Billionaires. No one needs this much money and it's not helpful to have this much hoarded.
We get it, you won at capitalism, now actually contribute to the world around you
Nobody ~earns~ a billion dollars. It can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor.
Out of curiosity, let's say I'm a video game developer and I make games by myself (no team). I have a hit success and sell 300 milion copies worldwide for an average of $20 a piece and am now a billionaire.
Was that money stolen or exploited? If so, how? If not, how does that jive with your stated position?
You're right that the claim that "being a billionaire requires exploitation" is massively oversimplified. But the situation you've described is essentially winning the lottery. Yeah, you put the time into think of, and execute on an idea, but everything else, from having the time to work on a possible flop, to it being a hit with 300 million people is ultra luck-based. 1000 people could do the exact same thing, and 1 might hit it big. It's gambling.
A more accurate phrasing of the original statement is: the only way to reliably amass billions of dollars in wealth is to exploit a supply/demand gap to the point of unsustainability.
A small business that operates with integrity, prioritizes the wellbeing of their society over their profits, doesn't price gouge, and doesn't discourage healthy competition will never become worth billions. They will always lose to competition that is willing and allowed to forego ethics for profits.
So 100 people could try your strategy of making a game that goes viral, and none of them are going to do it, most probably won't even make a profit. But then 100 people could try the strategy of exploitation, and they're going to reliably turn a profit. We allow a society where exploitation is a good investment.
Regardless of what people think of Peter Thiel he says out loud exactly what is wrong with late-stage capitalism: competition is for losers.
Firstly, it's no more luck based than any other method. There are less than 3000 billionaires in the world. If there was an even pseudo-reliable system to become a billionaire, there would be more than 0.00004% of the population who've managed it.
And selling a popular video game is just as much "exploiting a supply/demand gap" as any other method. You have an effective monopoly on an asset that people want.
All that to say, I'm pushing back on the "massively oversimplified," because it's not, it's just counterfactual.
I wouldn't have minded if the OP had said "the overwhelming majority of billionaires got there by exploiting the working class." That's just as "massively oversimplified" as what they did say, but isn't objectively false.
You're not describing a situation where your made a series of investments with a high ROI, you're describing a "one-hit-wonder" scenario. Ask any successful game developer and they'll all (sorry, the overwhelming majority will) tell you that making a viral game as you've described is hugely luck-based.
Similarly, all (sorry, the overwhelming majority) of those 3000 billionaires would agree that you don't amass their amount of wealth via a one-hit-wonder. Yes, it involves the fortune of having the opportunity to exploit others (usually born to already wealthy families), but then also requires a pattern of exploitation (I think they'll be less willing to admit that one. Maybe Theil would.)
If you'd like to adjust your hypothetical scenario to not be based off of a one-hit-wonder, and instead model a sustainable pattern of good investments, go for it. But I believe I've already addressed that possibility with my "small business" example in the previous post. It simply doesn't happen.
Yes, anything that turns a profit is based on a supply/demand gap, the key word I used was "unsustainablely". I'm not talking about selling a video game for $100 when players want to pay $20, I'm talking about selling the cure for a disease for $10000 when it costs $1 to make. Price gouging. Exploitation.
So, I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes:
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder)
Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder)
Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder)
Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)
There are several other examples in the top ten list that are lesser known but also one hit wonders, but even if there weren't, that's 40% right there.
I suppose you could argue that those companies do more than one thing, especially Google, but the vast majority of the cash flow for each is behind one product or line of products.
The only differentiator between any of them and Notch is that Notch was a one man team, and therefore wasn't "exploiting the capital generated by his employees."
And let's be real here. You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above. Microsoft started in Gates garage. Facebook was a college project. Almost all businesses start as small mom-and-pop shops. Some do in fact become multi-billion dollar businesses. Just not the vast majority because, again, it's based on luck.
And look, you keep circling back to try and paint what I'm saying as "it's fine for billionaires to price gouge medicine and stomp homeless people to death" or something. That's not what I'm saying no matter how many times you circle back to it.
To repeat ad nauseum, the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor. Full stop. No other point beside that. If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement. That is, again, the only point I'm arguing.
I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes: Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder) Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder) Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder) Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)
Not a single one of these hit billionaire status via a one-hit-wonder. Every single one of them did so via a pattern of exploitation.
Sure, some of them might have had a one-hit-wonder that resulted in their first few million. But to keep climbing past a billion required steady, consistent, methodical, unethical exploitation and anti-competative practices. These are the poster-children for exploitative billionaires in our society.
You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above.
I didn't say that. I said that (the overwhelming majority of) small businesses cannot become a billionaire company without a pattern of exploitation.
the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor...If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement.
Sure, it's theoretically possible. But that might account for less than 1% of currently living billionaires, if any at all. Do we agree?
Absolutely I'm willing to agree to that.
I am only pushing back on the statement, "it is impossible to amass a billion dollars without exploiting the labor of the working class."
I certainly don't think that's the majority of billionaires. If your definition of exploiting the labor of the working class includes "having any employees that aren't part owners of the business," then of course the number of billionaires who can say that is vanishingly small.
But they do in fact exist, and I think the majority of people are aware of that. Therefore, making statements like "all billionaires exploited labor" makes the average person think your position is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.
I think there is a slightly different claim we're each making, and it's confused by the term "billion". I think we both agree that it's an arbitrary value that was used in the interest of an oversimplified claim above, but I think we can disambiguate the points we're making if we generalize it.
Your statement that "it is possible to be an X-aire without exploitation of the working class" is technically correct for the value of X=billion.
But I think the claim I'm making (and the oversimplified claim that was originally made) is that: for any given point in time, in any given capitalist society, there is a value X beyond which you cannot reliably amass and retain wealth without unethical exploitation.
The post above set X at a billion, maybe it's not a billion, maybe it's 100 billion. 100 years ago maybe it was 100 million, and in 100 years it'll be 100 trillion. But the point is that there exists a value beyond which ONLY exploitative practices can get you; or in other words, you will never be the richest man in our late-stage capitalist society by winning the lottery or through steady, ethical investments.
Man, I feel like we reached an agreement and now you're trying to walk it back. :P
And while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, it feels like a setup to goal shift. Like, any example that gets brought up to counter the narrative can now just be dismissed as, "oh, but he's not enough of a billionaire."
And let's be real, a billion dollars, right now, is almost certainly beyond that arbitrary dollar amount X you speak of. There's only 3000 of them in the world! The *world! There's 8 trillion of us. How much more selective do we need to be??
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goal post movement, but I didn't make the original claim, and in fact thought the original claim was oversimplified, but that there was a truth to it. I think that in order to best illustrate that truth, "billion" had to be removed as it was a red herring.
And yeah the first half of it sounds like I'm setting a variable X, where X makes me right, but the fact that such an X exists is the point I'm making. If you agree then we're on the same page. The alternate claim would be that it's possible in our late stage capitalist society to be the richest person using purely ethical, non-exploitative means, which I don't believe is possible. And for a value of X=a billion, I think it's just very unlikely.
Heh Canonical is a funny example, considering most Linux users steer clear of it because of it's arguably exploitative practices in an effort to remain profitable.
I do think most, if not all billionaires have convinced themselves the ends justify their means. Zuck thinks he's "connecting the world". Bezos probably thinks the same thing Sam Walton did. Musk thinks he's ushering in the next stage of humanity. On some level I'm sympathetic to Ubuntu's cause; all tech companies harvest your data for profit, why not leverage that technique in order to bootstrap the prevalence of a FOSS platform.
But the point is, that's just what has to happen to amass that level of wealth in the society we live in. You can be as noble as you want, you can get lucky and find yourself in a pile of cash, but to steadily climb that ladder to the billion+ territory will require you to exploit or be exploited.
You are talking about Minecraft level success and even that took many years of success and being bought by one of the largest companies in the world to reach that many sells.
I am talking about that level of success, yes. I in fact was using it's numbers and exact case information, lol.
Notch is a billionaire. The original claim was that no one becomes a billionaire without stealing or exploiting the value of the work of the laborers. My question then is, the value of whose labor did Notch steal or exploit to become a billionaire?
Note: He is also an awful person, so setting that aside for the moment. He's not awful in a way that directly relates to the question at hand.
So really he made his money from selling his company, not just from the game sales itself. And I would argue that he more or less got lucky more than he "earned" it, which I think he has said as much in interviews before.
I can't really speak to if he directly exploited labor, but I think we can pretty safely state that Microsoft has in fact done so repeatedly, and so indirectly at least, Notch benefited from that as well.
Now does that make him morally corrupt for taking that offer? Maybe. But I think any one of us would take the same offer if given the chance. But the reality of the situation is that getting rich from this kind of success is very slim, and even then the labor and effort involved is very much disproportionate to what others are earning for much more effort. And if he was taxed at a rate where is was no longer a billionaire, but just a millionaire, then his quality of life very likely won't change too much while many other people would benefit, assuming that tax money is actually going to public services, that is.
The issue I'd take with that is that it's hardly any more or less "luck" than any other billionaire.
There's less than 3000 billionaires in the world. It's not like the other 2999 were wildly more qualified and had the perfect strategy that inevitably and directly led to their billionaire status.
