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Illuminostro ,

nbafantest ,

Remember, any time you see this headline, they’re cherrypicking the date to after the richest men lost 50% of their wealth in the Stock collapse immediately after covid/lockdowns hit.

Gloomy ,
@Gloomy@mander.xyz avatar

I wanted to check this. It’s not true. At the start of 2020 he had about 25 Billion Net worth. It has gone up as much as 350 Billion in late 2021 and is at 227 Billion as of now. I included a graph that showed the progress untill mid 2023. So no. No cherrypicking.

nbafantest ,

You can even see the dip in Elon’s networth in 2020 in this chart lol If they had started 1 month earlier, Elons net worth would have only 3x instead they cherry picked a date after Elon’s networth had halved, so instead it 6x’ed.

Gloomy , (edited )
@Gloomy@mander.xyz avatar

I don’t see it. Like, honestly, I can’t see it. If you zoom in you can see months and years.

The major dip I see in 2020 was from around 50 billion in Feb to 25 billion in April.

His net worth right now is 227.8 Billion (the graph ends in early 2023)

So it’s either 9 x higher if you take the 25 Billion or about 4.5 times higher if you take the 50 Billion. So they took the highest number.

What are you on about mate?

nbafantest ,

I don’t see it. Like, honestly, I can’t see it. If you zoom in you can see months and years.

The major dip I see in 2020 was from around 50 billion in Feb to 25 billion in April.

Hey! You found when they cherry picked the dates for this headline! Congrats!

SoylentBlake ,

“Morbidly Wealthy”…“Economically Obese”…?

tacosplease ,

Doesn’t morbid mean - dangerous for life? As in those parasites are looking more succulent each day. LOL

UFODivebomb ,

Can’t wait to read some idiot’s argument on why Trump is the right guy to fix this lol

AeonFelis ,

Because he already demonstrated his ability to cut down generational wealth

oascany ,

This is actually really funny

UFODivebomb ,

Lol. Lovely way to introduce that fact. Excellent delivery! Going to copy you :)

NaNABCV ,
@NaNABCV@lemmy.world avatar

Thank goodness Biden is doing so much to combat this

fosforus ,

Ok, so … Biden’s economic policies are worse than Trump’s were?

Or perhaps a tiny thing called war in Europe and worst pandemic in a century is having some teeny tiny effects in world economy. But when you detect a fire inside your house, it’s often smarter to use a fire extinguisher to douse it, not gasoline.

ShortFuse ,

“When the firefighter arrived, 50% of the building was burned. When they left, 70%.”

Under your logic, firefighters used gasoline to burn the other 20%.

nbafantest ,

Ok, so … Biden’s economic policies are worse than Trump’s were?

This is a cherry picked headline based on the stockmarket crashing immediately after covid/lockdowns hit. Its a good thing that Biden’s economy has fully recovered since then. There was no guarantee that we wouldn’t be in a depression after the lockdowns. The fact that the economy and stock market are back to normal after covid is not a bad thing, despite the scary sounding headline.

crsu ,
@crsu@lemmy.world avatar

Make billionaires extinct

Darkncoldbard ,

You got a plan?

KredeSeraf ,

Large mobs and guillotines seemed to work fine a while back. Larger mobs and guillotines should still do nicely.

bitwaba ,

The fun thing about that is if you live in a western nation, you’re almost guaranteed to be on the chopping block for being in the top 10% of earners world wide.

reagansrottencorpse ,

I doubt many or any of us own the means of production.

bitwaba ,

People don’t act rationally when heads start rolling.

rambling_lunatic ,

crimethinc.com/…/against-the-logic-of-the-guillot…

BigBananaDealer ,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

by making trillionaire the new milionaire?

Malfeasant ,

Eat them!

Darkncoldbard ,

Go ahead… right behind you

Yewb ,

These are all paper gains if they would never be able to realize that money in reality.

Sentau ,

Yeah but to achieve this paper gains I would wager a lot of people have been screwed out of their real money

rabiddolphin ,
@rabiddolphin@lemmy.world avatar

You can use paper gains as leverage for loans against the gains and get that sweet liquidity to pay for underage escorts at Davos

NaNABCV ,
@NaNABCV@lemmy.world avatar

Oh be quiet. I bet you believe in pizza gate

nbafantest ,

You still have to pay taxes on whenever you need income to pay those loans

Blackmist ,

Just see how much they claim to be worth when we finally get a wealth tax.

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

In their pockets flation

wabafee ,
@wabafee@lemmy.world avatar

Man that’s bad why aren’t people doing something about this. Me then proceed to continue doomscrolling.

Xer0 ,

If you really believe in the words that you preach, get off your screens and onto the streets. There will be no peaceful revolution, no war without blood. You can say I’m just a fool that stands for nothing. Well, to that, I say you’re a cunt.

GladiusB ,
@GladiusB@lemmy.world avatar

r/Iam14andedgy

Xer0 ,

sugma

Macaroni_ninja ,
@Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world avatar

Whoa whoa whoa dude

Colonel_Panic_ ,

As anyone who has played the board game Monopoly can tell you, this is the point in the game where the game is effectively “over”, the winner has been decided. That one player owns most of the board and the rest are hanging on with mortgages and selling off their houses and properties to hang on for one more turn and hoping to land on a space that doesn’t bankrupt them. But we all know they eventually will.

So, when do we say GG, pack up the board and try something else?

Muffi ,

GG? The game was rigged from the start. It’s time to flip the table.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

“Rigged” is human nature. There’s always people wanting to climb to the top of the heap and hoard anything of value and amass power. At no point in human civilization has this not been true. Kings, religions, merchants, even the criminal class. They all have people trying to place themselves in control to reap the money and rewards of others’ work.

