Imagine how many more Mozarts and Einsteins we could have if we removed barriers like poverty and hunger and allowed everyone to have a fair shot at life.
We have so much untapped potential in the world because of the system he is a product of. The vast majority of people have to spend most of their time and effort on general survival. There's diminishing amounts of time and effort that average Joe can actually spend on intellectual and artistic pursuits orthogonal to their source of income. Hell, just fucking having hobbies is becoming a bit of a privileged position in 2026, which is frankly a desolate place we've managed to take civilisation.
See, that's the thing these guys don't want to understand. There could be a thousand generational talents like that "right fucking now*, who have these enormous gifts and won't ever be able to realize them because they gotta go to their third job so they don't fall behind on rent AGAIN.
Your Uber driver might be a virtuosic violin player who's never realized it because he's never had the opportunity to try. The cashier at Taco Bell might be an amazing painter, who can't afford to paint because every last cent has to go to one bill or another. That kid in Ghana you're watching on the TV charity commercial might be the next talent in rocketry or physics or poetry or any of a dozen other fields if they had a shot.
I know a guy who draws absolutely beautiful sketches, and having seen some of the paintings he "dabble with", I'm positive he could make some amazing things.
Unfortunately, all he gets to do is small sketches in his down time, because he works two jobs and has 2 kids.
Imagine how many people have an ideas for something that would make tons of people's lives better, but they can't work on it because they have to go to work and all their energy is spent just trying not to become a statistic...
It’s so nice to see other people with this sentiment. Even at a young age I always thought it was a little silly for only rich people to have “the best” education when there are people out there who can’t follow their passions or dreams because of various things.
And if we cooperated instead of antagonizing each other (which happens under this capitalist system) we could probably collectively achieve even more than 1000 "mozarts" could do
We almost certainly have 1,000 Einsteins and 1,000 Mozarts alive today. A relevant quote from 1979:
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
I remember a talk by a Microsoft VP who said that a very optimistic estimate would be that we were using human intelligence and creativity at maybe 5% efficiency. The actual number is likely much lower than that.
That is pseudo science and a really stupid take. Our brain is expensive as fuck since the moment of conception, born realy early and mostly under developed because of Our fucking big head. The whole evolution says that we animals use it or loose it, let that be tails, guils or brain power.
If we didnt use the whole brain it would be cut off for efficiency.
Mind the context, we are talking about how little our society is capitalizing on the abilities of people, not on some stupid "we only use 10% of our brain" take
We very literally already have 1000 Motzarts and 1000 Einsteins. They are poor and working in your wearhouses and have no means or free time to pursue the fields they would accel in.
They literally could not give a fuck if there's a Mozart out there.
This is the same shit that happened with Nazis. They decided that classical art is the only "real" art and anything that was modern at the time was "degenerate art".
They want people that worship the traditional art that fuels nationalism, like Greek statues that are bleached white. They like the idea of classical art, that a perfect homogeneous society existed before them that they can re-achieve.
They hate all varieties of modern art because it's either hard to understand, or it might even conflict with their nationalism.
They want to dip their toes into what they think art should be, not embrace what it is.
We probably already have thousands of them out there but they never recieved the education they would have needed to unlock their potential and or are too busy surviving in abject poverty to contribute to the advancement of humanity.
Because shitheads like him hoard all the money and do everything they can so others around them are stuck in the poverty trap so they can use them as cheap, desperate and exploitable labor.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Look some the poors are going to die however that is just the price we all have to pay to make sure the rest of the Epstein Class continues to hoard wealth.
You know we already probably have a bunch of Mozarts and Einsteins peeing in bottles to avoid getting dinged while driving Amazon Prime trucks because that's the only way they can get by.
They're almost certainly is a bunch of geniuses who were never appreciated because they spend their entire lives trying to get food and water because they were unfortunate enough to be born into Ethiopia. We could feed and house and educate these people if we really wanted to, to the benefit of not just themselves, but the entire species if they did turn out to be the next Einstein. Instead the likes of Jeff Bezos go on podcasts and talk about how wonderful the distant future is going to be, while at the same time being utterly unprepared to do anything about the problems we have right now.
Is space Karen actually paid his taxes we probably could build a base on Mars with that money.
By that... We all live in Ethiopia. Compared to what could be, without the crooks and their rigged game holding us down
[and telling us they're our saviours, when they let us up for a bit of air, or take credit for making us strong when we manage to struggle for a gasp by ourselves].
I have to bite my tongue anytime someone mentions getting one or two day shipping. Like, you're not going to die if you don't get your RAM tomorrow ffs.
I legitimately would be okay with an "it gets to you within a month" option.
It's not the next day delivery that's the problem Amazon could totally offer that and not abuse their workforce. It would just cost them some more money so they don't do it.
It wouldn't cost them money, they would just make slightly less money per year. Which is just me being pedantic, but it matters in these contexts.
Like, Bezos could have been the most loved billionaire on the entire earth, just through treating his workers slighty better and some minor philanthropy on the side, but no, he had to squeeze every fuckin penny out of everything.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
"I'd love to breed a trillion humans and harvest only the extreme minority of specialized high performers to help me accomplish the things I can't do myself while I ignore the conditions of life for the 99.999% who I don't consider to have any value."
While completely overlooking how people are a product of both nature and nurture. Einstein, with an estimated iq of 160, would mean he's one in 10000 in terms of iq, implying there's already hundreds of thousands of Einstein's out in the wild we haven't found yet.
On a space ship, everyone’s basically a bottle pisser. I think I figured it out. The Amazon warehouses are a training facility for a trillion bottle pissing space slaves. Mind=blown.
To put it another way: we don't need a trillion people to find more Master Artists and Master Scientists, we need more Equality of Opportunity and a system that rewards Art and Science, both the very opposite what has made this "gentleman" as rich as he is, of what he promotes with his own words and using the parts of Press he bought and what he tells the politicians he has in this pocked to do.
He is literally one of the biggest individual forces pushing away from the very outcome he claims to want.
The hypocrisy of this asshole and others like him is mind-boggling.
They would say none, because Einstein made it out of the patent office and if you're still stuck in the patent office, you aren't Einstein. Brilliance must always rise to the top. Bezos is at the top, so in his mind he's brilliant. In his mind, there's no world where he isn't who he is today.
Just look at technical death metal and progressive
metal. Most of the musicians are holding down day jobs programming. Mike Lerner is a really sad case, since he is one of the greatest metal guitarists. Works as the worlds most generic programmer in silicon valley.
Hell, even jazz and classical. I just don't know what their fucking day jobs are.
Nothing better for packaging than those subtle piano fingers. Bonus points if they're desperate because the grant money that funded them recently ran out and they still haven't submitted their thesis.
I swear, no one who laments our lack of Einsteins and Mozarts has spent a single second ever actually trying to make a living as a scientist or musician.
You want more Einsteins and Mozarts? Establish universal basic income. You don't even need to pay a ton. Just enough that everyone can have basic subsistence regardless of what they can earn by working. The true Einsteins and Mozarts will probably be content with just that modest level of income, living in a studio apartment forever so they can dedicate all of their time to their passion.
