The Billionaires Are Abandoning Humanity
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81 replies
Think about how much empathy your parents generation has for yours. They kind of sympathize, wish things were easier, but ultimately do not understand the wealth gap or your day-to-day.
Think about how much empathy you have for a 3rd world exploited labourer. You kind of sympathize, definitely wish things were easier, but ultimately do not understand on how they live on less than a dollar a day.
Billionaires aren't just one or two levels removed from understanding your situation. They are whole planets apart. They cannot comprehend our daily struggles. They do not see it except through summarized news reports that pander and reframe it to their lifestyle.
Billionaires are the most removed species on this planet
Your generalizing re your parents and the previous gens sympathy.
Especially those of us who were poor as kids.
We know how hard it is. In 1968 a house was about twice a persons average yearly income, now? Forgot it. My son probably will never have the option. The. Again, I really didn't either.
My son will probably never be able to own a house, may not live in a free country, will face runaway inflation and much more
I faced much in my time. Some way worse than anything my son will see
But those were instances. Moments I. Time. Hard, difficult, but fleeting after a while
What we are living in now is pervasive, all consuming and total greed stifling the younger generations and pulling what little safety nets we have for the old.
I grew up harder. But I also grew up easier. For instance I. The early seventies , you could get a full weight set for 18 bucks ( don't ask how I know that )
Today that weight set is 300. I mean wages were WAYYYYY. Lower.
But when a house could be got for 20 grand , they didn't have to be.
I feel like we are in agreement
If we all do our part, they could be removed further
Unchecked capitalism has failed, and the USA is the first victim. This is what happens when you dumb down a country so much that they can't see the danger for themselves. Too bad for regular Americans but the leopards are going to feast.
Uhh, USA is one of the last to fall, off the backs of what we have the nerve to call "third world."
It's rich Theil refers to a book with a colonial slogan of "no free lunch," after he and his ilk already sucked the husks of humanity dry. Pun intended.
You're not wrong, but billionaires are just as easy to kill now as they ever were. If you can't take the money away from the planet destroying psychopath, take the planet destroying psychopath away from the money.
Killing them doesn’t give you their resources though. If you managed to get away with it, you will have to spend money staying anonymous and some board of directors will use the company value to enrich the next asshole.
You don't need their money. You need them not to have it. Do it enough times and whoever ends up with it will make more responsible choices with it even if nothing else changes.
I know that, but we’re talking about incentives to rob the rich, which in the best case would include a robinhood style give to the poor.
We’re clearly need to eliminate wealth inequality, but I’m skeptical killing a few billionaires will help.
Then kill them all
This is why we used to let government deal with overgrown wealth. They're the only ones with the power to stand up to robber barons. It's too bad that this time they bought the government.
Fight club style
They redistributed it away from us, they can redistribute it back. Democrats decided it's been 80 or 100 years, so we forgot they were never on our side, **remind them we remember. VOTE. THEM. OUT. PRIMARY. RIOT. **
It's fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I'm not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.
He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:
He believed in rationally-considered governance:
And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don't find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:
All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction... you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein's fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
I think they already do, hence the private islands and Bond villain style lairs.
That's too generous.
If every piece of MAGA trash you know isn’t afraid of you, you’re a coward and a failure.
Luigi
Maybe it is required to be inhumane to be a billionaire?
If so, then
Spez talked about this years ago. He wants society to fall so he can rule over what's left because he thinks he's superior to all other humans
Dude can't even run a glorified message board... How the fuck does he think he's gonna run a post-apocalyptic society?
This isn't a joke, Steve Huffman built a bunker with the express desire of becoming a feudal lord in whatever post apocalyptic hell hole that he helped create.
Yup. It's not about money it's about control. So long as they have control while the world burns they are happy.
Once you win at life and have enough money to fuck off to a beach somewhere most people do. Some people can't. Because they still want your money.
So they can control you.
They are basically addicts. If they weren't they would be on that beach and no one would be talking about them.
We can’t allow a mineshaft gap.
Hard to argue with that actually. I'm going to go with they're some terrible type of worm, slug, or parasite rather than human beings.
hey, don't insult insects like that :D
They never had any humanity to begin with. It is the only way to become a Billionaire.
and there i was standing on the crossroads of destiny, choosing to keep either my enterpreneurial spirit, or my humanity ...
Imagine looking back at the proud of time where there was literally the most advances in the wildest technology and thinking it's stagnation. It was from a time period where people remembered refrigeration as new and exciting to the time where your phone has more computing power than the ones that put people on the moon, and it's in your freaking pocket, and say that technology stagnated.
As for the lower economic growth and the "stagnating" culture, that's squarely on the shoulders of corporations, and therefore, billionaires.
man who hoarded and centralized wealth from software companies concerned about decay of entrepreneurship
interestingly, i get the sentiment that the economy has stalled since the 1970s from a surprising number of people, and i figured out that it's probably because blue-collar jobs have stagnated since the 1970s, and that's what most people feel. That sentiment coming from Thiel, who invests in software, is very weird though.
The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.
You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can't afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine.. You can instantly engage with people all over the world.
On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.
Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.