And while he did become a billionaire by selling to Microsoft, he would have even without that most likely. The game has sold enough copies that it would have made him a billionaire, even without the sale to Microsoft.
And I think it's unfair, even if that wasn't the case, to lay the sins of the buyer at the feet of the seller, when the seller isn't otherwise doing anything wrong. It's basically the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing. There is no one he could sell to that wouldn't be "unethical", and therefore he'd be morally obligated to never sell it to anyone. He's as "morally corrupt" for that as any of us are when we shop at a grocery store or buy/rent housing.
And I said it elsewhere, I am in no way arguing against him being appropriately taxed on this income (or potentially standing wealth). I simply push back on the idea that billionaires can only become such by being morally bankrupt exploiters who stomp on the heads of millions of the proletariat to get where they are.
Are there some like that? Absolutely.
Is it the vast majority? Depends on how you define "stomping on the heads of the proletariat," but it's probably a good chunk at minimum.
But the only requirement is luck. Not cruelty or exploitation.
I'm all for progression tax structures. I'm all for taxing the rich. But statements like "all billionaires got their money by exploiting the poor" makes one look, at best, uncritical of your own positions. It's counterfactual name calling of the out-tribe, the same as calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi.
Every billionaire are where they are at by being at least somewhat lucky. In a lot of cases they are simply lucky enough to be born to the right family. Some have worked to get where they are, but its not just hard work or effort that got them there.
And I would argue that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I would also argue that that is the case for just about any other societal system as well. After all, none of us can live without being a burden or hurting others at some point. That's life. Its also more or less the concept of "original sin" that Christians go on about. Its fine to acknowledge that and only by doing so can society at large takes steps to reduce systematic harm where we can.
That being said, billionaires, by having more capital, have more power and influence under capitalism, so it can be argued that they get a larger part of the blame for systematic issues, especially as many of them do utilize their power to maintain the status quo or push for more harmful systematic policies. And the ones that aren't actively pushing such policies are still benefiting from such policies. And they could donate their fortunes to charitable causes, but in my opinion that's not something that we should have to rely on them doing and does nothing to solve the systematic issues at play.
At the end of the day, it's its not as if its a black and white issue, but the statement that no one "earned" a billion dollars is largely true in the sense that if you work hard or put in the effort, you can make it. Even in Notch's case, if he didn't decide to sale to Microsoft, maybe he might still be a billionaire today, but would he have earned it himself? Its not like he was the only one working on the game even when he sold the company. I'm not sure what the compensation the others working at Mojang got, but if he continued to independently develop Minecraft, getting to 300 million sales requires significant development effort between porting the game to various platforms and ongoing content updates. If he ended up getting the majority of the payout, then he would have very likely did it at the disproportionately at the expense of other's effort.
A billion dollars is a lot of money. Like a lot of money. I don't necessary think its wrong to have the opinion that billionaires shouldn't exist. At least in the system we have today. Now, I'd say that its the system that's the problem, not necessary any individual billionaire, but if they get to wieild the power that comes with their fortune, then its fair to have more blame for it as well.
I don't disagree with a single thing you have just said, nor have I. But then, based on all that, would you agree then that the sentence "[A billion dollars] can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor" is counterfactual?
Because that's the only point I'm making. I'm with you on the additional social responsibility that should be encumbant upon billionaires. I'm with you on fixing systematic issues that allow them to exist.
My one and only point for this whole thread is that you can be a billionaire without "stealing and exploiting other people's labor."
I think what we are getting to is the semantics of it. Theoretically, it should be possible to be a billionaire without stealing and exploitation. I think that in reality though, a billion dollars is so much money that's its hard to see how a single person can amass that much wealth without being exploitative, intentionally or not. Even if you were given that much money, holding onto it would require investing into a system that is rife with exploitation.
I'll admit that I'm by no means an expert on billionaires and there might exist some that made their fortune without exploitation. And I'm including indirect exploitation here. Maybe that's another point of semantics, but its one that I feel very much matters in this context.
I don't think this is semantic though. The initial post said that "Nobody earns a billion dollars. It can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor."
That statement does not read as "they were at least involved indirectly in some behavior at some point in their life that was in some way unethical." It is purporting a direct relationship between their achieving a billion dollars and an active exploitation of others direct labor. That is why I pushed back against it.
And here is my issue with including indirect exploitation in the consideration. It vastly waters down culpability. A billionaire is just as guilty of indirect exploitation as you or me or the Pope. There is literally no action at all that one can take that I couldn't make some argument for being a form of indirect exploitation. So when you say that billionaires are exploitative for indirect exploitation reasons, it seems churlish. It loses all meaning because it's basically tautologically true. Why should I care about it if the person telling me that the billionaire is exploiting people is actively and continuously engaging in the exact same type of exploitation?
Because a billionaire isn't "just as guilty" in an exploitative system. They are more guilty because they benefit more and they have more power due to their capital. If you can't see that, then I guess we won't ever agree.
Do you have a job? If so, you should know how hard it is to earn money. The level of effort required to even get minimum wage is usually astounding. And maybe you went to school and learned to do more skilled jobs, so you don't have to work as hard as a minimum wage laborer. Maybe you can justify it as being smarter or more skilled and that's fine. But do you think someone that "earned" a billion dollars actually worked ten thousand times harder than someone who earns 100k. Or a thousand times harder than someone that earned a million dollars. Or are that much smarter or more skilled?
In your original example, you talk about how and individual could make a game that could get 300 million in sales while ignoring that vast amount of effort it realistically takes to do so. Way more effort than a single individual person can do. Getting to those kinds of sales would take the effort of many people, so if a single person benefits more than the others involved in that effort, then they did so by exploitation of their labor.
Not all of that money goes to the developer, but also to the seller places and other places. You'd also still have to pay income tax.
Ideally, there'd just be a 100% income and wealth tax after having say, 1/10,000,000th of the world's total GDP. Without any loopholes.
With a world GDP of approx. $ 102 trillion, or 102 billion if you use the long scale, that is about $ 10.2 million you would have at max.
I think it fair up until then, exploited after that.
With that money, you can practically buy anything to your heart's content anyways.
How about more brackets?
-- Practical scenario --
Suppose you had a wealth of 10 billion. The lowest bracket is a 3 billionth of the world's income, so say 34k. That's taxed 0%.
The lower middle is from there til 1.6 billionth of that income, around 64k. Taxed 35%.
Upper middle, around 1.6 billionth til 1 billionth (around 100k), taxed 65%.
Upper, around 1 billionth til 1 millionth (10 million) of world's GDP, has about 99%.
Highest has 1 millionth and beyond. Let's assume the world's GDP is 100 trillion for ease of calculation.
So, you have 10 billion. 10 bil - 10 mil. 9.99 bil, all removed, used for public works.
10 mil - 100k, 9.9 mil. Taxing 99% of that 9.9 mil gets 99k.
And so on, until you have a smaller but respectable amount to play with.
I think you misunderstand me. I don't strictly disagree with anything you've said. I'm not sure that I'm on the 100% tax above a certain threshold idea, but I'm not terrible interested in debating it one way or another.
The point I was interested in was what makes it inherently exploitative to earn that much money?
You repeat the claim (and clarify) that making anything above 10mil is exploitative, but what I'm curious about is the justification.
Typically, my understanding of when people say billionaires exploited the working class, it's because they are pocketing the excess value of those that they employ. But we have real world cases of billionaires who employ no one.
In those cases, what have they done that is exploitative?
And to further clarify. I'm not asking why it's unjust from an equity standpoint. I'm not asking why it would be better if that wealth was taxed. I'm specifically asking after the word exploitative.
Yeah we really need an upper limit for wealth. In video games you would eventually cap the score, and billionaires are far in excess of that. Reminds me of that episode of Ducktales where Scrooge celebrates that he has become so rich he no longer has to pay taxes because they cannot be calculated any more.
We would be ~1000 years in the future right now without Abrahamic faiths.
You're probably right but I can't help thinking there would just be a different version, equally harmful and controlling, stunting our growth.
I think it's part of us that we have to outgrow as a species. For some reason I'm confident that will happen, given enough time.
Talked about this a ton with an LLM a couple months back. The thing is, there was never an alternative that captured a similar psychotic zealotry. All groups have their faiths throughout the same eras, but none match the exported hate, murder, and industrial scale slaughter of other humans like the Abrahamic faiths. Confusion Monks never invaded France. Buddhists never occupied Scandinavia. The hate, death, and constant conflict of the Abrahamic faiths are the absolute most toxic and harmful aspect of all of humanity. The most deadly conflict since WW2 has been in Africa over the last few years. Most of the west isn't even talking about this. It is a Abrahamic in origin. Gaza is the same. It has all been like this for 2500 years of constant killing. Other places had minor issues, but they never exported and in the present, these others are mostly in decline. If you take away the Abrahamic faiths, I bet all are gone in half a millennia. The man was as schizophrenic as the nations and peoples he left in his wake. Taming the ghost of the worlds most psychotic killer changes everything for the better.
You're getting religion mixed up with technology and opportunity.