Most billionaires are the scums of the world, hording the wealth and spending it on stupid stuff while his employees who do the actual work get little to no credit and are payed much less.
I believe the propaganda here is idea that some people are born special, brighter than every one else.
The message here is not that Bezos wants a trillion humans, the message is that the majority of people are not special and will never archive greatness (like him)
Rich people love to think they belong to this special group but it’s not real, all humans have the capacity to archive greatness if only given the resources to not only survive but thrive.
If everyone had acces to free and quality education, healthcare and food we could have more than a thousand Einsteins and Mozarts right now.
Once everyone is able to archive greatness, it becomes the norm, therefore the rich no longer able to justify their wealth by claiming to be geniuses. Helping the poor thrive and become not poor is a direct threat to their ego and status.
Edit: Wholesome to realise i am the fourth person to comment this. Positivity woke!
You said way more than the other ones, namely that the Jeff Bezos of the world believe themselves part of a superior humanity that allows them to treat the rest like garbage.
The reason Mozart became a great composer is that he pissed on his employer's working conditions and went rogue. His Bezos treated him to a kick in the ass, literally, administered on his behalf. Allegedly.
The reason Einstein became a great physicist is that he got an outstanding public education and then worked a government job to make ends meet. The same government jobs that Bezos and Musk wanted to cut last year.
Bezos is not part of a special superhumanity. He is an extremely privileged lottery winner that is too vain to admit he got lucky and now pretends his opinion matters. As the meme states, the only useful thing he can provide is tax money.
So tired of watching these dipshit's fortunes detach them from reality.
The narcissism is so off the charts that the idea of death must be utterly terrifying to them. You know this chode is going to put himself on ice at the end in the hopes he can get a new body in the future without recognizing that the future is going to be a dystopian shithole or arid wasteland.
It ain't murder to take a billionaire's frozen head out of one of those cryo chambers and chuck it into a porta potty at a Gathering of the Juggalos. If they ever get close to figuring out how to revive those fuckers, well, it'll be time to make some decisions.
modern einstein is trying to develop new ways to keep people hooked on a social media scroll. modern mozart is producing kpop or playing jazz/fusion in some club where they make $40 a night and then dying broke (like allan holdsworth).
but it's true that most great brains probably never develop properly because the system tries its hardest to keep them stupid and in poverty.
the modern media landscape is all nepo babies and what does it get you? it gets you fuck all; everything is pathetic from top to bottom in every single artform but we're acting like shit is normal.
A bygone age, where polymathy was still more the norm, before the corporation separated us into maximal-bar-one ignorance, of "specialisation",
and (I recently read, in the new book I'm reading) they lopped off the latter half of the expression "jack of all trades, master of none" [something like, "... is more often better than a master of one."],
and they convinced us the specialists were the "experts", the sages of the enlightenment, the wise ones with superior knowledge. ... All the while they're one step away from maximal ignorance.
I wonder how much better acting (and all "professions"/skills) could be, with a broader range of skills beside.
You got me wanting to go listen to more soffmi muhod, boc, or autechre.
I know, not really the point you were making... but yeah... lets go find more of these mozarts, who, whether still obscure, or found their niche audience, retain their creative integrity, despite the economic pressures. ... Oh that we could each be so. Or that we'd not even need be.
$0.02: above average intelligence is abundant. The opportunities and support that enable those people to achieve greatness (read: privilege), are not. This situation will only get worse with the like of Bezos squeezing the people that work for them. This "1000 Mozarts" line only serves to illustrate how intellectually bankrupt this person is.
When you have endless money and are surrounded by people fighting to give you handjobs all day, every day you tend to lose touch with reality and common sense.
I strongly disagree. We need to focus more on quality of life than population. If humanity grows to a trillion people 999.9 billion of us will be living in coffin-sized apartments and eating that runny white goop that fed people in the Matrix.
I would rather have 1 billion humans and everyone lives the American Dream for real.
I know I'm an asshole, but I was legitimately hoping that covid was going to wipe out a more significant amount. At least all the anti vaxxers, but that didn't happen.
I'm the jackass that watched Endgame and was like "goddamn that abandoned neighborhood looks peaceful".
I know I’m an asshole, but I was legitimately hoping that covid was going to wipe out a more significant amount. At least all the anti vaxxers, but that didn’t happen.
I’m the jackass that watched Endgame and was like “goddamn that abandoned neighborhood looks peaceful”.
Well, at least you know to some extent that that's in the wrong. Better than still being in the terrorised totalitarianised fervor and seeing such atrocities (not as making you the asshole, but instead) as a necessary virtues.
It gets better when one realises where that [headspace] came from...
Human beings can only live abput two years at most in micro gravity. On return after said two years they are effectively paralyzed and have to endure months of physiotherapy just to be able to walk again.
We will never "live" in space or the "solar system", the only place we can live is this planet and anybody telling you otherwise is lying to you.
They do want you in micro gravity though. Besos has on his blue origin website that they plan on having heavy industry in orbit and basically the prols will work in orbit so the planet can remain clean for the rich.
I've heard both Melon Husk and Lil' Jeffy Kisses repeat this sentiment. Where do they even get their figure? Something like 120 billion humans have existed, ever, and there has been only one Einstein and one Mozart. 1/120B * 1T = 8.5.
Factor in the widespread nutritional and medical resource shortages that would come along with one trillion humans, and I'm confident that number would drop to zero.
It seems to be that we'd be better off ensuring the future of humanity and focusing on science. Surely it would be quicker to experiment with genetics to grow an Einstein than it would be to implement a trillion-human breeding lottery hoping to find one.
Also lack of genuine self-awareness on their own true intentions. To them, being greedy is so ingrained they can't see it as a hazard to themselves until its too late.
Funny how he also happens to be one of the worlds largest employers and also has one of the biggest amounts of customers. Wonder if he secretly would like anything else from those 9,999,999,998,000 people.
That unfortunate reality that their enormous wealth has been mostly down to population growth and psychopathic greed, and not because they were born with magical business brains.
He says '1000 Einsteins', but surely thinks '1000 Bezoses' because of course he thinks he's a genius, and because there'll be more new faces in the billionaire paedophilic orgies.
Saw this prick talking about nurses making like 30k a year having to pay like 12k in taxes and that "it didn't make sense." Motherfucker makes billions and pays less taxes than the nurse he says shouldn't have to pay so much taxes.
He doesn't want Mozart's or Einstein's, he and other parasites like him want slaves and a trillion people with the debt boot on their throats is paradise for him and hell for everyone else.
Assuming some aliens appeared out a thin air and gifted us fusion powered spacecraft and space elevator technology it would still take centuries to get to trillions of humans. These people really do talk utter shit.
I'm not sure that we ever would. Every country that gets healthcare and a standard of living above abject poverty drops their birthrates. I would hope with fusion power, there wouldn't be a person on (or off) the planet going hungry.