You have to “un” rig the system with controls to prevent obscene collection of wealth and power; and even then it’s a continuous, non-stop battle to prevent the rich and powerful, and their sycophants and supporters, from constantly trying to find workarounds and/or undermine the system keeping them from their economic gluttony.

Patches ,

If a Monkey tried to collect two hundred and thirty billion bananas - he would’ve been ripped in half by the other monkeys with his head on a banana pike as a warning. This is not ‘business as usual’…

RememberTheApollo_ ,

And we’re not monkeys. What an awful analogy considering monkeys have no concept of hoarding wealth, much less any other facets of human society that drives wealth acquisition at the expense of others.

set_secret ,

i have no clue why you received a downvote for this.

I’ll vote for you.

rambling_lunatic ,

Yeah. We should probably destroy the hierarchy at some point. Make it so you literally can’t hoard wealth and force others to work for you.

boaratio ,

“richest men” Hmmm.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The problem (according to Das Kapital ) is that the owning class will fight back. Not all of them. Some realize that long-term capitalism requires keeping the working class happy (more or less) but well more than not. And as we learned with feudalism in the middle ages, it takes only one bad king to bring the ruin the works of ten of his predecessors. (It’s a running theme in A Song of Ice and Fire )

So these recommendations are on the assumption that our governments are not already captured. The point of government is to serve the public good and the US has been trying to go back to that for over a century (since the Great depression, which escalated the desire to try something else, all the while the Soviet Union was doing just that.)

Our plutocrats have more resources by which to keep hold of our current governments, even as industry pollutes the air and drives us toward extinction.

Eximius , (edited )

Please don’t perceive the Soviet Union as serving the public good. It was a well played (albeit it was 1950s 1960s, easy to write your own narrative) fascism that only benefitted Stalin and Moscow, while keeping the usual fireworks expense needed to sate the masses (just as in capitalist America) at a minimum. They murdered good people left and right, because they weren’t obedient. They murdered good and bad people because they had money they wanted.

They were no different from Nazis, in that Moscow wanted to russify the world. They did it in a more “tolerant” way, you could say. Doing their genocides slowly. Immigrating ethnic russians over decades. But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.

Some “visionaries” were allowed to build some architectural projects or other, for the people, as long as they adhered to the party’s rule, kept the fake narrative going. This was an easy way for a person without honor to have his name written in stone. Repeat for all subcultures.

nickwitha_k ,

But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.

Hey now. That’s not quite accurate. A great deal of thought went into it when the leadership realized that the Greens (peasant militias primarily organized for mutual defense against pillaging aka “requisitions” by the Red and White armies), the presence of anarchist societies allowing voluntary association (like the Makhnovists in Ukraine, and ethnic groups with strong identities or cultural individuality would interfere with the Central Commitee’s absolute power over the populace.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States was is was (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.

US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.

So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.

At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (🐶🔥) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, you’re totally right. This isn’t our first rodeo.

In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isn’t new. It’s the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.

Let’s also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.

I’m not a political scientist. I can’t say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasn’t really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption

(I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflake’s chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)

Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while we’re still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We don’t like to talk about the people we don’t like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think it’s just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. We’re all the baddies.

And that said I’m not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than I’m going to throw out Hume because of America.

Eximius , (edited )

I highly doubt USSR 1930s onwards was ever an attempt to make socialism work. Especially after Lenin’s death.

The remark about USSR being only an attempt at communism is verbose, and questionably required. I never attacked socialism’s ideas.

Just by numbers, a lot more innocents’ murdering happened in Soviet Union. Double digit millions if not more over its existence. There is just no whataboutism that can save that piece of fascist wreck of a state.

I merely wanted the idea by @uriel238 that the Soviet Union “Had good ideas” to die in a fire.

Otherwise, good points.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

In my top-of-thread comment, I didn’t mention the USSR at all other than to say it was trying something other than capitalism, and that trying something else was inspiring Americans in the early 20th century. Now I suspect you’re not engaged in this dialogue in good faith.

Eximius ,

Soviet Union === USSR

kaffiene ,

I didnt read his posts as “USSR had some good ideas”

kaffiene ,

Good post. One thing I will say about Marx is that his analysis of Capital is really insightful. Especially if you consider it alongside what Smith says in The Wealth of Nations regarding the problems of rent seeking behaviour. Between those two works is a solid analysis of much of what ails modern Capitalism. The biggest problem with Marx isn’t his analysis of the problem, it’s his proposed solution . I’m sympathetic to socialist ideas, but while the idea that a small group of people can seize power is plausable, the idea that they will then voluntarily disseminate it to the populace, is fanciful. Human nature doesn’t work that way.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yeah, so far we don’t have any good solutions for the propensity of power to consolidate. Similarly Madison presumed people in office would be rational and naturally inclined towards serving the common good, but also that the voters would know their own personal best interests and vote accordingly. History would quickly demonstrate otherwise.

As I said, I’m not a political scientist, and right now, if we could revise our elections there’s a handful of basic changes we could make to improve things and give the public more power. But we’re going to need sociological tricks we don’t yet have to erect a society that doesn’t succumb to corruption over centuries (if not decades). We naked apes aren’t really meant for huge societies, and knew we were treading on dangerous ground when we first started seeing the fruits of agriculture.

That said, CIA experts and Christian Sociologists (desperate to see their faith not get shredded in the next few eras) warn that if power is not disseminated back to the public, we are likely headed towards civil war within the next five to ten years. These will be interesting times, and if history serves it might be decades before we see a stable normal again.

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