• AvaMadison_27@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Imagine how different the world would be if billionaires competed to solve problems instead of competing to become richer. What a world that would be!

    • Glaedr304@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      To be honest, I think the billionaires think they are solving problems. I also think that they believe if they had the money they could do more good with it. They are obviously wrong.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I had this vision of the military. Imagine a natural disaster like a tsunami is about to strike the Middle East. Here comes the carrier force and they start launching what looks like tomahawk missiles. Instead of blowing people up on the ground they open up in air and drop rafts and life preservers. The military has shown up to save countless people instead of murdering them.

        • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yes, along those lines only the major force(Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, etc.) would be like a nation wide coast/national guard that goes around helping nations out in times of disasters. In-between disasters they could act like a worldwide corp of engineers improving areas that need it.

  • Sparky@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    billions sitting in billionaire bank accounts? You mean investment portfolios? You obviously don’t know wealth management :D

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Because they think they know better than us hoi polloi. Seriously. There’s a psych term that escapes me, but once a person gains wealth and power, they think they know better than the rest of us and the rules don’t apply to them.

      One of the most horrifying things I know about humans is that almost all of us are susceptible to this and it’s not simply a matter of people kissing their ass, though that certainly “helps”.

      • Hal@piefed.nz
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        1 day ago

        One of the most horrifying things I know about humans is that almost all of us are susceptible to this and it’s not simply a matter of people kissing their ass, though that certainly “helps”.

        This doesn’t have to be true. I have explained to one of my kids when asked why I don’t think the rich are good people.

        Me: Well, what would you do with a billion dollars?

        Them: buy lots of toys

        Me: ok, after you have bought all the toys in the store, what would you do?

        Them: Buy toys for all my friends… Well maybe they could have the ones I’m not using. Buy a house? Buy you a new car?

        Me: What would you do after you had bought all that and still have almost all of the billion dollars left over, since a billion is so huge?

        Them: um, buy houses for the people that don’t have houses? And food for the people that don’t have enough food?

        Ultimately I believe that to have a billion dollars for any decent length of time you are probably a bad person, because even a kid’s instinct is to use that money to help others’, even people they don’t know.

        While wealth might make people bad as you imply, I think an equally valid option is that good people don’t stay wealthy because they use the money to help others.

    • Napster153@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      They don’t see money as we do. It’s the control in the price of items and buying power where the real value is at.

      These sort of control freak cultists have existed in human societies since time immemorial. They have, can and will always find ways to exploit everyone.

      Last year was religion, yesterday ideology and today it’s finance. None of these things in a vacuum were meant to debilitate humans until these same people rigged the system.

      Future humans will be condemning our capitalist ways like we do feudal societies. They won’t see the difference.

    • Guy Dudeman@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Because they don’t actually have the money. The value of their holdings are used as collateral on loans. They use the loans to pay for their expenses and are just constantly in debt. This avoids all tax consequences for them. And it is fucking stupid.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      they like to hoard it, and use other peoples money thats why. thier net worth is actually in thier stocks/investments for the most part.

        • JC1@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          No, unless a company releases new stock options that are diluting the value of the current shareholders, the money doesn’t go to the company, it goes to the shareholders that sell the shares. Their money doesn’t create employment, it realises the capital gain of other investors. And companies don’t want to dilute the shares as their sole purpose is to increase shareholder value. And even though they sometimes do, it’s pale in comparison to stock buybacks which are exactly the opposites, removing money that could be used for R&D or for workers and raising the imaginary value of their company by inflating investors shares.

        • mrpxilo@lemmy.zip
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          2 days ago

          It’s not their money. These people have 5 aces in their hand. They cheat and then instead of golden rocket cars, they buy the media, our politicians, and secret compounds where they brainstorm how to dismantle democracy and start cults.

          It’s just that the cheaters that top the leaderboard also know how to play the game, so they overlap legitimate investors and business owners. Musk and friends don’t need to cheat every hand because the deck is already stacked in their favor.

        • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          That’s not really how it works though. The money you pay for stock goes to the person you bought the stock from not into the company to pay the employees

        • homosapien@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          A man cannot develop and maintain a product that made a billion. He has to employ people. And if he does not exploit them for their surplus labor value, he CANNOT become a millionaire

    • Zephorah@discuss.online
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      2 days ago

      Dealing with investments and the stock market is like going to a casino. Unless they inherited legacy accounts, they made their money gambling.

      Cuban is probably the most obvious example. The man placed a risky bet on shorts and won. Gallway, for all his faults, discusses the luck factor that he stumbled into based on someone else’s gambling failures.

  • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Correct (when it comes to billionaires; Sam Altman and his ilk intentionally caused the RAM shortage by buying RAM their companies are not using and should be held accountable).

    Billionaires would be impossible in a properly civilised society, which would implement progressive taxes so that anyone with a wealth above, say, ten times the median wealth of the population or 25 times the wealth of the poorest person (citizen or not) in the nation (whichever’s lowest at the time) are taxed to the point that their wealth can increase no further, with the resulting income being invested on public services so that personal wealth is irrelevant except for luxury items.

    • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Quit making perfect sense. You’re making the capitalists nervous and ruining the hopes and dreams of all the Questrader’s out there. /s

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I knew there’d be folks in here claiming it’s “fake money.” They can liquidate when they want to, it’s not “fake.”

    • Gravitywell.xYz@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Not only is it real money when its invested, typically the rich can just borrow against those shares instead of having to liquidate anything to pay for things.

      For example when they need $40b to purchase a website or media corp to use so they can have better control of the narrative, they just get a loan because everyone knows they’ll be able to make the payments, instead of selling enough shares to tank the thing that inflates their networth beyond all reason.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      They can liquidate part of it. If they liquidate all of it then most will disappear into thin air.

      If you’re Elon Musk and own a large part of Tesla and SpaceX and you sell all your shares, both companies crater HARD.

      Just remove stock from anyone who owns over 1% of any publicly traded company and nationalize all index funds’ assets (yes, that includes retirement funds). Problem solved.

      Or just cap total wealth at ~5 mill, indexed to the median income so there’s no need for legislation like with minimum wage.

  • 87Six@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    I think we should extract the water from Sam Altman’s body and use it to cool a datacenter

    • ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      Just because it isn’t hundred dollar bills in their mattress doesn’t mean they don’t have it. They can leverage what they own in exchange for goods and services equivalent to the value of their holdings, the exact mechanism doesn’t really matter.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        We just watched musky light $500,000,000 on fire last month they clearly got the liquidity.

      • hansolo@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        No, it’s that they invest their money so it makes more money. They leverage the wealth being liquid to make more. It’s the real dividing line between wealth and not.

        You can’t really invest $200 in your bank account and expect anything. First of, you need that to spend to live.

    • Potocobe@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      The only actual cash billionaire I can think of is the guy that created and sold Minecraft. That dude has billions in the bank. Or at least he did for a minute or two before I’m sure he invested a ton of it. All the other billionaires just own billions worth of stuff for the most part. Banks don’t even leave money in banks. They invest or loan out all of it and keep the returns. That’s the scam, same as it ever was.

      • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s not really a scam to move your cash into non liquid assets for financial security. How you got there could be a product of a scam but (going off of a previous comment I made a few days ago about how they buy assets and hold their money in those) typically, after you have a certain amount of money, one can only figure boredom kicks in and that in-turn, would most likely create a sense of frivolous spending or seeing what you can hold in forever items with absurd values.

        Paintings, Collectable Cars, Mid-Century Clothing, Collectable Foods (ikr), Historical Properties (that sometimes get sold and then they re-coup losses through making the historical property profitable…sigh, creating a historical society with the goal of recouping losses). …

        • Potocobe@lemmy.zip
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          1 day ago

          Nah, I meant the banks are the scam. They hold your money in a low interest rate savings account. Then they loan out your savings account (on paper at least) to someone at a higher interest rate and so on. Every bank for the longest time was a big old house of cards that only held up as long as no one moved too much money at once. I get what you are saying about wealthy people wealth acquisition, though.

        • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Whoever downvoted this: For example, if you purchased a… Idfk a Rolex watch and it gained value over 40 year and you kept it pristine condition and never wore it and sold it at auction, is that a scam or just market fluctuations? Is it a scam that someone would pay twice as much at auction for a watch that due to others opinions gains market value or just ridiculous?

          It’s no one’s fault or a scam that an item in the future gains value. Is it a scam that a video game system can become more valuable in 20 years or just a product of opionated market value?

          It’s not fucked up to have nice things of value. People put payment plans on nice things that they may choose to keep in pristine quality for decades before it gains value and sell it at auction, is the person who did a payment plan for the item and has an item of value that gains value over time more fucked up than the person who can buy the same item outright to do the same?

          It’s the fact that people who are stupid rich do it but if I, a person in financial poverty does the same, through a payment plan I’m a fucking idiot for not saving money.

          So when does it become okay to buy nice things at a ridiculous value to have financial security in non-liquid assets? When, in your opinion does it become okay to buy a nice piece of jewelry or a nice painting and storing those away properly until they gain more value?

          I mean shit people collect baseball cards and wait until they gain value. It’s such a normal thing, to hold value in assets.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      People have this contrary view that billionaires actually have all this liquid wealth, yet that same money living in the stock market is fake. And this causes no cognitive dissonance.

      • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s not “fake”. They can liquidate. Bezos liquidated 10 billion in stock to push his cock-rocket vanity project over the finish line. They can do it when they want to. The same way they can do it to pay taxes, if we make them. No, it’s not “fake money”.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    That’s the thing; the billions don’t sit in a bank account but in the stock betting market. They would be heavily taxed otherwise.

    • JC1@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Just tax unrealised capital gain then. A progressive tax too so small investors wouldn’t really be penalized much.

  • Tenderizer@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    Also, the idea that accelerating AI development should be the goal is I think silly.

    If anything we should be slowing down the RAM factories. We have too much RAM. We need less RAM.

  • hamsamrich@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I have 624 GB of DDR5 6000 MHz RAM just sitting around. Sam Altman, you can lick my butt and suck on my balls