But then again, Jeff Bezos exists, so we'll still end up with 99% of the wealth in the hands of 1%.
Yep. Especially if we're all separated in spaceships. Dating's hard enough in the same meat space.
Jesting aside, yup. And space expands faster than we even could fill it. So, at least we're getting billionaires off the idea they need to cull the human population because there's not enough resources here for their squanderous rigged game of manufactured scarcities and coerced dependence on pollution emitting finite resources.
But... Isn't Bezos in the rocket club? "Space is hard", is the idea sold with rockets. We never needed rockets. Follow the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla, and all the less famous innovators of that era, and we can see the start of zero-inertia propulsion had its beginnings on air balloons in the 1800s. Then that's just one step of creating a vessel that can surviva the vacuum of space, and you have a rudimentary space ship. ... From human innovation. But do we get nice things? No. Such tech's secreted, and only used on the wing tips of black stealth fighters to accelerate turns. We could have spaceships for everybody. Even almost a hundred years ago. ... But then other plans were already laid down for us, by the existing power structures, and being followed through. So now we get the likes of Bezos, peddling preposterously implausible placation platitudes, pandering as if he's a good guy, as if he's smart, as if he's a visionary...
... When really it seems like he's the type that does not understand you cannot get 9 women to make a baby in 1 month. But [given Amazon worker treatment] would still keep whipping them harder to try get them to.
He's literally talking about the distant future of mankind where we've colonized other planets
You guys really think he just walked into a room and completely unprompted and with zero context to any kind of previous conversation told someone in the media he wanted a trillion humans and then left?
It never occurred to you that this was probably in context of a larger conversation and that maybe you should go look that conversation up before you form an opinion?
What he is actually thinking is he needs more slaves for wearhouses some Amazon and it's shit working conditions has already churned through the entire labor pool in some markets.
I can never take anyone who complains about "Eco Fascists" that want a lower human population seriously because I always have to consider if they're getting their views downstream of Bezos or Musk. The Elite want higher populations so we have to fight each other. Every time in history when there's been a workers deficit, the workers got more right.
You are not ever going to have another Einstein since as soon as they prove useful the cretins like bozoes would use them for something that would not allow for the free thought that would come up with decent ideas.
Ehh, finding these mozarts and einsteins will be near impossible because their upbringing will be impoverished and school results are more dependant on wealth than intelligence.
Above a certain point in wealth one's income is basically a slice of the wealth everybody produces, so the more the people the more wealth in aggregated they produce, the faster these types increase their wealth.
It's the reason why countries' GDPs are quoted as a whole rather than per-capita basis - whilst per-capita is what matters to most people as individuals (ideally the median rather than the mean), for those in power and the local elites it's the entire country's GDP that matters because their power and wealth is linked to the whole quite independently of how many people are producing it (think of it this way: market dominance, political influence, Press control and other forms of controlling how much wealth one gets are mainly country-specific or at least have less "power transmission" between countries than they do inside countries, so given that those tools to extract a slice of country-wide wealth are mainly country-specific, more people in that country means more returns from having such tools).
For the very rich immigration is always desirable even when importing people with lower formal education and less well integrated than the locals - even if the average productivity goes down (and hence per-capita GPD) because the newer, less expert and less well integrated workers, produce less wealth per-person that those already in the local worker pool, for those getting a slice of the aggregated wealth produced in a country even a little more from lower productivity workers, is always more for them.
The wealth distributions are so called "normal" statistical distributions (basically a peak in the middle with a low on each side), so most people are at and around the central peak whilst only a few people are at the extremes, and in these the median which is at the top of the peak tells you the most common situation. Meanwhile for wealtht the mean is just mathematically the total wealth divided by the number of people.
In other words, the median tells you the most common situation, whilst the mean tells you how much is the total wealth divided by the total number of people (for wealth a purelly mathematical value which doesn't really represent any human situation).
(Edit: changed maths below for clarity)
An example - if there are 10 people with 1 chicken each and 1 person with 100 chickens
The mean says that each person has 10 chickens ( (10*1 + 100) / 11), so 10x the chickens than the reality for 10 out of 11 people.
The median says that each person has 1 chicken, as that's how many chickens the person in the middle of a list ordered by number of chickens has.
Going back to wealth, one stupidly rich person and a lot of very poor people produces a mean were they're all supposedly middle-class - which is not at all representative of the wealth of most people - whilst it produces a median which says the most common situation is to be poor.
This extreme example, by the way, is very close to the situation in the US - most people in America are (according to some OECD data somebody posted here a couple of days ago) poorer than for example the Portuguese (pretty much the tail of Europe), but the mean of wealth for America says that per-capita Americans are almost 3x as wealthy than the Portuguese, and the reason for this is that America is WAY more unequal than Portugal, so whilst most Americans are poorer than most Portuguese, the small fraction at the top which is the upper-middle class in America is much better off that the same in Portugal and a handful of Americans at the very top are incredibly more wealthy than the wealthiest Portuguese.
Thank you very much for going out your way to do this explanation. It’s something that’s bugged me for a while and I’ve not found a good explanation behind it.
I’m assuming based on this then the median often offers a better “reasonable” person in a given demographic and includes everyone, over mean with top and bottom excluded.
And obviously from your explanation median makes wealth comparisons between nations more accurate.
Well, median, mean and mode are all imperfect, but mean is by far the most imperfect because it ignores the distribution of values per data point (so in this case the distribution of wealth per individual) whilst median and mode do not and so tend to fall towards an indicative value (i.e. wealth level) around were the majority of cases are.
By the way, I made a mistake in my previous post and wealth is not a "normal distribution", though it is similar.
A normal distribution looks like this but the wealth distribution is not balanced on both sides since the upper tail of cases (i.e. the richer) is theoretically unbound, whilst the lower tail of cases is either bound (at $0 if debt is not included) or only goes up to a certain point if debt is included (basically only up to the point were people will lend money to other people).
Normal distributions (so, the Mathematical, perfectly balanced ones) have amongst other things the property that mean = median = mode so if wealth was a perfect normal statistical distribution then using the mean would not be a problem.
Can you please change this to 11 people with 100 chickens so I can just take the 6th persons chicken count instead of averaging it with the 5ths person chicken count to determine the median?
We should all "treat others the same as we want to be treated ourselves" and I got the impression that the way I had done it got on your nerves, same as some things a bit "out of place" get on mine.
There's a great comedian complaining she didn't initially get her autism diagnosis because when the psychologist asked her, "Do the tags on the back of your shirt bother you?" she answered simply, "No." When she found out that not having sensory issues was what denied her the diagnosis, she snapped, "Of course the tags don't bother me--I have a system!"
I'm coming to grips with the fact that I have a lot--but not all--of the traits of autism. I realize that as an adult, I probably have at least a few more than I'm immediately aware because I've been subconsciously avoiding situations that trigger my autism, so this week, this week I'm letting my freak flag fly to see what's beneath the mask.