There's been plenty of violence, war, and extremism in the name of Buddha and Confucius. They absolutely can be used to justify genocide, just look at Myanmar. It's very difficult to find a major religion that has never produced fanatical sociopaths.
Never on boats across seas and continents. Nowhere on earth now is really safe from the history and influence of colonialism. All of those expeditions carried a strong religious underpinning that was the primary capital motivation in case of loss. Myanmar is no exception. All of it only happened because it was underpinned by religious bullshit. Many cultures were motivated by trade in the past but none of those that only cared for trade ever had the kind of history of death accompanied by Abrahamic faiths. This is the primary commonality with all of the worst acts in human history in one form or another. Shedding this one awful thing would be the largest positive change possible. Abrahamic faith is the single greatest disease in all of history.
I am equally confident there will never be enough time
I'm an atheist and think we'd be better off if we moved beyond religion. That said, I don't think it's true we'd be so much farther ahead without it.
Looking at early humans I think religion was a competitive advantage, because it organized groups of people who might not otherwise have worked together. It allowed us to move beyond tribal affiliation, to create a common "operating system" for societies and conceive of and pursue multigenerational goals.
I think we can do all that stuff now without religion, but also think we need more explicitly defined structures and institutions to fill the role religion has played.
I really liked that in Raised by Wolves it was an alternate timeline where there was no Christianity.
Instead the religious fanatics eradicating the atheists were Mithraics.
Poverty. It’s honestly something I don’t wish upon my worst enemy and the fact I’ve seen so much shit due to it, it’s something I can never get back and now will have to endlessly live with the pain until the day I literally die.
Pocerty is crazy. When i grew up, i didn't really know any poor people. The closest i got was a family that moved here from Sarajevo, because they had a war going. They weren't poor, because we have a good safety net for things like that (for the most part.) when i got older, there was the occasional beggar in the city. When i was 20 ish, i went to canada for two weeks, and ithey had not only more beggars, they had different beggars. Like i have never seen someone going through a garbage bin to find food. I talked to a guy in a suit who was eating a donut that i threw away. He lost his job like 3 weeks ago and was on the street pretty much from one week to another. I'm not shitting on canada at all, it was just the first time that i left europe.
Religion
Well, I liked learning about the ethics some religions have like budhism and so on.
But I totally agree with that when I see various countries being controlled by religion.
That’s the thing though, most people don’t view a religion as an ethical lens, they view it as a dogma to be followed unconditionally under threat of eternal torture.
Religions, all of them
Cancer
It's kind of a side effect for us having regenerating cells. From what I understand it's an umbrella term for a variety of diseases that emerge from us living long lives with - relatively - versatile/adaptable bodies. In some ways it's amazing that our bodies work at all.
That said, it's not easy to be philosophical about it when you or someone you know is affected. Lost a family friend to cancer just a few months ago.
Trump
Nature abhorres a vacuum, and we could get someone worse instead, someone actually smart.
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Jordan Peterson
Canada supports this message. God I wish that fuck would close his fucking trap.
At the end of the day he's a fragile human being who appears to suffer from moderately bad mental health issues. I'd argue that he is more of a symptom of something going wrong with our society than a cause, even if he does amplify certain undesirable viewpoints.
If he didn't exist some other charlaton would get niche internet celebrity status by making hot takes from a similar perspective.
He causes no harm to the people who don't like him but he has helped thousands of young men sort their lives out and get their shit together. This has objectively made a huge positive impact in the world.
He became popular by harming people.
He became popular by resisting government mandate on speech. He haven't harmed anyone. He's literally a clinical psychologist whose job is to help people.
Didn't he lose the right to be a psychologist because he was harming people?
A quick google didn't provide me with any information on that but I'm sure you will.
"An Ontario court ruled against popular clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson and is upholding an order for him to receive social media sensitivity training or lose his license to practice medicine...
The court declared Dr. Peterson’s activities as harmful to the public and damaging to the profession of psychology, with his statements threatening to erode public trust...
...He has not worked in clinical psychology since 2017,"
I don't see it saying anywhere that he has lost his licence or harmed anyone. He doesn't even do clinical work anymore.
Agree he hasn't lost his license yet, as that is currently what is being threatened if he does not comply with the court order. Hasn't actually happened yet, just will if he doesn't.
As for being harmful... I don't know how to spell this out any simpler than the quote so I'll just make it easier to read I guess?
**THE COURT DECLARED DR. PETERSON'S ACTIVITIES AS HARMFUL TO THE PUBLIC AND DAMAGING TO THE PROFESSION OF PSYCHOLOGY **
I'm really not what there is to misunderstand, he is under threat of losing his license because his actions are HARMFUL TO THE PUBLIC AND THE PROFESSION OF PSYCHOLOGY
First you said that he became popular by "harming people" but the article you linked states; He became famous in 2016 after criticizing Canadian Bill C-16, claiming that the bill would enforce speech codes and harm free speech.
Then you implied he lost his license to practise clinical psychology which also has not happened (atleast yet)
Now you're saying that posting controversial comments on social media is "harmful to the public"
"The complaints against him include making "misleading" statements about COVID-19; mocking a plus-size Sports Illustrated model; and calling a surgeon a "criminal" for removing the breasts of transgender actress Ellen Page."
So while I don't disagree that saying stupid shit on social media can potentially be harmful to some individuals that is still not in any way unique behaviour to JP so considering the original argument I still disagree with the claim that the world would be a better place without him. He's like Elon Musk; people don't like him as a person so they're actively looking for the most insignificant faults in his behaviour and then act like he's some horrible human being. It's recreational outrage pure and simple.
It's been two people bud. Other guy took over for me and I don't see a need to repeat the information, he did a better job than what I would've done.
Your statement is correct in he became popular because of his voice on C-16.
Listen I don't care to spell out every detail on why his statements ARE harassment. I don't feel like you care to listen. That's fine, no one expects you to be superman. It's okay to not be right sometimes. You don't have to change, you'll just be left behind. Good luck gamer.
The other guy is on my block list so it's only you I'm hearing from. Ad hominem also isn't changing anyone's mind. Making this about me is just wasting both of our time.
There is a certainreason I ask that, this empowerment comes off as weaponization.
he encourages the idea that physical fun time is a human right
Care to elaborate on this? I've listened probably 20 hours of him talking but I don't remember him saying anything like this. To me his core message seems to be that stop blaming the world for your issues and instead look in the mirror and sort your own life out first. He even became famous as the "clean your own room before you go out fixing the world" dude.
I said that euphemistically, but he's quite famous for his teachings regarding the community known as incels which he describes as having been failed by society, mentioning his notion that they would be satisfied if society was built according to ideal conditions, which implies what they want should be a given, with incels being predominantly men, most of whom are self-convinced into thinking their situation is more than happenstance and almost never based on their own prior social conduct.
The belief in inherent entitlements and obligations, especially when they're not even balanced, is the biggest reason society has succumbed so hard in the first place, which he even says when it doesn't involve the interests of his target audience, yet in any discussion on sexuality, including asexuality, which his dismissal of is feeding into some of how we're treated in the world, you'll find him bringing up this train of thought.
The quote you linked is not from Jordan Peterson but a random twitter user called "TYL80737692"
If you want to know JP's thought on incels you can look it up and hear it from the man himself rather than look for someone to intrepret it for you and add their own spin to it.
From the comments of the first video: "It's ironic that mainstream media slandered Jordan Peterson as "King of the incels" when he routinely tells men that if women don't find them attractive - it's not the women's fault - but men's fault, and it's each man's responsibility to fix it."
I did, and I'm who I linked to on Twitter (forgot Twitter replies are often unattainable). The comment on the first video goes against his own words in other parts of his wisdom. You don't have to even be politically aligned against him to gather that it's a populist game, he is the Dr. Phil or Supernanny of politics.
Advertising, political parties and religions. All of them.
Homelessness
We have the ability to end homelessness, at least in more developed countries, but the people in charge would rather send the homeless to prison for daring to find a place to sleep. At least in the US, I don't know how other places handle the homeless.
Ads
A couple of strains of mosquito. We don’t need the two or three that bite humans. There are plenty of other strains that the bats and birds can eat.
Bats don't really eat them.
Like, they do, but it's mostly incidental.
Car-dependent suburban sprawl
Ticks
and Leeches
At least Leeches are useful in medicine, even today! I'm convinced Ticks have no ecological benefit or traits worthy of study apart from those necessary to ensure their eradication. Perspectives to the contrary from tick lovers and biologists welcome, however!
IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED IS THIS WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND
Cars. Or at least infrastructure systems that's entirely built just for cars.
Human ego.
If we were to get rid of that the world would probably be significantly better place.
Greed.
populism
social media
using religion for control and power
mosquitoes
unchecked corporate greed
Agreed except for mosquitoes. The eradication of them would seriously disrupt the natural order. But yeah fuck mosquitoes.
I hate mosquitos enough to be willing to roll the dice on this one
Bullshit nobody would miss them if they went and that's scientific fact. FOH with that hippy-dippy "live and let live" BS.
Stocks and everything around them are an expression of the greed and baseness of our species.
