes out to a real world value of between $800,000,000 to $1,200,000,000. That's for the richest dragons out there.
Most dragons aren't billionaires.
Therefore, billionaires are literally greedier than the anthropomorphic caricaturization of greed from legend, namely dragons. The greediest fictional thing we could come up with isn't greedy enough to accurately portray these people's mental illnesses.
Shadowrun probably throws these assumptions off a bit. Dunkelzahn's net worth is hard to pin down but I think the listed cash dispursements in his will exceeded 1 billion nuyen, plus all the real estate and the establishment of several foundations, several items of extreme power and a number of 'wishes'.
Lofwyr owns a AAA megacorp that he assembled out of purchases made within about 30 years of waking up. My personal he'd cannon is that he ate Musk at some point in this process.
Even the less well known ones have serious stock portfolios and including multiple point shares in megacorps. Dragons took to business rather well as soon as they worked out what share certificates were.
Fair enough. Never played Shadowrun, and didn't know there were dragons in that system.
I would be curious what year it is set in, and how inflation may affect their currency value vs current real world currency values.
2050s for 1st edition, I think current edition is 2070s. Dragons started waking up in the early 2010s though. There has also been significant geopolitical upheaval, especially in the Americas and Europe. The general assumption is that a nuyen being about 1 modern dollar is about the right ballpark.
Wow! Thanks for the perspective!
On Reddit, your account would be banned for contributing to an anti-social atmosphere after two dozen corporate accounts red-flagged this image and reported it to the PR staffer currently operating as the subs moderator.
Industry insiders will pay tens of millions of dollars a year to fight off the bad press of their shitty decisions, while doggedly insisting the market cannot support the salaries of a few middle income developers living in some of the most expensive residential markets in the country.
This is why federated social media is important.
What are you even on about? The guillotine joke is probably one of the most common reaction posts to any corporate news on Reddit. On any major sub it would get thousands of upvotes and there would be dozens of comment replies with the same overused jokes people post every single time like "Ah, back to the classics", "Time to dust off the old guillotine", "Eat the rich 🍽️", "When’s the revolution starting? I’ll bring snacks.". Pretending anyone at Reddit HQ cares about this kind of thing is peak Redditor behaviour.
Who subs have gotten shut down because Reddit administrators accused the local mods of failing to curtail it.
The application of the ban rules tend to be arbitrary and highly political. But guillotine jokes absolutely get accounts banned. And moderators who fail to consistently ban certain accounts were targeted for removal very aggressively over the last four years.
I use Reddit. This joke is still insanely popular even on the generic default subs. No one cares enough about this to shut down /r/gaming or /r/funny. Reddit is already pretty bad in reality, there's no need to fantasize about it being even worse.
This has the same vibe as the hundreds of posts that appear on there every single year around the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary saying stuff like "Reddit is owned by Tencent!!!!1! and they're banning everyone who mentions Tiananmen Square!!!!11!!!!" despite there being literal thousands of posts about the massacre on the platform.
Yes, the anti-China trolls love to insist they're speaking truth to power rather than just echoing a bit of recycled propaganda from the 1990s.
No, that doesn't change the fact that Rule #1 gets invoked on guillotine posts regularly.
Excuse me, I can’t follow. What do you mean by propaganda?
"Nobody in China is allowed to know what happened in Tienanmen Square. You're not allowed to talk about it. Everything is censored. Nobody in China knows what happened."
Pure propaganda. This shit is in Chinese elementary school textbooks. Its about as poorly disseminated and heavily censored as the Kent State Massacre or the Waco Siege or the OWS protests in the United States.
I am glad we can agree that the Chinese government is trying to weave a false narrative that all of that has been instigated by mysterious western powers working in the shadows and as long as people stick to that they will be perfectly fine.
Don’t care about what the yankees have done tho. Don’t know what’s that about all of a sudden.
The idea that the John Birch Society single handedly perpetuated the Tienanmen Protests is pretty classic "evil foreigners did this" bullshit propaganda. But I see folks on Lemmy (and even more zealous folks on Reddit) doggedly assert that you can be arrested for saying the words "Tienanmen Square" in public.
Incidentally, you can link information to the contrary on Reddit, and that's also grounds for account suspension, given a critical mass of users slamming the "Report" button.
Every social media site has its orthodoxy and its taboos. Saying anything outside this orthodoxy opens you up to the full toolbox of censorship, depending on the zealousness of the moderators and administrators.
There's really no point in continuing this, but again, I use Reddit. I see these posts all the time. I'm not saying no one ever gets their posts removed or banned from communities or whatever, but they're insanely popular to the point someone like me who uses the platforms every few days sees it all the time.
That crazy, because that's exactly what I'm saying. And yet we're stuck here with you calling me a liar.
Why do I do this to myself.
This implies every post of this kind gets the user banned on Reddit. That is verifiably false. If that were true or even common enough, these posts wouldn't be as incredibly popular on Reddit as they are. Shifting your argument so you can pretend we agree is insane behaviour.
And no, I had never called you a liar until this point. I don't assume people are liars - extreme world views often lead people to have biased interpretations of reality, but that doesn't make them inherently evil or liars. Now you are lying, though.
Please let it be today!
I really don't care what starts the revolution, but I'd be pleased as punch if history books of the future had to note that gamers ate the first CEO after he shit on their favorite devs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acT_PSAZ7BQ
Vote Mega guillotine: https://youtu.be/YYJ5ZViYhHQ