With proper resource management (up to and beyond availing and provisioning all emancipatory technologies), such that we could build vast multi-layered forest arcologyscapes, we could increase the carrying capacity of earth, for humans, to over 300 trillion, living in vast spacious lush garden abundance. Not saying that we should. Just that we could. Such is our headroom.
But we don't get to have nice things, because of the likes of Bezos.
Industrialists, monopolists, "globalists" [oh they love that one, a flowery euphemism for more like "megalomaniacs"?], who eliminate any competition, by whatever means necessary to attain and maintain an imbalance of power.
A few years back I recall some journalists unearthing a study that showed how Wall St (and other stock exchange centers), were not only not "making" money/wealth, but extracting it from the economy, and further, for every dollar of wealth they extracted from the economy, they destroy another 7 dollars of wealth. ... Takes a moment for the magnitude of that to sink in.
So then we get these fauxlanthropists, swanning around, like Rockerfeller, giving a dime to someone on camera, in a community from whom he'd stolen millions, to whitewash their image.
... by whatever means necessary... a lot of that's just by the patents system and the legal system. How many patents get secreted a year? How many merely get sat on? How much lawfare's done to scare off inventors of technologies that would out-compete and obsolete enshitified rent-extraction maximisation technologies? How much else? A spat of inventors disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances recently. How far would you go to protect a multi trillion industry? As far as to actively prevent a better world without resource wars or poverty from ever happening? How far would a psychopath who's drawn to power go, with exacerbating tragedies of the commons for their own selfish short-sighted power-grab and resource gain? There's nothing stopping them...
We can all be polymaths in the making,
not slaves in training, lapping up the platitudes that placate us, from those who enslave us.
(PS, I've been boycotting Amazon since 2004, waiting for everybody else to see it. Maybe now with their participation in vast rampant destruction of rare books to feed their AI for cheap, to become the info monopoly, able to shape our agnosis, more people will see it and stop falling for it, in this small window we have, before their total information management becomes complete and we become a cosmic dystopian tragedy, with our minds entirely curated by the everpresent cold-reading psychopathic ai hypnotist, not just coercively hoodwinking us to carrying it in our pocket, but skynet, will be everywhere, especially in our mind. Except it wont be our mind any more. It will be the corporation's. Maximum capitalisation, reducing people to the numbers. ... Bezos, a trillion humans? Sure. But we are not the same.)
If you had 1000 kids with proper education, a good safe environment environment, who are allowed and motivated to follow their dreams, and with the economics to support all that you'll probably could also get 1000 Mozarts.
Not that I'm aware of, I was always taught to write out any number because it helps with the reader maintaining flow while reading. For the exact reasons we're discussing here, 'a thousand' and 'a 1,000' are functionally the same - but one breaks the readers train of thought a lot more easily than the other. Whereas dates and times are used so frequently that writing out 31/12/2026 or 10:00 AM really doesn't impact their ability to read them on a page.
At least, that's what I was taught. Maybe there's a different line of thinking I'm not aware of, though the rule you're talking about sounds like a business English rule - and I disagree with business English.
You talk about reader maintaining flow. And I think for exactly that reason you are supposed to use digits when the number is of a certain size. Like if I say, there are six hundred and seventy three buildings in the city. To me it’s much clearer to write there are 673 buildings in the city. Whatever “rule” I’m thinking of I seem to recall you spell out smaller numbers. Like you would write “there are three files” as opposed to “there are 3 files.” Everyone at work does the latter which always annoys me, though they also commit much more egregious mistakes in their emails and other writings.
Yeah I think this is ultimately a difference of opinion, and potentially a difference in how we learn to read in modern day - because while 673 is technically succinct, I wouldn't say it flows better than six hundred and seventy three.
That being said, this could just be a carry over (for me) from the U.S. education system incentivizing reaching a certain word count. Idk
I uh... Idk, I never thought Bezos was a genius or anything, but I figured he must've been at least moderately above average in intelligence for Amazon to take off initially like it did (I do realize that all the growth for the past 2 decades and more is unrelated to him, but the actual founding part of a startup is somewhat... dependent on the founders)
But I don't think it takes a particularly smart person to figure out that we can't handle 3 more orders of magnitude of humans consuming resources that are mostly available on planet Earth. Average person should definitely figure it out. And he owns a space company. How the fuck does he not realize how infeasible it is?
151 replies
Imagine how many more Mozarts and Einsteins we could have if we removed barriers like poverty and hunger and allowed everyone to have a fair shot at life.
Exactly this
We have so much untapped potential in the world because of the system he is a product of. The vast majority of people have to spend most of their time and effort on general survival. There's diminishing amounts of time and effort that average Joe can actually spend on intellectual and artistic pursuits orthogonal to their source of income. Hell, just fucking having hobbies is becoming a bit of a privileged position in 2026, which is frankly a desolate place we've managed to take civilisation.
See, that's the thing these guys don't want to understand. There could be a thousand generational talents like that "right fucking now*, who have these enormous gifts and won't ever be able to realize them because they gotta go to their third job so they don't fall behind on rent AGAIN.
Your Uber driver might be a virtuosic violin player who's never realized it because he's never had the opportunity to try. The cashier at Taco Bell might be an amazing painter, who can't afford to paint because every last cent has to go to one bill or another. That kid in Ghana you're watching on the TV charity commercial might be the next talent in rocketry or physics or poetry or any of a dozen other fields if they had a shot.
I know a guy who draws absolutely beautiful sketches, and having seen some of the paintings he "dabble with", I'm positive he could make some amazing things.
Unfortunately, all he gets to do is small sketches in his down time, because he works two jobs and has 2 kids.
Imagine how many people have an ideas for something that would make tons of people's lives better, but they can't work on it because they have to go to work and all their energy is spent just trying not to become a statistic...
It’s so nice to see other people with this sentiment. Even at a young age I always thought it was a little silly for only rich people to have “the best” education when there are people out there who can’t follow their passions or dreams because of various things.
So nice to see, thank you for pointing it out!
And if we cooperated instead of antagonizing each other (which happens under this capitalist system) we could probably collectively achieve even more than 1000 "mozarts" could do
But. Then we'd have no Elon Musks or Jeff Bezos's or Jeffrey Epsteins... Surely you don't want healthcare that bad, right??
No no no, just make endless people living in poverty and maybe a gentleman can pick up a child prodigy here and there
We almost certainly have 1,000 Einsteins and 1,000 Mozarts alive today. A relevant quote from 1979:
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
-Stephen Jay Gould
I remember a talk by a Microsoft VP who said that a very optimistic estimate would be that we were using human intelligence and creativity at maybe 5% efficiency. The actual number is likely much lower than that.
That is pseudo science and a really stupid take. Our brain is expensive as fuck since the moment of conception, born realy early and mostly under developed because of Our fucking big head. The whole evolution says that we animals use it or loose it, let that be tails, guils or brain power.
If we didnt use the whole brain it would be cut off for efficiency.
Maybe the quote wasn't about the brain, but about human resource management, which would make more sense in the context here?