Advertising
DRM
Software Patents
The way it reads is that DRM intended for use with software patents should not be advertised
Greed
Landlords
Israel.
Israel was fine for the first few thousand years. The problem is the current acting individuals in the state.
I'm happy for the region to exist.
The state, not so much.
The experiment was a failure, give the land back to Palestine.
Maybe the Israelis can go to Egypt and demand their old jobs back.
By that same token, was Ottoman occupation of Israel successful or called for? Is it not unfair to call anyone in particular that when most nations sadly act as "failed experiments" (which causes Russia to come to mind thinking about it)? If Palestine itself had to lie about certain tragedies and get Russia and North Korea involved, could the "failed experiment" remark not be used on them? There is no hiding anything on any side anymore.
Humans.
(Yes i am a Misanthrope)
you could start with yourself
Not cool. Do not incite suicide.
I can excuse genocide incitement, but I draw the line at suicide incitement.
I don't excuse genocide incitement, that is inexcusable. But nobody was doing that, so. 👍
true, that fucker was inciting omnicide, which is even worse. why do vile ecofascists like you always do lip service to the fact that the statement "the world would be better without [insert ethnic group]" is evil but are suddenly ok with the prospect of murdering even more people? absolutely disgusting ideology of yours.
They weren't inciting anything. They were just answering the question of what the world would be better off without.
They aren't saying humans should actually be murdered. It is hard to deny the fact that we as a human race do nothing but exploit nature right now, rather than coexist with it. That is what is being said. Not that "we should kill all humans". That's reading too much into it, just like you are reading way too much into what I'm supposedly insinuating (i.e. "murdering even more people", which makes no sense because nobody was talking about murdering anybody lol).
Relax. I have not expressed anything that you can derive an ideology from. So you should not get your debate-trigger-happy panties in a twist over anything that's being said here. It's an objective, truthful answer to OP's question.
I'm not saying anybody should die. The commenter is not saying anybody should die. You aren't saying anybody should die, right?
All good? 🤝
That would be only one less hunans.He can do better if he puts his back into it.
Social media
Uncontrolled and unbridled capitalism (though don't throw out the baby with the bathwater)
70% of the cars
Republican party
Russian government
Israeli government
Hamas
Terrorists
Cancer
Communism
Dictators
I can go on for a while....
I can go on for a while....
Yeah, you could, but you're gonna need some of these: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
You can make a line break by ending your sentence with two spaces and then a line break.
Only using one space or none will instead treat the line break in your comment as just a space.
Ending a line on a \ will also make a new line
Two line breaks in a row while making your comment will make a paragraph break
Human beings.
Mosquitoes. There is literally no benefit of them existing.
They are a major food source for other animals, pollinators and they spread diseases (which is very beneficial for the diseases).
I know you are right. But my hate for those bastards keep me from saying something nice about them.
Do you know what mosquitoes eat? Nectar. They're pollinators.
But they also eat my nectar. I dont like it
(I didnt knew it, thought that they could die without consequences)
There's a song where the singer lists a long long list of things that are wrong with the world, then says simply that if it was up to her, she'd take away the guns.
I also think the world would be a much better place if there were no sexually transmitted disease. Sex should just be fun and healthy, there's no need for that additional layer of risk.
Also limited liability corporate business structure ought never to have been made legal.
Yellowjackets - I hate mosquitoes but they just trying to live. Yellowjackets are assholes.
I'm wearing one right now though, they're cozy.
Mosquitoes
Right wing ideologies
That chair-leg-homing-behavior little toes seem to have.
Also, Jason. Because fuck Jason.
Also fuck... Was it Bianca? Fuck whoever that chick is who sold the guy's PS3 to pay for... Was it a manicure?
Fossil fuels.
Oh look, a thread full of things that I fucking don't like. (love you all)
Define "the world".
Are we talking about the actual ball of rock? The collective ecology of organisms living on it? Or specifically the human race's existence on the rock and within the ecology?
If we narrow it down to all organic life on the planet, the answer is: humans.
humans are part of the organic life on this planet (and since recently even outside) and your proposal would be pretty bad for them. fuck off ecofash
You’re right, that it would be bad for humans. I’m just looking at the big picture and what would good for it in the long run.
Humans already make similar decisions anyway. Certain part of the population will suffer so that another one can benefit. Occasionally, these sorts of decisions also lead to deaths. In an even larger scale, humans have also decided that certain animals and plants can suffer so that humans may thrive. Imagine if the ecosystem as a whole could make a decision like this about itself. Do you think the it would keep humanity, remove it entirely or maybe trim it down a bit?
But seriously though, humans are here to stay for the time being, and I prefer to keep it that way. Unlike Linkola, I’m in no hurry to see disasters wipe out a portion of humanity.
so you realize that the problem isnt within humanity itself, but class division. those classes a social construct and can be overcome. join your local radical leftist organization, read theory and start fighting for a better world not only for humanity but for the rest of life as well.
What kind of theory do you recommend?
as a ml its firstly gonna be the obvious ones: marx, engels and lenin. marx style can be a little hard to read sometimes, but it will make you see the world with new eyes truly. i genuinely recommend this reading list.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
It's been twisted so far from its original intention.
Starts with D ends in P.
Not dubstep!!!
Donald trumP?
Doorstop
Dustheap
Desktop
Dewdrop
Dollop
Damp
alt: Son Goku with stylish clothes
Dip?
Absolutely not!
Fossil fuels.
Putin.
Magical thinking.
Five day working week.
MS Windows.
one of those is not like the others
All are bad, idk what you mean
Smartphones
Jessica
@Phen True, Roger Rabbit would be so much better without her. :D
I don't know who Jessica is but I bet she must have done something to piss you off.
Tobacco, alcohol, etc.
They need more MDMA and cocaine though.
Ehhh. Maybe more mushrooms and ketamine
Ketamine is more in the ballpark of being bad for your body like cocaine than MDMA is. More addictive and can damage your kidneys/bladder with long term use. It also puts a moderate amount of strain on your heart like what happened with Matthew Perry earlier this year.
Are you seriously denying that Käsekrainer and Bernerwürstel are a lot better?
The mainstream kind of Käsekrainer is way worse IMO. Original Krainer from Slovenia/Carinthia are great though, and Berner are better than Frankfurter/Wiener. But I still like them.
Porn
Shit like this -
"I think the world would be better without (insert idea)"
"Oh my god but what about (insert unbelievably niche reason why not)? Won't someone think of the incredibly niche exception?!?!?"
On every fuckin comment on Lemmy. You're not improving the world guys, you're making it insufferable
I think the world could be better without people vocally losing their minds over some harmless fun. Ignore it if you don't like and move on, or if you're so wrapped up in being online that you can't ignore it I suggest you touch grass
what has that to do with what i said? or are just another fascist drooling about endangered civilians due to them having the "wrong" ethnicity?
edit: statement was based on an misunderstanding, see below
Russia is similar in mentality and economics to what are traditionally seen as cultures of "the West", including the US and Israel, but at the same time, I take it from the context that you said what you said from a Russian cultural perspective. It is an entirely neutral question, with a link to cast a shadow on the similarities. So I ask again, does that include Russia?
sorry for misunderstanding you. i use the term "the west" as a political term meaning the us and their european allies, not a cultural one. i also wanna stress that my distain refers exclusively to the regimes ruling this area, not the common population.
I for one am not fond of the infighting or corruption in any nation right now. Even if you subtract all the things that are unclear (such as the motives to take Ukraine, the extent of guilt of Israel, etc.) due to people waging misinformation wars, it's still pretty indicative and unsettling to hear certain leaders threaten nuclear strikes out in the open. China is the only Eastern enemy of the West that hasn't done this habitually.
Communism
Your government is never lowering the age of consent, get over it.
What kind of a sick fuck thinks disliking communism makes u a pedo. You have serious problems maybe stop projecting.
Ahahaha! You couldn't have made a worse reply if you tried!!
I bet if I googled ur name it would be on a list.
Now there's the projection.
ohh nooo! them evil asiaric barbarians want to improve our lives, how horrible!
thank mammon god that we saved them by giving them shock therapy and with it the great carrier options of crime and prostitution.
we are so civilized.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Communism is a pretty bad thing.
I said it as a joke cos someone said capitalism its an excellent example of lemmys political bias. I find it very interesting that lemmy embodies so many of the ideals of the marketplace of idea a fundamentally libertarian concept yet it has a bias towards the extreme left that fundamentally hate the concept.
Maybe one or two more genocides/famines and then they might relise.
According to them that's not real communism as its never been tried properly. They are missing the fundamental problem that it can never be tried properly cos it can never be implemented successfully. But they don't let that stop them.
Billionaires. No one needs this much money and it's not helpful to have this much hoarded.
We get it, you won at capitalism, now actually contribute to the world around you
Nobody ~earns~ a billion dollars. It can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor.
Out of curiosity, let's say I'm a video game developer and I make games by myself (no team). I have a hit success and sell 300 milion copies worldwide for an average of $20 a piece and am now a billionaire.
Was that money stolen or exploited? If so, how? If not, how does that jive with your stated position?