William Gibson, Count Zero (Sprawl, #2)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/126076-and-for-an-instant-she-stared-directly-into-those-soft
Like the torment Nexus tweet, I feel like some rich idiots read stuff like that and think it's a good idea.
I read a wonderful short story once about mankind venturing into the stars where they become a symbol of hope, friendliness, and community across all physical and psychological barriers. They would be the ones you turn to in times of crisis, to deliver aid and make repairs, to mediate in times of conflict and to bring joy in times of celebration.
However, occasionally, the humans would see one of their own ships adrift in the sea of stars, and they would stop at nothing to destroy it. The abrupt and merciless hostility would always shock onlookers and associates. "Why" they always ask. The answer was always the same; "when the earth was suffering, they used up our resources and left us behind."
Got a link or a name for this story? I’d like to read it.
Second
Third.
The Billionaires are a bunch of Degenerate Morons who diddle children, much as the ruling class has always been. They're funneling the world's wealth upwards thinking capital will insulate them from the coming climate crisis they're exasperating. How I wish I could be there when they realize that it won't.
A second time.
The first time was stealing from everybody to become billionaires in the first place.
well yeah, it seems to be a karmic thing. the pattern repeats life after life, age after age, until it splits off the main-stream and becomes its own thing, independent, permanent.
as a german I am very sorry to the world for Peter Thiel, Trumps bloodline, Hitler and a shit ton more. We are bad exporters as it turns out
Hitler was Austrian. Still tho.
yeah but we exported his ideology to the world, also during his reign Austria was more than happy to be a part of Nazi Germany, so at least during this time period, there wasn't really a distinction besides elevation levels and number of hiking boots used per year
Let them be cake
We should abandon them, by expropriating their wealth!
Lew- e-geee style.
Steps to become a billionaire:
"If the billionaires are so determined on quitting humanity, perhaps it would be best to give them what they want and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them."
+++
They abandoned humanity the second they decided to exploit their fellow man for profit. Fuck them and fuck anyone ignorant enough to believe that they ever had anything but ill will towards the rest of the world.
i think it's not even explicit ill will, just absence of a sense of understanding that humans shouldn't be killed for profit. some kind of not-recognizing the value in life.
Sorry mate, this "money" thing can only be owned by humans. See, that dog over there, that chair, that building, or that chatbot over yonder, they can't own anything, because they're not human. If you are not part of humanity, you can't own human IOU credits. So, have fun at the island, we'll check in on you in October.
Have they not learned from Mario's brother?
Mario's tall brother is my hero!
The mods here are a disappointment
A human's humanity is inversely proportional to the amount of money they have. After a billion, you stop being human and turn into a lizard person. We are quickly approaching the day when a lizard person will evolve into something even weirder once they hit a trillion.
I can guarantee you, they turn into a lizard person way before a billion. I'd set it at $20 million even.
It's because they become an avatar for their money
Every tweet Elon makes affects his horde. Every single one - and usually it's just a few hundred thousand and balances out- but occasionally it's hundreds of millions in the red
And Elon can't help himself. Most of them can
They can only be themselves in locations with tight information control, which is generally resorts with other billionaires. Who seem to be consistently in a pissing match with each other about their wealth and influence
And that's why they're fucking inhuman dragons
Money amplifies who you are. There are actually a number of quiet rich people living good lives, though that doesn’t justify the bad ones regardless of their wealth.
There is a point after all your basic needs are met for Iife and you have enough money to do something fun/ intellectually enriching and interesting every day of your life and pay for any healthcare you may need if an emergency arises or as a result of your own mortality where the accumulation of more wealth to satiate your ego is detrimental to one’s own sense of humanity. I think $5-10 million is a reasonable sum for someone to live a fulfilling life. With the rate of continual currency devaluation through the increase of our national debt and introduction of more printed currency into the supply (the main driving forces of inflation which current inflation models used by the IMF and world Bank intentionally exclude from their inflationary models) $20-25 million may be more reasonable in the next several decades.
Well, they can feel free to fuck right off and find another species that will accept them.
🌎🌑🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Then maybe we should start relieving them of theirs
That's because, and I'll speak loudly for those in the back, THEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU
Always have been
Always will
is it a news?
it's worthy repeating :)
I'm all for it. Send them to Mars and make sure they don't come back!
Personally, I would prefer Venus. I want these bastards to melt.
Nah, Mars sounds great. A tiny prison of their own making, as the corners they cut slowly come back to bite them? That's poetic
One of the things I wish we'd stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They're more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.
They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they've convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.
And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that's what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it's only gotten much, much worse.
So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they've been marinating in some kind of "WH40K-esque" tech religion, it's because they are, and they have.
Sea steading, BioShock here we come...
But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it's still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.
Anyone who says that is pretty stupid, but I don't think I've ever met someone who actually held that position
I will say that working to colonize Mars will teach us to fix the Earth... But it would be real nice if we stopped fucking up the Earth in the first place
pika pika
pika-chuu
What they need to do is stop us moving as a hive mind, because all of us against them, we have more money than they do, if we all had one dollar, we could out bid them on buying back our own politicians, (until we had ones in power that actually change laws for us, rather than for them) tax them to poverty, dismantle capitalism, the end.
Perhaps they don't have human rights now? Means unaliving them would be legal and their weath is ours for the taking.