Mind the context, we are talking about how little our society is capitalizing on the abilities of people, not on some stupid "we only use 10% of our brain" take
We very literally already have 1000 Motzarts and 1000 Einsteins. They are poor and working in your wearhouses and have no means or free time to pursue the fields they would accel in.
Pay your taxes Jeff.
They literally could not give a fuck if there's a Mozart out there.
This is the same shit that happened with Nazis. They decided that classical art is the only "real" art and anything that was modern at the time was "degenerate art".
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24819441
They want people that worship the traditional art that fuels nationalism, like Greek statues that are bleached white. They like the idea of classical art, that a perfect homogeneous society existed before them that they can re-achieve.
They hate all varieties of modern art because it's either hard to understand, or it might even conflict with their nationalism.
They want to dip their toes into what they think art should be, not embrace what it is.
We probably already have thousands of them out there but they never recieved the education they would have needed to unlock their potential and or are too busy surviving in abject poverty to contribute to the advancement of humanity.
Because shitheads like him hoard all the money and do everything they can so others around them are stuck in the poverty trap so they can use them as cheap, desperate and exploitable labor.
We already have a 1000 mozarts but half of them are starving right now and then out of the other half 80% couldnt pursue their dreams
- Steven Jay Gould
Look some the poors are going to die however that is just the price we all have to pay to make sure the rest of the Epstein Class continues to hoard wealth.
And Bezos is pushing for genAI, so they will be pushed out by genAI slop.
You know we already probably have a bunch of Mozarts and Einsteins peeing in bottles to avoid getting dinged while driving Amazon Prime trucks because that's the only way they can get by.
They're almost certainly is a bunch of geniuses who were never appreciated because they spend their entire lives trying to get food and water because they were unfortunate enough to be born into Ethiopia. We could feed and house and educate these people if we really wanted to, to the benefit of not just themselves, but the entire species if they did turn out to be the next Einstein. Instead the likes of Jeff Bezos go on podcasts and talk about how wonderful the distant future is going to be, while at the same time being utterly unprepared to do anything about the problems we have right now.
Is space Karen actually paid his taxes we probably could build a base on Mars with that money.
By that... We all live in Ethiopia. Compared to what could be, without the crooks and their rigged game holding us down
[and telling us they're our saviours, when they let us up for a bit of air, or take credit for making us strong when we manage to struggle for a gasp by ourselves].
I have to bite my tongue anytime someone mentions getting one or two day shipping. Like, you're not going to die if you don't get your RAM tomorrow ffs.
I legitimately would be okay with an "it gets to you within a month" option.
It's not the next day delivery that's the problem Amazon could totally offer that and not abuse their workforce. It would just cost them some more money so they don't do it.
It wouldn't cost them money, they would just make slightly less money per year. Which is just me being pedantic, but it matters in these contexts.
Like, Bezos could have been the most loved billionaire on the entire earth, just through treating his workers slighty better and some minor philanthropy on the side, but no, he had to squeeze every fuckin penny out of everything.
That's a bit pedantic. It currently is an issue and Amazon isn't going to change anytime soon.
Look at moneybags here, able to afford RAM.
This is pretty much how all my Aliexpress orders go. Works for me.
Did you guys know it's possible to be rich and also just shut the fuck up?
Yeah, we don't see e.g. the heads of the BIS etc swanning around doing the fauxlanthropist whitewashing bit on the podcast circuit.
I haven't heard that term before. Gonna mentally bookmark that.
he was literally on a podcast talking about Blue Origin and a distant future where humans have colonized multiple planets
lol, literally the quote by Stephen Jay Gould.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Quotes
"I'd love to breed a trillion humans and harvest only the extreme minority of specialized high performers to help me accomplish the things I can't do myself while I ignore the conditions of life for the 99.999% who I don't consider to have any value."
yeah but itll be cool because its in space 😃
While completely overlooking how people are a product of both nature and nurture. Einstein, with an estimated iq of 160, would mean he's one in 10000 in terms of iq, implying there's already hundreds of thousands of Einstein's out in the wild we haven't found yet.
It's like Atlas Shrugged, but even dumber.
The difference between me and Jeff Bezos is I love each and every one of pikmin and don't play favorites.
But we need more bottle pissers.
On a space ship, everyone’s basically a bottle pisser. I think I figured it out. The Amazon warehouses are a training facility for a trillion bottle pissing space slaves. Mind=blown.
Think about how many Einsteins and Mozarts all over the world who he and the other billionaires have killed through their policies and greed
Well said.
I tried say that too but probably got lost in my verbose rant.
How many Mozarts and Einsteins are pissing in bottles in your warehouses, Jeff?
To put it another way: we don't need a trillion people to find more Master Artists and Master Scientists, we need more Equality of Opportunity and a system that rewards Art and Science, both the very opposite what has made this "gentleman" as rich as he is, of what he promotes with his own words and using the parts of Press he bought and what he tells the politicians he has in this pocked to do.
He is literally one of the biggest individual forces pushing away from the very outcome he claims to want.
The hypocrisy of this asshole and others like him is mind-boggling.
They would say none, because Einstein made it out of the patent office and if you're still stuck in the patent office, you aren't Einstein. Brilliance must always rise to the top. Bezos is at the top, so in his mind he's brilliant. In his mind, there's no world where he isn't who he is today.
Remember there's no empathy or understanding.
The ironic thing is that Einstein would disagree with Bezos and Einstein is his example of the worlds smartest man.
We have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. Most of them are stuck working at an Amazon warehouse.
Just look at technical death metal and progressive metal. Most of the musicians are holding down day jobs programming. Mike Lerner is a really sad case, since he is one of the greatest metal guitarists. Works as the worlds most generic programmer in silicon valley.
Hell, even jazz and classical. I just don't know what their fucking day jobs are.
Nothing better for packaging than those subtle piano fingers. Bonus points if they're desperate because the grant money that funded them recently ran out and they still haven't submitted their thesis.
I swear, no one who laments our lack of Einsteins and Mozarts has spent a single second ever actually trying to make a living as a scientist or musician.
You want more Einsteins and Mozarts? Establish universal basic income. You don't even need to pay a ton. Just enough that everyone can have basic subsistence regardless of what they can earn by working. The true Einsteins and Mozarts will probably be content with just that modest level of income, living in a studio apartment forever so they can dedicate all of their time to their passion.
... and 990 billion cheap, exploitable slaves, of course.
Most billionaires are the scums of the world, hording the wealth and spending it on stupid stuff while his employees who do the actual work get little to no credit and are payed much less.
mostYeah. If anyone can propose an exception, I will show them an example of effective image whitewashing.
I believe the propaganda here is idea that some people are born special, brighter than every one else.
The message here is not that Bezos wants a trillion humans, the message is that the majority of people are not special and will never archive greatness (like him)
Rich people love to think they belong to this special group but it’s not real, all humans have the capacity to archive greatness if only given the resources to not only survive but thrive.
If everyone had acces to free and quality education, healthcare and food we could have more than a thousand Einsteins and Mozarts right now.