You're right that the claim that "being a billionaire requires exploitation" is massively oversimplified. But the situation you've described is essentially winning the lottery. Yeah, you put the time into think of, and execute on an idea, but everything else, from having the time to work on a possible flop, to it being a hit with 300 million people is ultra luck-based. 1000 people could do the exact same thing, and 1 might hit it big. It's gambling.
A more accurate phrasing of the original statement is: the only way to reliably amass billions of dollars in wealth is to exploit a supply/demand gap to the point of unsustainability.
A small business that operates with integrity, prioritizes the wellbeing of their society over their profits, doesn't price gouge, and doesn't discourage healthy competition will never become worth billions. They will always lose to competition that is willing and allowed to forego ethics for profits.
So 100 people could try your strategy of making a game that goes viral, and none of them are going to do it, most probably won't even make a profit. But then 100 people could try the strategy of exploitation, and they're going to reliably turn a profit. We allow a society where exploitation is a good investment.
Regardless of what people think of Peter Thiel he says out loud exactly what is wrong with late-stage capitalism: competition is for losers.
Firstly, it's no more luck based than any other method. There are less than 3000 billionaires in the world. If there was an even pseudo-reliable system to become a billionaire, there would be more than 0.00004% of the population who've managed it.
And selling a popular video game is just as much "exploiting a supply/demand gap" as any other method. You have an effective monopoly on an asset that people want.
All that to say, I'm pushing back on the "massively oversimplified," because it's not, it's just counterfactual.
I wouldn't have minded if the OP had said "the overwhelming majority of billionaires got there by exploiting the working class." That's just as "massively oversimplified" as what they did say, but isn't objectively false.
You're not describing a situation where your made a series of investments with a high ROI, you're describing a "one-hit-wonder" scenario. Ask any successful game developer and they'll all (sorry, the overwhelming majority will) tell you that making a viral game as you've described is hugely luck-based.
Similarly, all (sorry, the overwhelming majority) of those 3000 billionaires would agree that you don't amass their amount of wealth via a one-hit-wonder. Yes, it involves the fortune of having the opportunity to exploit others (usually born to already wealthy families), but then also requires a pattern of exploitation (I think they'll be less willing to admit that one. Maybe Theil would.)
If you'd like to adjust your hypothetical scenario to not be based off of a one-hit-wonder, and instead model a sustainable pattern of good investments, go for it. But I believe I've already addressed that possibility with my "small business" example in the previous post. It simply doesn't happen.
Yes, anything that turns a profit is based on a supply/demand gap, the key word I used was "unsustainablely". I'm not talking about selling a video game for $100 when players want to pay $20, I'm talking about selling the cure for a disease for $10000 when it costs $1 to make. Price gouging. Exploitation.
So, I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes: Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder) Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder) Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder) Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)
There are several other examples in the top ten list that are lesser known but also one hit wonders, but even if there weren't, that's 40% right there.
I suppose you could argue that those companies do more than one thing, especially Google, but the vast majority of the cash flow for each is behind one product or line of products.
The only differentiator between any of them and Notch is that Notch was a one man team, and therefore wasn't "exploiting the capital generated by his employees."
And let's be real here. You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above. Microsoft started in Gates garage. Facebook was a college project. Almost all businesses start as small mom-and-pop shops. Some do in fact become multi-billion dollar businesses. Just not the vast majority because, again, it's based on luck.
And look, you keep circling back to try and paint what I'm saying as "it's fine for billionaires to price gouge medicine and stomp homeless people to death" or something. That's not what I'm saying no matter how many times you circle back to it.
To repeat ad nauseum, the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor. Full stop. No other point beside that. If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement. That is, again, the only point I'm arguing.
Not a single one of these hit billionaire status via a one-hit-wonder. Every single one of them did so via a pattern of exploitation.
Sure, some of them might have had a one-hit-wonder that resulted in their first few million. But to keep climbing past a billion required steady, consistent, methodical, unethical exploitation and anti-competative practices. These are the poster-children for exploitative billionaires in our society.
I didn't say that. I said that (the overwhelming majority of) small businesses cannot become a billionaire company without a pattern of exploitation.
Sure, it's theoretically possible. But that might account for less than 1% of currently living billionaires, if any at all. Do we agree?
Absolutely I'm willing to agree to that.
I am only pushing back on the statement, "it is impossible to amass a billion dollars without exploiting the labor of the working class."
I certainly don't think that's the majority of billionaires. If your definition of exploiting the labor of the working class includes "having any employees that aren't part owners of the business," then of course the number of billionaires who can say that is vanishingly small.
But they do in fact exist, and I think the majority of people are aware of that. Therefore, making statements like "all billionaires exploited labor" makes the average person think your position is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.
I think there is a slightly different claim we're each making, and it's confused by the term "billion". I think we both agree that it's an arbitrary value that was used in the interest of an oversimplified claim above, but I think we can disambiguate the points we're making if we generalize it.
Your statement that "it is possible to be an X-aire without exploitation of the working class" is technically correct for the value of X=billion.
But I think the claim I'm making (and the oversimplified claim that was originally made) is that: for any given point in time, in any given capitalist society, there is a value X beyond which you cannot reliably amass and retain wealth without unethical exploitation.
The post above set X at a billion, maybe it's not a billion, maybe it's 100 billion. 100 years ago maybe it was 100 million, and in 100 years it'll be 100 trillion. But the point is that there exists a value beyond which ONLY exploitative practices can get you; or in other words, you will never be the richest man in our late-stage capitalist society by winning the lottery or through steady, ethical investments.
Man, I feel like we reached an agreement and now you're trying to walk it back. :P
And while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, it feels like a setup to goal shift. Like, any example that gets brought up to counter the narrative can now just be dismissed as, "oh, but he's not enough of a billionaire."
And let's be real, a billion dollars, right now, is almost certainly beyond that arbitrary dollar amount X you speak of. There's only 3000 of them in the world! The *world! There's 8 trillion of us. How much more selective do we need to be??
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goal post movement, but I didn't make the original claim, and in fact thought the original claim was oversimplified, but that there was a truth to it. I think that in order to best illustrate that truth, "billion" had to be removed as it was a red herring.
And yeah the first half of it sounds like I'm setting a variable X, where X makes me right, but the fact that such an X exists is the point I'm making. If you agree then we're on the same page. The alternate claim would be that it's possible in our late stage capitalist society to be the richest person using purely ethical, non-exploitative means, which I don't believe is possible. And for a value of X=a billion, I think it's just very unlikely.
Tempting to agree on the less than 1%.
Regarding millionaires, not billionaires, I can only think of one who sold a business and then started a Linux distribution : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth
Heh Canonical is a funny example, considering most Linux users steer clear of it because of it's arguably exploitative practices in an effort to remain profitable.
I do think most, if not all billionaires have convinced themselves the ends justify their means. Zuck thinks he's "connecting the world". Bezos probably thinks the same thing Sam Walton did. Musk thinks he's ushering in the next stage of humanity. On some level I'm sympathetic to Ubuntu's cause; all tech companies harvest your data for profit, why not leverage that technique in order to bootstrap the prevalence of a FOSS platform.
But the point is, that's just what has to happen to amass that level of wealth in the society we live in. You can be as noble as you want, you can get lucky and find yourself in a pile of cash, but to steadily climb that ladder to the billion+ territory will require you to exploit or be exploited.
You are talking about Minecraft level success and even that took many years of success and being bought by one of the largest companies in the world to reach that many sells.
I am talking about that level of success, yes. I in fact was using it's numbers and exact case information, lol.
Notch is a billionaire. The original claim was that no one becomes a billionaire without stealing or exploiting the value of the work of the laborers. My question then is, the value of whose labor did Notch steal or exploit to become a billionaire?
Note: He is also an awful person, so setting that aside for the moment. He's not awful in a way that directly relates to the question at hand.
So really he made his money from selling his company, not just from the game sales itself. And I would argue that he more or less got lucky more than he "earned" it, which I think he has said as much in interviews before.
I can't really speak to if he directly exploited labor, but I think we can pretty safely state that Microsoft has in fact done so repeatedly, and so indirectly at least, Notch benefited from that as well.
Now does that make him morally corrupt for taking that offer? Maybe. But I think any one of us would take the same offer if given the chance. But the reality of the situation is that getting rich from this kind of success is very slim, and even then the labor and effort involved is very much disproportionate to what others are earning for much more effort. And if he was taxed at a rate where is was no longer a billionaire, but just a millionaire, then his quality of life very likely won't change too much while many other people would benefit, assuming that tax money is actually going to public services, that is.
The issue I'd take with that is that it's hardly any more or less "luck" than any other billionaire.
There's less than 3000 billionaires in the world. It's not like the other 2999 were wildly more qualified and had the perfect strategy that inevitably and directly led to their billionaire status.
And while he did become a billionaire by selling to Microsoft, he would have even without that most likely. The game has sold enough copies that it would have made him a billionaire, even without the sale to Microsoft.
And I think it's unfair, even if that wasn't the case, to lay the sins of the buyer at the feet of the seller, when the seller isn't otherwise doing anything wrong. It's basically the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing. There is no one he could sell to that wouldn't be "unethical", and therefore he'd be morally obligated to never sell it to anyone. He's as "morally corrupt" for that as any of us are when we shop at a grocery store or buy/rent housing.
