Wealth inequality (2 Viewers)

[ann post]

People who have enough money to never work for a second of thier entire lives yet continue to work.

I kinda think rich people are really` boring all told. The entire planet at their disposal, and they all just do the same faffing about on yachts and buying status symbols.

Wiki was saying there are about 2500 odd billionares - I wonder how many were born into stacks of cash from that list .

@egg_ - It is weird - Humans walking about thinking they know shit yet replicating 5000 year old egyptian culture and lionising these pricks while they are at. Modern day God kings.
They all got complacent and initially sold their gold to freelances to protect the Empire but then the freelances got complacent and some rednecks from the shitty nearb mountain farms ate them for breakfast in the end.

 

[flashback]

People who have enough money to never work for a second of thier entire lives yet continue to work.

Yup. I had a multi (?) billionaire work... for (?) me. I didn't know how wealthy he was at the time. He just wanted to learn the stuff I was working on, so I was told to take care of him, check his stuff, get him working. Maybe "for me" is a bit much. He didn't really work for me, he just worked alongside me and I had to supervise him.

He'd turn up on the subway, shuffle into work, and slope off at the end of the day. He didn't turn up every day, but he showed up a fair amount. He just liked to do computery shit. And talk about dynamic programming. Jesus. Mad for dynamic programming.

I'm still not sure what dynamic programming is. I should probably look that up.


edit. JFC. Just looking at Dynamic programming now. Nope.

 

[ernesto]

I don't find these simple bromides useful in real life tbh.

McCartney increased the sum of human happiness in the world by a decent click. Here, have your billion.

Whoever the team that just started that sickle cell gene therapy treatment - they can have a billion.
Nice work, guys.
Like you'd have let Jonas Salk have it, if he'd have taken a penny from you.

The FInns have their share of billionaires and they're making it work.

We can agree to disagree though.

I see the point you're making and a few million to see him out would suffice.

The sheer amount a billion is, should be humanly unobtainable

 

[Cormcolash]

Wiki was saying there are about 2500 odd billionares - I wonder how many were born into stacks of cash from that list .

There was some article recently saying that every single young millionaire in America was born into it. Every single one.

 

[egg_]

There was some article recently saying that every single young millionaire in America was born into it. Every single one.

Well if you're talking young young then ...

 

[egg_]

I kinda think rich people are really` boring all told. The entire planet at their disposal, and they all just do the same faffing about on yachts and buying status symbols.

... and deciding what a large chunk of the productive capacity of the planet is put working towards, via their purchases and their investment decisions (and, in some cases, their think-tanks and their foundations)

 

[Deadmanposting]

There was some article recently saying that every single young millionaire in America was born into it. Every single one.

No idea what the criteria is here, but the NBA and NFL are chocker with young millionaires
They mint a fresh couple hundred every year
It's a bootstrap lottery though

But the overall point generally stands - money is self-sustaining at a certain point and it's hard to break up into a higher division.
So actually not disagreeing

 

[Cormcolash]

Think it was talking under-25s or something

 

[taubstumm]

I don't think the fact that some billionaires deserve it makes it ok ... but either way it really doesn't matter whether I think it's ok or not, right?

I just think the size of the disparity is kind of amazing. I don't care that someone has a yacht and I don't, but money equals power and I care that a single billionaire has as much power as a decent-sized town full of regular folks

... though the other thing that's kinda boggling my mind about this is how this has always been a feature of human civilisations. We mostly got rid of royalty, but we still have unelected fellow citizens with many orders of magnitude more power than the rest of us. It's weird.

thumped consensus has been reached: this has to change, but mccartney is ok

 

[taubstumm]

thumped consensus has been reached: this has to change, but mccartney is ok

hey @BOTicelli please make a version of the “this is fine” meme where the dog is saying “kill ’em all except for paul”

 

[BOTicelli]

Take it!

 

[taubstumm]

hmm

needs some finessing, boticelli

 

[ann post]

In an ethical fantasy world they'd be thin on the ground - like why would we grant one person infinite wealth? Maybe if they discovered bread or something? The exisiting ones like the ancient egyptians are reliant on slave labour in their 'making the world better'. The person who can do it without the slaverey or explotation part possibly could be granted infinite wealth. otherwise they are just pricks, but they are a creation of the world so eh....

 

[JohnnyRaz]

I heard that the head Kinihan guy is a billionaire, and was thinking about that over the weekend

€100k per year is an upper-middle-class salary in Ireland - PO in the civil service or TD or principal of a big school (socialjustice.ie counts €100k/year as the lower boundary of "rich")

To make a billion quid with a salary of €100k/annum will take you ten thousand years

I don't think I'd really realised just how rich actually rich people are before

Throughout history vast income inequality was the norm is most 'civilized' societies. The relative wealth of a Roman patrician vs a pleb or worse again a slave, landlord versus tenant farmer. King vs serf.

In the 'west' this changed over the middle of the 20th century with redistributive approaches, regulation, nationalisation etc etc.

We're rolling back from that point rapidly, I'm not sure if the absolute concentration of wealth has it's exact parallel - and obviously this is global rather than local, but the trend is reversion to norm.