Once everyone is able to archive greatness, it becomes the norm, therefore the rich no longer able to justify their wealth by claiming to be geniuses. Helping the poor thrive and become not poor is a direct threat to their ego and status.
Edit: Wholesome to realise i am the fourth person to comment this. Positivity woke!
You said way more than the other ones, namely that the Jeff Bezos of the world believe themselves part of a superior humanity that allows them to treat the rest like garbage.
The reason Mozart became a great composer is that he pissed on his employer's working conditions and went rogue. His Bezos treated him to a kick in the ass, literally, administered on his behalf. Allegedly.
The reason Einstein became a great physicist is that he got an outstanding public education and then worked a government job to make ends meet. The same government jobs that Bezos and Musk wanted to cut last year.
Bezos is not part of a special superhumanity. He is an extremely privileged lottery winner that is too vain to admit he got lucky and now pretends his opinion matters. As the meme states, the only useful thing he can provide is tax money.
Not true. He and a select few others are in the process of providing the great collapse.
This you?
Amazon’s turnover and injury rates are so high they risk running out of workers to hire
The only reason ghouls like Bezos want a bigger population is because they want more people to exploit, especially artists and scientists.
So tired of watching these dipshit's fortunes detach them from reality.
The narcissism is so off the charts that the idea of death must be utterly terrifying to them. You know this chode is going to put himself on ice at the end in the hopes he can get a new body in the future without recognizing that the future is going to be a dystopian shithole or arid wasteland.
^^ thanks to people like him
Either that or he'll wake up to some "re-education".
It ain't murder to take a billionaire's frozen head out of one of those cryo chambers and chuck it into a porta potty at a Gathering of the Juggalos. If they ever get close to figuring out how to revive those fuckers, well, it'll be time to make some decisions.
And we'd have more Mozarts and Einsteins right now if people were free from the burden of worry about survival.
modern einstein is trying to develop new ways to keep people hooked on a social media scroll. modern mozart is producing kpop or playing jazz/fusion in some club where they make $40 a night and then dying broke (like allan holdsworth).
but it's true that most great brains probably never develop properly because the system tries its hardest to keep them stupid and in poverty.
the modern media landscape is all nepo babies and what does it get you? it gets you fuck all; everything is pathetic from top to bottom in every single artform but we're acting like shit is normal.
God, remember when actors were expected to be able to dance and sing as well as act?
A bygone age, where polymathy was still more the norm, before the corporation separated us into maximal-bar-one ignorance, of "specialisation",
and (I recently read, in the new book I'm reading) they lopped off the latter half of the expression "jack of all trades, master of none" [something like, "... is more often better than a master of one."],
and they convinced us the specialists were the "experts", the sages of the enlightenment, the wise ones with superior knowledge. ... All the while they're one step away from maximal ignorance.
I wonder how much better acting (and all "professions"/skills) could be, with a broader range of skills beside.
You got me wanting to go listen to more soffmi muhod, boc, or autechre.
I know, not really the point you were making... but yeah... lets go find more of these mozarts, who, whether still obscure, or found their niche audience, retain their creative integrity, despite the economic pressures. ... Oh that we could each be so. Or that we'd not even need be.
$0.02: above average intelligence is abundant. The opportunities and support that enable those people to achieve greatness (read: privilege), are not. This situation will only get worse with the like of Bezos squeezing the people that work for them. This "1000 Mozarts" line only serves to illustrate how intellectually bankrupt this person is.
When you have endless money and are surrounded by people fighting to give you handjobs all day, every day you tend to lose touch with reality and common sense.
I strongly disagree. We need to focus more on quality of life than population. If humanity grows to a trillion people 999.9 billion of us will be living in coffin-sized apartments and eating that runny white goop that fed people in the Matrix.
I would rather have 1 billion humans and everyone lives the American Dream for real.
Just gotta genocide a few billion people real quick.
I know I'm an asshole, but I was legitimately hoping that covid was going to wipe out a more significant amount. At least all the anti vaxxers, but that didn't happen.
I'm the jackass that watched Endgame and was like "goddamn that abandoned neighborhood looks peaceful".
Well, at least you know to some extent that that's in the wrong. Better than still being in the terrorised totalitarianised fervor and seeing such atrocities (not as making you the asshole, but instead) as a necessary virtues.
It gets better when one realises where that [headspace] came from...
That's interesting. I think we should have 0 'Jeff Bezos'es in the solar system.
I'm certain if I hadn't fought depression and sucidial thoughts for the most part of my life I'd be in a better position now.
Yep. So much wasted human potential.
Fuck billionaires, and their rigged game.
Human beings can only live abput two years at most in micro gravity. On return after said two years they are effectively paralyzed and have to endure months of physiotherapy just to be able to walk again.
We will never "live" in space or the "solar system", the only place we can live is this planet and anybody telling you otherwise is lying to you.
They do want you in micro gravity though. Besos has on his blue origin website that they plan on having heavy industry in orbit and basically the prols will work in orbit so the planet can remain clean for the rich.
Spin it! Bebe. ;)
[To make a cheap adequate equivalent centripital force (centrifugal force?... whatever) simulating gravity]
There be ways.
Bezos defo is lying to us though. ... bwahahahaha, "rockets" XD Yuh, cos that's how one travels through space. XD
A 1000 Hitlers, a 1000 Epsteins, a 1000 Bezos
Imagine a world with just a million people, 0 hitlers, 0 epsteins, 0 Bezos, 0 Trumps, 0 musks.
I've heard both Melon Husk and Lil' Jeffy Kisses repeat this sentiment. Where do they even get their figure? Something like 120 billion humans have existed, ever, and there has been only one Einstein and one Mozart. 1/120B * 1T = 8.5.
Factor in the widespread nutritional and medical resource shortages that would come along with one trillion humans, and I'm confident that number would drop to zero.
It seems to be that we'd be better off ensuring the future of humanity and focusing on science. Surely it would be quicker to experiment with genetics to grow an Einstein than it would be to implement a trillion-human breeding lottery hoping to find one.
Stories like these from people like these are always delivered through the lens of what's best for business. This is propaganda.
Also lack of genuine self-awareness on their own true intentions. To them, being greedy is so ingrained they can't see it as a hazard to themselves until its too late.
Funny how he also happens to be one of the worlds largest employers and also has one of the biggest amounts of customers. Wonder if he secretly would like anything else from those 9,999,999,998,000 people.
That unfortunate reality that their enormous wealth has been mostly down to population growth and psychopathic greed, and not because they were born with magical business brains.
He says '1000 Einsteins', but surely thinks '1000 Bezoses' because of course he thinks he's a genius, and because there'll be more new faces in the billionaire paedophilic orgies.
I believe he's said that he doesn't listen to music, which makes it even funnier to me. A real, "hello fellow humans" moment from Robo Chromedome.
Saw this prick talking about nurses making like 30k a year having to pay like 12k in taxes and that "it didn't make sense." Motherfucker makes billions and pays less taxes than the nurse he says shouldn't have to pay so much taxes.