And I said it elsewhere, I am in no way arguing against him being appropriately taxed on this income (or potentially standing wealth). I simply push back on the idea that billionaires can only become such by being morally bankrupt exploiters who stomp on the heads of millions of the proletariat to get where they are.
Are there some like that? Absolutely. Is it the vast majority? Depends on how you define "stomping on the heads of the proletariat," but it's probably a good chunk at minimum. But the only requirement is luck. Not cruelty or exploitation.
I'm all for progression tax structures. I'm all for taxing the rich. But statements like "all billionaires got their money by exploiting the poor" makes one look, at best, uncritical of your own positions. It's counterfactual name calling of the out-tribe, the same as calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi.
Every billionaire are where they are at by being at least somewhat lucky. In a lot of cases they are simply lucky enough to be born to the right family. Some have worked to get where they are, but its not just hard work or effort that got them there.
And I would argue that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I would also argue that that is the case for just about any other societal system as well. After all, none of us can live without being a burden or hurting others at some point. That's life. Its also more or less the concept of "original sin" that Christians go on about. Its fine to acknowledge that and only by doing so can society at large takes steps to reduce systematic harm where we can.
That being said, billionaires, by having more capital, have more power and influence under capitalism, so it can be argued that they get a larger part of the blame for systematic issues, especially as many of them do utilize their power to maintain the status quo or push for more harmful systematic policies. And the ones that aren't actively pushing such policies are still benefiting from such policies. And they could donate their fortunes to charitable causes, but in my opinion that's not something that we should have to rely on them doing and does nothing to solve the systematic issues at play.
At the end of the day, it's its not as if its a black and white issue, but the statement that no one "earned" a billion dollars is largely true in the sense that if you work hard or put in the effort, you can make it. Even in Notch's case, if he didn't decide to sale to Microsoft, maybe he might still be a billionaire today, but would he have earned it himself? Its not like he was the only one working on the game even when he sold the company. I'm not sure what the compensation the others working at Mojang got, but if he continued to independently develop Minecraft, getting to 300 million sales requires significant development effort between porting the game to various platforms and ongoing content updates. If he ended up getting the majority of the payout, then he would have very likely did it at the disproportionately at the expense of other's effort.
A billion dollars is a lot of money. Like a lot of money. I don't necessary think its wrong to have the opinion that billionaires shouldn't exist. At least in the system we have today. Now, I'd say that its the system that's the problem, not necessary any individual billionaire, but if they get to wieild the power that comes with their fortune, then its fair to have more blame for it as well.
I don't disagree with a single thing you have just said, nor have I. But then, based on all that, would you agree then that the sentence "[A billion dollars] can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor" is counterfactual?
Because that's the only point I'm making. I'm with you on the additional social responsibility that should be encumbant upon billionaires. I'm with you on fixing systematic issues that allow them to exist.
My one and only point for this whole thread is that you can be a billionaire without "stealing and exploiting other people's labor."
I think what we are getting to is the semantics of it. Theoretically, it should be possible to be a billionaire without stealing and exploitation. I think that in reality though, a billion dollars is so much money that's its hard to see how a single person can amass that much wealth without being exploitative, intentionally or not. Even if you were given that much money, holding onto it would require investing into a system that is rife with exploitation.
I'll admit that I'm by no means an expert on billionaires and there might exist some that made their fortune without exploitation. And I'm including indirect exploitation here. Maybe that's another point of semantics, but its one that I feel very much matters in this context.
I don't think this is semantic though. The initial post said that "Nobody earns a billion dollars. It can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor."
That statement does not read as "they were at least involved indirectly in some behavior at some point in their life that was in some way unethical." It is purporting a direct relationship between their achieving a billion dollars and an active exploitation of others direct labor. That is why I pushed back against it.
And here is my issue with including indirect exploitation in the consideration. It vastly waters down culpability. A billionaire is just as guilty of indirect exploitation as you or me or the Pope. There is literally no action at all that one can take that I couldn't make some argument for being a form of indirect exploitation. So when you say that billionaires are exploitative for indirect exploitation reasons, it seems churlish. It loses all meaning because it's basically tautologically true. Why should I care about it if the person telling me that the billionaire is exploiting people is actively and continuously engaging in the exact same type of exploitation?
Because a billionaire isn't "just as guilty" in an exploitative system. They are more guilty because they benefit more and they have more power due to their capital. If you can't see that, then I guess we won't ever agree.
Do you have a job? If so, you should know how hard it is to earn money. The level of effort required to even get minimum wage is usually astounding. And maybe you went to school and learned to do more skilled jobs, so you don't have to work as hard as a minimum wage laborer. Maybe you can justify it as being smarter or more skilled and that's fine. But do you think someone that "earned" a billion dollars actually worked ten thousand times harder than someone who earns 100k. Or a thousand times harder than someone that earned a million dollars. Or are that much smarter or more skilled?
In your original example, you talk about how and individual could make a game that could get 300 million in sales while ignoring that vast amount of effort it realistically takes to do so. Way more effort than a single individual person can do. Getting to those kinds of sales would take the effort of many people, so if a single person benefits more than the others involved in that effort, then they did so by exploitation of their labor.
Not all of that money goes to the developer, but also to the seller places and other places. You'd also still have to pay income tax.
Ideally, there'd just be a 100% income and wealth tax after having say, 1/10,000,000th of the world's total GDP. Without any loopholes.
With a world GDP of approx. $ 102 trillion, or 102 billion if you use the long scale, that is about $ 10.2 million you would have at max.
I think it fair up until then, exploited after that. With that money, you can practically buy anything to your heart's content anyways.
How about more brackets?
-- Practical scenario --
Suppose you had a wealth of 10 billion. The lowest bracket is a 3 billionth of the world's income, so say 34k. That's taxed 0%.
The lower middle is from there til 1.6 billionth of that income, around 64k. Taxed 35%.
Upper middle, around 1.6 billionth til 1 billionth (around 100k), taxed 65%.
Upper, around 1 billionth til 1 millionth (10 million) of world's GDP, has about 99%.
Highest has 1 millionth and beyond. Let's assume the world's GDP is 100 trillion for ease of calculation.
So, you have 10 billion. 10 bil - 10 mil. 9.99 bil, all removed, used for public works.
10 mil - 100k, 9.9 mil. Taxing 99% of that 9.9 mil gets 99k.
And so on, until you have a smaller but respectable amount to play with.
I think you misunderstand me. I don't strictly disagree with anything you've said. I'm not sure that I'm on the 100% tax above a certain threshold idea, but I'm not terrible interested in debating it one way or another.
The point I was interested in was what makes it inherently exploitative to earn that much money? You repeat the claim (and clarify) that making anything above 10mil is exploitative, but what I'm curious about is the justification.
Typically, my understanding of when people say billionaires exploited the working class, it's because they are pocketing the excess value of those that they employ. But we have real world cases of billionaires who employ no one.
In those cases, what have they done that is exploitative?
And to further clarify. I'm not asking why it's unjust from an equity standpoint. I'm not asking why it would be better if that wealth was taxed. I'm specifically asking after the word exploitative.
Yeah we really need an upper limit for wealth. In video games you would eventually cap the score, and billionaires are far in excess of that. Reminds me of that episode of Ducktales where Scrooge celebrates that he has become so rich he no longer has to pay taxes because they cannot be calculated any more.
We would be ~1000 years in the future right now without Abrahamic faiths.
You're probably right but I can't help thinking there would just be a different version, equally harmful and controlling, stunting our growth.
I think it's part of us that we have to outgrow as a species. For some reason I'm confident that will happen, given enough time.
Talked about this a ton with an LLM a couple months back. The thing is, there was never an alternative that captured a similar psychotic zealotry. All groups have their faiths throughout the same eras, but none match the exported hate, murder, and industrial scale slaughter of other humans like the Abrahamic faiths. Confusion Monks never invaded France. Buddhists never occupied Scandinavia. The hate, death, and constant conflict of the Abrahamic faiths are the absolute most toxic and harmful aspect of all of humanity. The most deadly conflict since WW2 has been in Africa over the last few years. Most of the west isn't even talking about this. It is a Abrahamic in origin. Gaza is the same. It has all been like this for 2500 years of constant killing. Other places had minor issues, but they never exported and in the present, these others are mostly in decline. If you take away the Abrahamic faiths, I bet all are gone in half a millennia. The man was as schizophrenic as the nations and peoples he left in his wake. Taming the ghost of the worlds most psychotic killer changes everything for the better.
You're getting religion mixed up with technology and opportunity.
There's been plenty of violence, war, and extremism in the name of Buddha and Confucius. They absolutely can be used to justify genocide, just look at Myanmar. It's very difficult to find a major religion that has never produced fanatical sociopaths.
Never on boats across seas and continents. Nowhere on earth now is really safe from the history and influence of colonialism. All of those expeditions carried a strong religious underpinning that was the primary capital motivation in case of loss. Myanmar is no exception. All of it only happened because it was underpinned by religious bullshit. Many cultures were motivated by trade in the past but none of those that only cared for trade ever had the kind of history of death accompanied by Abrahamic faiths. This is the primary commonality with all of the worst acts in human history in one form or another. Shedding this one awful thing would be the largest positive change possible. Abrahamic faith is the single greatest disease in all of history.
