The mental trick that keeps on giving. When government does it - it’s automatically bad, but when a private business does it - it’s between the business and its customers. Then all the gov’t needs to do is become a customer on the B2B side.

If you buy the argument that billionaires have become such by collecting the extra value their employees create above the wage they get paid, then it’s easy to see why many consider them harmful regardless of their personal traits. In that framework, the billionaire that’s the least harmful is the one that has the fewest billions. Luckily, unlike race, there’s an easy way to become a non-billionaire. One option is paying higher wages so that you never become one. Another is lobbying for high taxes and paying them. Yet another is giving enough of money away as to become a millionaire. With race, there are no options to become not-that-race.

And so we judge billionaires as a group, as a class, because of their function and effect on society, the economy and the political system. Not because we think they’re all bad people that we have to hate. They cannot be billionaires without having these effects.

Speaking of value employees make above their wages, here’s a fun fact. If you take the average yearly net income (profit after costs) of Google and you divide it by their number of employees, you get a number around half a million per person, per year.

Stay woke ✊

Remember when he lobbied against sharing vaccine IP at the height of the pandemic?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

The parent is being a bit hyperbolic, which isn’t useful, but that’s not Alex Jones-level tinfoil hattery, even if it appears similar at first glance. Of course you’re right that he was an Epstein bud because he liked to fuck the classmates he couldn’t in school. At the same time it’s also true and provable that uncle Bill spends his money lobbying various domestic and international organizations to further his and by proxy the owner class’es interest. I distinctly remember for example good uncle Bill lobbying the US government and the WHO against IP sharing at the height of the COVID crisis:

Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world. A chorus of support from pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration didn’t hurt.

Source: Wired Magazine

PS: Being an Epstein bud could help if you want to lobby big names with words and capital. People pay good money to sit at the table and talk to some big shots at various places.

Billionaire philanthropy is like doing 100 damage to humanity, then returning 5 health. Then the 5 health gets amplified by information channels and it gets to feel much bigger in the collective consciousness. It gets a further boost when there’s other prominent billionaires that don’t give any hp back making it stand out as the good guy. So you end up in a bizarre position where objectively the philanthropist is the good guy compared to the rest, but the vast majority of us have no hp left.

Many are new blood having no idea what Microsoft used to be. Add to that the modern good-guy MS face, funding (usefu for theml) open source and all that, and it gets difficult to convey how things used to be.

Could be worse - Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

Food should be OK, no? I guess everything helps if you need to pay more for non-food items.

Someone stockpiling in Canada and Mexico, some of what isn’t delivered in LA, would make a killing. We should be putting an export tax on Chinese made goods going to the US unless we want to follow the coyote. 😂

Yeah, it’s one of the necessary tools for achieving ever growing profits.

🥇

I see. Thanks!

What’s Hyprland?

This rings true.

My brain instinctively thought the hand being stopped was Thatcher’s.

Don’t worry, cheque’s in the mail.

I think most of here see it. But then again we already understand enough to move away from corporate social.

Totally great for Tom in the short to medium term. Long term… maybe, if he finds an isolated self-sufficient place to spend the rest of his days. Either way he’ll be better off than the rest of us no matter what.

Not sure if sarcastic or I didn’t make my point well enough. Just in case I’ll expand. The bad thing is that the system necessitates ever increasing profits. It’s not the individuals. If Zuck fucks off to paradise Zuck Prime would take over the social media market and keep finding ways to grow profits year-on-year. The problem with ever increasing profit is this profit comes from the wages and time of people one way or another, leaving less for other social things like paying to meet friends, a partner, having and raising children. Multiply this process to most firms in most markets and you’ll soon see that this leads to social instability, unrest, crisis, and worse. Like it’s happened in the past in different places around the world. Today in the US, Big Tech does it, Big Ag does it, Big Grocer does it, Big Insurance does it, Big Landlord does it, Big Pharma does it, Big Entertainment does it, and increasingly larger proportion of the population gets squeezed out of time and money… for the basics or luxuries like friends and partners. And they’re not gonna take it laying down. Electing Trump was one salvo, even if counterproductive.

Yes this is how things are supposed to work in the system but my point is that it’s a) driven by the system, not individuals, and b) the consequences are unsustainable.