He doesn't want Mozart's or Einstein's, he and other parasites like him want slaves and a trillion people with the debt boot on their throats is paradise for him and hell for everyone else.
Assuming some aliens appeared out a thin air and gifted us fusion powered spacecraft and space elevator technology it would still take centuries to get to trillions of humans. These people really do talk utter shit.
I'm not sure that we ever would. Every country that gets healthcare and a standard of living above abject poverty drops their birthrates. I would hope with fusion power, there wouldn't be a person on (or off) the planet going hungry.
But then again, Jeff Bezos exists, so we'll still end up with 99% of the wealth in the hands of 1%.
Yep. Especially if we're all separated in spaceships. Dating's hard enough in the same meat space.
Jesting aside, yup. And space expands faster than we even could fill it. So, at least we're getting billionaires off the idea they need to cull the human population because there's not enough resources here for their squanderous rigged game of manufactured scarcities and coerced dependence on pollution emitting finite resources.
But... Isn't Bezos in the rocket club? "Space is hard", is the idea sold with rockets. We never needed rockets. Follow the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla, and all the less famous innovators of that era, and we can see the start of zero-inertia propulsion had its beginnings on air balloons in the 1800s. Then that's just one step of creating a vessel that can surviva the vacuum of space, and you have a rudimentary space ship. ... From human innovation. But do we get nice things? No. Such tech's secreted, and only used on the wing tips of black stealth fighters to accelerate turns. We could have spaceships for everybody. Even almost a hundred years ago. ... But then other plans were already laid down for us, by the existing power structures, and being followed through. So now we get the likes of Bezos, peddling preposterously implausible placation platitudes, pandering as if he's a good guy, as if he's smart, as if he's a visionary...
... When really it seems like he's the type that does not understand you cannot get 9 women to make a baby in 1 month. But [given Amazon worker treatment] would still keep whipping them harder to try get them to.
He's literally talking about the distant future of mankind where we've colonized other planets
You guys really think he just walked into a room and completely unprompted and with zero context to any kind of previous conversation told someone in the media he wanted a trillion humans and then left?
It never occurred to you that this was probably in context of a larger conversation and that maybe you should go look that conversation up before you form an opinion?
Humans would find a way to destroy space through greed and corruption.
What he is actually thinking is he needs more slaves for wearhouses some Amazon and it's shit working conditions has already churned through the entire labor pool in some markets.
We could have a THOUSAND Mozarts if we
FUNDED youth Education!FUNDED youth Healthcare!FUNDED the Arts!Had LOTS ofWorkers!Babies!Let's focus on building the solar system with less Bezos-es.
I hope he clones a trillion of himself and they all end up killing each other fighting for the top spot of best sociopath in the solar system.
This is complete gacha thinking. "Every 10 pulls guarantees a four-star
characterintellect".How many people must be crammed on an overdrawn planet to pull Raiden Shogun, Jeff?
Misquote, he clearly said "one thousand Epsteins" while fondling himself
Yeah, I heard him say Epsteins as well. Didn't see the fondling part, so that day was a good day for my brain and eyes.
I can never take anyone who complains about "Eco Fascists" that want a lower human population seriously because I always have to consider if they're getting their views downstream of Bezos or Musk. The Elite want higher populations so we have to fight each other. Every time in history when there's been a workers deficit, the workers got more right.
JoeRoganization is the carcinization equivalent for the wealthy.
Geared up, brained down.
You are not ever going to have another Einstein since as soon as they prove useful the cretins like bozoes would use them for something that would not allow for the free thought that would come up with decent ideas.
I'm glad most (all?) of the replies here get it, and get it so solid, like this.
Ehh, finding these mozarts and einsteins will be near impossible because their upbringing will be impoverished and school results are more dependant on wealth than intelligence.
Above a certain point in wealth one's income is basically a slice of the wealth everybody produces, so the more the people the more wealth in aggregated they produce, the faster these types increase their wealth.
It's the reason why countries' GDPs are quoted as a whole rather than per-capita basis - whilst per-capita is what matters to most people as individuals (ideally the median rather than the mean), for those in power and the local elites it's the entire country's GDP that matters because their power and wealth is linked to the whole quite independently of how many people are producing it (think of it this way: market dominance, political influence, Press control and other forms of controlling how much wealth one gets are mainly country-specific or at least have less "power transmission" between countries than they do inside countries, so given that those tools to extract a slice of country-wide wealth are mainly country-specific, more people in that country means more returns from having such tools).
For the very rich immigration is always desirable even when importing people with lower formal education and less well integrated than the locals - even if the average productivity goes down (and hence per-capita GPD) because the newer, less expert and less well integrated workers, produce less wealth per-person that those already in the local worker pool, for those getting a slice of the aggregated wealth produced in a country even a little more from lower productivity workers, is always more for them.
He wants a trillion prime memberships.
Probably a really stupid question, but why is the median used for wealth and GDP rather than the mean (with the top and bottom sliced out)?
The wealth distributions are so called "normal" statistical distributions (basically a peak in the middle with a low on each side), so most people are at and around the central peak whilst only a few people are at the extremes, and in these the median which is at the top of the peak tells you the most common situation. Meanwhile for wealtht the mean is just mathematically the total wealth divided by the number of people.
In other words, the median tells you the most common situation, whilst the mean tells you how much is the total wealth divided by the total number of people (for wealth a purelly mathematical value which doesn't really represent any human situation).
(Edit: changed maths below for clarity)
An example - if there are 10 people with 1 chicken each and 1 person with 100 chickens
Going back to wealth, one stupidly rich person and a lot of very poor people produces a mean were they're all supposedly middle-class - which is not at all representative of the wealth of most people - whilst it produces a median which says the most common situation is to be poor.
This extreme example, by the way, is very close to the situation in the US - most people in America are (according to some OECD data somebody posted here a couple of days ago) poorer than for example the Portuguese (pretty much the tail of Europe), but the mean of wealth for America says that per-capita Americans are almost 3x as wealthy than the Portuguese, and the reason for this is that America is WAY more unequal than Portugal, so whilst most Americans are poorer than most Portuguese, the small fraction at the top which is the upper-middle class in America is much better off that the same in Portugal and a handful of Americans at the very top are incredibly more wealthy than the wealthiest Portuguese.
Thank you very much for going out your way to do this explanation. It’s something that’s bugged me for a while and I’ve not found a good explanation behind it.
I’m assuming based on this then the median often offers a better “reasonable” person in a given demographic and includes everyone, over mean with top and bottom excluded.
And obviously from your explanation median makes wealth comparisons between nations more accurate.
Well, median, mean and mode are all imperfect, but mean is by far the most imperfect because it ignores the distribution of values per data point (so in this case the distribution of wealth per individual) whilst median and mode do not and so tend to fall towards an indicative value (i.e. wealth level) around were the majority of cases are.
By the way, I made a mistake in my previous post and wealth is not a "normal distribution", though it is similar.