I am equally confident there will never be enough time
I'm an atheist and think we'd be better off if we moved beyond religion. That said, I don't think it's true we'd be so much farther ahead without it.
Looking at early humans I think religion was a competitive advantage, because it organized groups of people who might not otherwise have worked together. It allowed us to move beyond tribal affiliation, to create a common "operating system" for societies and conceive of and pursue multigenerational goals.
I think we can do all that stuff now without religion, but also think we need more explicitly defined structures and institutions to fill the role religion has played.
I really liked that in Raised by Wolves it was an alternate timeline where there was no Christianity.
Instead the religious fanatics eradicating the atheists were Mithraics.
Poverty. It’s honestly something I don’t wish upon my worst enemy and the fact I’ve seen so much shit due to it, it’s something I can never get back and now will have to endlessly live with the pain until the day I literally die.
Pocerty is crazy. When i grew up, i didn't really know any poor people. The closest i got was a family that moved here from Sarajevo, because they had a war going. They weren't poor, because we have a good safety net for things like that (for the most part.) when i got older, there was the occasional beggar in the city. When i was 20 ish, i went to canada for two weeks, and ithey had not only more beggars, they had different beggars. Like i have never seen someone going through a garbage bin to find food. I talked to a guy in a suit who was eating a donut that i threw away. He lost his job like 3 weeks ago and was on the street pretty much from one week to another. I'm not shitting on canada at all, it was just the first time that i left europe.
Religion
Well, I liked learning about the ethics some religions have like budhism and so on.
But I totally agree with that when I see various countries being controlled by religion.
That’s the thing though, most people don’t view a religion as an ethical lens, they view it as a dogma to be followed unconditionally under threat of eternal torture.
Religions, all of them
Cancer
It's kind of a side effect for us having regenerating cells. From what I understand it's an umbrella term for a variety of diseases that emerge from us living long lives with - relatively - versatile/adaptable bodies. In some ways it's amazing that our bodies work at all.
That said, it's not easy to be philosophical about it when you or someone you know is affected. Lost a family friend to cancer just a few months ago.
Trump
Nature abhorres a vacuum, and we could get someone worse instead, someone actually smart.
Advertising
Jordan Peterson
Canada supports this message. God I wish that fuck would close his fucking trap.
At the end of the day he's a fragile human being who appears to suffer from moderately bad mental health issues. I'd argue that he is more of a symptom of something going wrong with our society than a cause, even if he does amplify certain undesirable viewpoints.
If he didn't exist some other charlaton would get niche internet celebrity status by making hot takes from a similar perspective.
He causes no harm to the people who don't like him but he has helped thousands of young men sort their lives out and get their shit together. This has objectively made a huge positive impact in the world.
He became popular by harming people.
He became popular by resisting government mandate on speech. He haven't harmed anyone. He's literally a clinical psychologist whose job is to help people.
Didn't he lose the right to be a psychologist because he was harming people?
A quick google didn't provide me with any information on that but I'm sure you will.
"An Ontario court ruled against popular clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson and is upholding an order for him to receive social media sensitivity training or lose his license to practice medicine... The court declared Dr. Peterson’s activities as harmful to the public and damaging to the profession of psychology, with his statements threatening to erode public trust... ...He has not worked in clinical psychology since 2017,"
Article from August 2023 https://leaders.com/news/public-speaking/jordan-petersons-appeal-denied-requires-training-for-medical-license/
Behind the bastards podcast on JP https://youtu.be/v9zjjj8NP3g?si=_YSIx7AjAH4p-g3O
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I don't see it saying anywhere that he has lost his licence or harmed anyone. He doesn't even do clinical work anymore.
Agree he hasn't lost his license yet, as that is currently what is being threatened if he does not comply with the court order. Hasn't actually happened yet, just will if he doesn't.
As for being harmful... I don't know how to spell this out any simpler than the quote so I'll just make it easier to read I guess?
**THE COURT DECLARED DR. PETERSON'S ACTIVITIES AS HARMFUL TO THE PUBLIC AND DAMAGING TO THE PROFESSION OF PSYCHOLOGY **
I'm really not what there is to misunderstand, he is under threat of losing his license because his actions are HARMFUL TO THE PUBLIC AND THE PROFESSION OF PSYCHOLOGY
First you said that he became popular by "harming people" but the article you linked states; He became famous in 2016 after criticizing Canadian Bill C-16, claiming that the bill would enforce speech codes and harm free speech.
Then you implied he lost his license to practise clinical psychology which also has not happened (atleast yet)
Now you're saying that posting controversial comments on social media is "harmful to the public"
"The complaints against him include making "misleading" statements about COVID-19; mocking a plus-size Sports Illustrated model; and calling a surgeon a "criminal" for removing the breasts of transgender actress Ellen Page."
Source
So while I don't disagree that saying stupid shit on social media can potentially be harmful to some individuals that is still not in any way unique behaviour to JP so considering the original argument I still disagree with the claim that the world would be a better place without him. He's like Elon Musk; people don't like him as a person so they're actively looking for the most insignificant faults in his behaviour and then act like he's some horrible human being. It's recreational outrage pure and simple.
It's been two people bud. Other guy took over for me and I don't see a need to repeat the information, he did a better job than what I would've done.
Your statement is correct in he became popular because of his voice on C-16.
Listen I don't care to spell out every detail on why his statements ARE harassment. I don't feel like you care to listen. That's fine, no one expects you to be superman. It's okay to not be right sometimes. You don't have to change, you'll just be left behind. Good luck gamer.
The other guy is on my block list so it's only you I'm hearing from. Ad hominem also isn't changing anyone's mind. Making this about me is just wasting both of our time.
He's literally a disgraced neo-nazi.
Just young men?
Mostly young men. That's his audience.
There is a certain reason I ask that, this empowerment comes off as weaponization.
Care to elaborate on this? I've listened probably 20 hours of him talking but I don't remember him saying anything like this. To me his core message seems to be that stop blaming the world for your issues and instead look in the mirror and sort your own life out first. He even became famous as the "clean your own room before you go out fixing the world" dude.
I said that euphemistically, but he's quite famous for his teachings regarding the community known as incels which he describes as having been failed by society, mentioning his notion that they would be satisfied if society was built according to ideal conditions, which implies what they want should be a given, with incels being predominantly men, most of whom are self-convinced into thinking their situation is more than happenstance and almost never based on their own prior social conduct.
The belief in inherent entitlements and obligations, especially when they're not even balanced, is the biggest reason society has succumbed so hard in the first place, which he even says when it doesn't involve the interests of his target audience, yet in any discussion on sexuality, including asexuality, which his dismissal of is feeding into some of how we're treated in the world, you'll find him bringing up this train of thought.
The quote you linked is not from Jordan Peterson but a random twitter user called "TYL80737692"
If you want to know JP's thought on incels you can look it up and hear it from the man himself rather than look for someone to intrepret it for you and add their own spin to it.
From the comments of the first video: "It's ironic that mainstream media slandered Jordan Peterson as "King of the incels" when he routinely tells men that if women don't find them attractive - it's not the women's fault - but men's fault, and it's each man's responsibility to fix it."
I did, and I'm who I linked to on Twitter (forgot Twitter replies are often unattainable). The comment on the first video goes against his own words in other parts of his wisdom. You don't have to even be politically aligned against him to gather that it's a populist game, he is the Dr. Phil or Supernanny of politics.
Capitalism
Conservatism.
The only thing they "conserve" is a low age of consent.
Greed
Cancer.
Marketing departments.
A little 90's comedy bit your comment made me think of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0&t=0
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I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Advertising, political parties and religions. All of them.
Homelessness
We have the ability to end homelessness, at least in more developed countries, but the people in charge would rather send the homeless to prison for daring to find a place to sleep. At least in the US, I don't know how other places handle the homeless.
Ads
A couple of strains of mosquito. We don’t need the two or three that bite humans. There are plenty of other strains that the bats and birds can eat.
Bats don't really eat them.
Like, they do, but it's mostly incidental.
Car-dependent suburban sprawl
Ticks
and Leeches
At least Leeches are useful in medicine, even today! I'm convinced Ticks have no ecological benefit or traits worthy of study apart from those necessary to ensure their eradication. Perspectives to the contrary from tick lovers and biologists welcome, however!
IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED
IS THIS WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0BOpkA2Vs4
Humans.
i think there neat.
Capitalism.
Cars. Or at least infrastructure systems that's entirely built just for cars.
Human ego.
If we were to get rid of that the world would probably be significantly better place.
Greed.
Agreed except for mosquitoes. The eradication of them would seriously disrupt the natural order. But yeah fuck mosquitoes.
I hate mosquitos enough to be willing to roll the dice on this one
Bullshit nobody would miss them if they went and that's scientific fact. FOH with that hippy-dippy "live and let live" BS.
Stocks and everything around them are an expression of the greed and baseness of our species.