A normal distribution looks like this but the wealth distribution is not balanced on both sides since the upper tail of cases (i.e. the richer) is theoretically unbound, whilst the lower tail of cases is either bound (at $0 if debt is not included) or only goes up to a certain point if debt is included (basically only up to the point were people will lend money to other people).
Normal distributions (so, the Mathematical, perfectly balanced ones) have amongst other things the property that mean = median = mode so if wealth was a perfect normal statistical distribution then using the mean would not be a problem.
Can you please change this to 11 people with 100 chickens so I can just take the 6th persons chicken count instead of averaging it with the 5ths person chicken count to determine the median?
Sure.
I appreciate you.
We should all "treat others the same as we want to be treated ourselves" and I got the impression that the way I had done it got on your nerves, same as some things a bit "out of place" get on mine.
There's a great comedian complaining she didn't initially get her autism diagnosis because when the psychologist asked her, "Do the tags on the back of your shirt bother you?" she answered simply, "No." When she found out that not having sensory issues was what denied her the diagnosis, she snapped, "Of course the tags don't bother me--I have a system!"
I'm coming to grips with the fact that I have a lot--but not all--of the traits of autism. I realize that as an adult, I probably have at least a few more than I'm immediately aware because I've been subconsciously avoiding situations that trigger my autism, so this week, this week I'm letting my freak flag fly to see what's beneath the mask.
With proper resource management (up to and beyond availing and provisioning all emancipatory technologies), such that we could build vast multi-layered forest arcologyscapes, we could increase the carrying capacity of earth, for humans, to over 300 trillion, living in vast spacious lush garden abundance. Not saying that we should. Just that we could. Such is our headroom.
But we don't get to have nice things, because of the likes of Bezos.
Industrialists, monopolists, "globalists" [oh they love that one, a flowery euphemism for more like "megalomaniacs"?], who eliminate any competition, by whatever means necessary to attain and maintain an imbalance of power.
A few years back I recall some journalists unearthing a study that showed how Wall St (and other stock exchange centers), were not only not "making" money/wealth, but extracting it from the economy, and further, for every dollar of wealth they extracted from the economy, they destroy another 7 dollars of wealth. ... Takes a moment for the magnitude of that to sink in.
So then we get these fauxlanthropists, swanning around, like Rockerfeller, giving a dime to someone on camera, in a community from whom he'd stolen millions, to whitewash their image.
... by whatever means necessary... a lot of that's just by the patents system and the legal system. How many patents get secreted a year? How many merely get sat on? How much lawfare's done to scare off inventors of technologies that would out-compete and obsolete enshitified rent-extraction maximisation technologies? How much else? A spat of inventors disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances recently. How far would you go to protect a multi trillion industry? As far as to actively prevent a better world without resource wars or poverty from ever happening? How far would a psychopath who's drawn to power go, with exacerbating tragedies of the commons for their own selfish short-sighted power-grab and resource gain? There's nothing stopping them...
We can all be polymaths in the making,
not slaves in training, lapping up the platitudes that placate us, from those who enslave us.
(PS, I've been boycotting Amazon since 2004, waiting for everybody else to see it. Maybe now with their participation in vast rampant destruction of rare books to feed their AI for cheap, to become the info monopoly, able to shape our agnosis, more people will see it and stop falling for it, in this small window we have, before their total information management becomes complete and we become a cosmic dystopian tragedy, with our minds entirely curated by the everpresent cold-reading psychopathic ai hypnotist, not just coercively hoodwinking us to carrying it in our pocket, but skynet, will be everywhere, especially in our mind. Except it wont be our mind any more. It will be the corporation's. Maximum capitalisation, reducing people to the numbers. ... Bezos, a trillion humans? Sure. But we are not the same.)
If you had 1000 kids with proper education, a good safe environment environment, who are allowed and motivated to follow their dreams, and with the economics to support all that you'll probably could also get 1000 Mozarts.
Also you could just name 1000 kids Amadeus, idk.
I don't think that's how it works.
There are one trillion ants on the world and they have zero Mozarts.
Name one Mozart composition or one Einstein scientific publication by title. Fucking populists.
he said "a one thousand"?
what a fucking chud. speaks like he looks.
He likely said 'a thousand' but whoever wrote this article failed English and never learned to write out numbers.
The only numbers I should see in an article are things people already expect to see as numbers, like dates (dd/mm/yy) or the time of day.
Isn’t there a style rule where if it’s a number greater than ten you use digits?
Though if you say a thousand, that’s different than saying “a 1,000” which is saying “a one thousand”, which you wouldn’t write.
Not that I'm aware of, I was always taught to write out any number because it helps with the reader maintaining flow while reading. For the exact reasons we're discussing here, 'a thousand' and 'a 1,000' are functionally the same - but one breaks the readers train of thought a lot more easily than the other. Whereas dates and times are used so frequently that writing out 31/12/2026 or 10:00 AM really doesn't impact their ability to read them on a page.
At least, that's what I was taught. Maybe there's a different line of thinking I'm not aware of, though the rule you're talking about sounds like a business English rule - and I disagree with business English.
You talk about reader maintaining flow. And I think for exactly that reason you are supposed to use digits when the number is of a certain size. Like if I say, there are six hundred and seventy three buildings in the city. To me it’s much clearer to write there are 673 buildings in the city. Whatever “rule” I’m thinking of I seem to recall you spell out smaller numbers. Like you would write “there are three files” as opposed to “there are 3 files.” Everyone at work does the latter which always annoys me, though they also commit much more egregious mistakes in their emails and other writings.
Yeah I think this is ultimately a difference of opinion, and potentially a difference in how we learn to read in modern day - because while 673 is technically succinct, I wouldn't say it flows better than six hundred and seventy three.
That being said, this could just be a carry over (for me) from the U.S. education system incentivizing reaching a certain word count. Idk
Space Nutter, hm?
Yep, that's definitely confirmed by the work conditions he fosters.
/s
I uh... Idk, I never thought Bezos was a genius or anything, but I figured he must've been at least moderately above average in intelligence for Amazon to take off initially like it did (I do realize that all the growth for the past 2 decades and more is unrelated to him, but the actual founding part of a startup is somewhat... dependent on the founders)
But I don't think it takes a particularly smart person to figure out that we can't handle 3 more orders of magnitude of humans consuming resources that are mostly available on planet Earth. Average person should definitely figure it out. And he owns a space company. How the fuck does he not realize how infeasible it is?
Did you miss the part where he said a trillion humans in the solar system instead of just on earth?
Same outcome if we invested AI gambling money into education and scholarships, btw.
That would also mean a thousand Jeff Bezos'! Stop advancing humanity before it's too late!! /s
History's Not Made By Great Men
I thought AI was supposed to give us an infinite number of Einsteins and Mozarts. They can't even keep their own lore/propaganda straight
these braying jackass billionaires wouldnt know genius even if it kicked them square in the ass
Someone has the world popilation numbers from the 18. century?
How many Jeffrey Epsteins and Martin Shkrelis would we have BTW?