Advertising DRM Software Patents
The way it reads is that DRM intended for use with software patents should not be advertised
Greed
Landlords
Israel.
Israel was fine for the first few thousand years. The problem is the current acting individuals in the state.
I'm happy for the region to exist.
The state, not so much.
The experiment was a failure, give the land back to Palestine.
Maybe the Israelis can go to Egypt and demand their old jobs back.
By that same token, was Ottoman occupation of Israel successful or called for? Is it not unfair to call anyone in particular that when most nations sadly act as "failed experiments" (which causes Russia to come to mind thinking about it)? If Palestine itself had to lie about certain tragedies and get Russia and North Korea involved, could the "failed experiment" remark not be used on them? There is no hiding anything on any side anymore.
Humans.
(Yes i am a Misanthrope)
you could start with yourself
Not cool. Do not incite suicide.
I don't excuse genocide incitement, that is inexcusable. But nobody was doing that, so. 👍
true, that fucker was inciting omnicide, which is even worse. why do vile ecofascists like you always do lip service to the fact that the statement "the world would be better without [insert ethnic group]" is evil but are suddenly ok with the prospect of murdering even more people? absolutely disgusting ideology of yours.
They weren't inciting anything. They were just answering the question of what the world would be better off without.
They aren't saying humans should actually be murdered. It is hard to deny the fact that we as a human race do nothing but exploit nature right now, rather than coexist with it. That is what is being said. Not that "we should kill all humans". That's reading too much into it, just like you are reading way too much into what I'm supposedly insinuating (i.e. "murdering even more people", which makes no sense because nobody was talking about murdering anybody lol).
Relax. I have not expressed anything that you can derive an ideology from. So you should not get your debate-trigger-happy panties in a twist over anything that's being said here. It's an objective, truthful answer to OP's question.
I'm not saying anybody should die. The commenter is not saying anybody should die. You aren't saying anybody should die, right?
All good? 🤝
That would be only one less hunans.He can do better if he puts his back into it.
ITT: religion and pests
This useless comment
If this site is anything to go by, there have been worse.
Social media Uncontrolled and unbridled capitalism (though don't throw out the baby with the bathwater) 70% of the cars Republican party Russian government Israeli government Hamas Terrorists Cancer Communism Dictators I can go on for a while....
Yeah, you could, but you're gonna need some of these: ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
You can make a line break by ending your sentence with two spaces and then a line break.
Only using one space or none will instead treat the line break in your comment as just a space.
Ending a line on a
\will also make a new lineTwo line breaks in a row while making your comment will make a paragraph break
Human beings.
Mosquitoes. There is literally no benefit of them existing.
They are a major food source for other animals, pollinators and they spread diseases (which is very beneficial for the diseases).
I know you are right. But my hate for those bastards keep me from saying something nice about them.
Do you know what mosquitoes eat? Nectar. They're pollinators.
But they also eat my nectar. I dont like it
(I didnt knew it, thought that they could die without consequences)
Mosquitos!
Trickle down economics.
Earthquakes
I sat through one this morning.
There's a song where the singer lists a long long list of things that are wrong with the world, then says simply that if it was up to her, she'd take away the guns.
ETA: Found it
I also think the world would be a much better place if there were no sexually transmitted disease. Sex should just be fun and healthy, there's no need for that additional layer of risk.
Also limited liability corporate business structure ought never to have been made legal.
Yellowjackets - I hate mosquitoes but they just trying to live. Yellowjackets are assholes.
I'm wearing one right now though, they're cozy.
Mosquitoes
Right wing ideologies
That chair-leg-homing-behavior little toes seem to have.
Also, Jason. Because fuck Jason.
Also fuck... Was it Bianca? Fuck whoever that chick is who sold the guy's PS3 to pay for... Was it a manicure?
Fossil fuels.
Oh look, a thread full of things that I fucking don't like. (love you all)
Define "the world".
Are we talking about the actual ball of rock? The collective ecology of organisms living on it? Or specifically the human race's existence on the rock and within the ecology?
If we narrow it down to all organic life on the planet, the answer is: humans.
humans are part of the organic life on this planet (and since recently even outside) and your proposal would be pretty bad for them. fuck off ecofash
You’re right, that it would be bad for humans. I’m just looking at the big picture and what would good for it in the long run.
Humans already make similar decisions anyway. Certain part of the population will suffer so that another one can benefit. Occasionally, these sorts of decisions also lead to deaths. In an even larger scale, humans have also decided that certain animals and plants can suffer so that humans may thrive. Imagine if the ecosystem as a whole could make a decision like this about itself. Do you think the it would keep humanity, remove it entirely or maybe trim it down a bit?
But seriously though, humans are here to stay for the time being, and I prefer to keep it that way. Unlike Linkola, I’m in no hurry to see disasters wipe out a portion of humanity.
so you realize that the problem isnt within humanity itself, but class division. those classes a social construct and can be overcome. join your local radical leftist organization, read theory and start fighting for a better world not only for humanity but for the rest of life as well.
What kind of theory do you recommend?
as a ml its firstly gonna be the obvious ones: marx, engels and lenin. marx style can be a little hard to read sometimes, but it will make you see the world with new eyes truly. i genuinely recommend this reading list.
hey thanks it's my list 😀
thanks comrade for your work!
Pls be kind on the internet child
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
It's been twisted so far from its original intention.
Starts with D ends in P.
Not dubstep!!!
Donald trumP?
Doorstop Dustheap Desktop Dewdrop Dollop Damp
alt: Son Goku with stylish clothes
Dip?
Absolutely not!
Fossil fuels.
Putin.
Magical thinking.
Five day working week.
MS Windows.
one of those is not like the others
All are bad, idk what you mean
Smartphones
Jessica
@Phen True, Roger Rabbit would be so much better without her. :D
I don't know who Jessica is but I bet she must have done something to piss you off.
Tobacco, alcohol, etc.
They need more MDMA and cocaine though.
Ehhh. Maybe more mushrooms and ketamine
Ketamine is more in the ballpark of being bad for your body like cocaine than MDMA is. More addictive and can damage your kidneys/bladder with long term use. It also puts a moderate amount of strain on your heart like what happened with Matthew Perry earlier this year.
I was thinking microdosing, but you're right
Multi cellular life
Life
This post
Vienna sausages
How dare you?!
Surely the Viennese don't claim these? https://www.armour-star.com/vienna-sausages
Are you seriously denying that Käsekrainer and Bernerwürstel are a lot better?
The mainstream kind of Käsekrainer is way worse IMO. Original Krainer from Slovenia/Carinthia are great though, and Berner are better than Frankfurter/Wiener. But I still like them.
Porn
Shit like this -
"I think the world would be better without (insert idea)"
"Oh my god but what about (insert unbelievably niche reason why not)? Won't someone think of the incredibly niche exception?!?!?"
On every fuckin comment on Lemmy. You're not improving the world guys, you're making it insufferable
I think the world could be better without people vocally losing their minds over some harmless fun. Ignore it if you don't like and move on, or if you're so wrapped up in being online that you can't ignore it I suggest you touch grass
It's a thought experiment, calm your titts
the us
israel
the west in general
liberalism
the bourgeoisie
Does that include Russia?
what has that to do with what i said? or are just another fascist drooling about endangered civilians due to them having the "wrong" ethnicity?
edit: statement was based on an misunderstanding, see below
Russia is similar in mentality and economics to what are traditionally seen as cultures of "the West", including the US and Israel, but at the same time, I take it from the context that you said what you said from a Russian cultural perspective. It is an entirely neutral question, with a link to cast a shadow on the similarities. So I ask again, does that include Russia?
sorry for misunderstanding you. i use the term "the west" as a political term meaning the us and their european allies, not a cultural one. i also wanna stress that my distain refers exclusively to the regimes ruling this area, not the common population.
I for one am not fond of the infighting or corruption in any nation right now. Even if you subtract all the things that are unclear (such as the motives to take Ukraine, the extent of guilt of Israel, etc.) due to people waging misinformation wars, it's still pretty indicative and unsettling to hear certain leaders threaten nuclear strikes out in the open. China is the only Eastern enemy of the West that hasn't done this habitually.
Communism
Your government is never lowering the age of consent, get over it.
What kind of a sick fuck thinks disliking communism makes u a pedo. You have serious problems maybe stop projecting.
Ahahaha! You couldn't have made a worse reply if you tried!!
I bet if I googled ur name it would be on a list.
Now there's the projection.
ohh nooo! them evil asiaric barbarians want to improve our lives, how horrible!
thank
mammongod that we saved them by giving them shock therapy and with it the great carrier options of crime and prostitution.we are so civilized.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Communism is a pretty bad thing.
I said it as a joke cos someone said capitalism its an excellent example of lemmys political bias. I find it very interesting that lemmy embodies so many of the ideals of the marketplace of idea a fundamentally libertarian concept yet it has a bias towards the extreme left that fundamentally hate the concept.
Maybe one or two more genocides/famines and then they might relise.
According to them that's not real communism as its never been tried properly. They are missing the fundamental problem that it can never be tried properly cos it can never be implemented successfully. But they don't let that stop them.
Meanwhile, in Israel...