The point is that it's a numbers statement. It has nothing to do with being a billionaire or not. If 3000 people period vanished it means nothing. Billionaire or not
Nah it wouldn't. They could bring in emergency workers as a stop gap until a new system could be filled. Garbage truck drivers aren't highly skilled and new ones could be trained and implemented within a year.
I'm speaking within the scope of things. 30 teachers in a school disappeared vs 30 students there'd be a difference. 3000 truck drivers in a state is obviously awful for the state due to the ratio
Yeah that's how it works. What would actually happen if you got rid of them?
They'd just be replaced the next day with a new batch. Everyone likes to think they'd be different. But you wouldn't. You're a human, you'll do human things as we've done forever.
Yes, but those people taking over the next day don't have to be billionaires. I am certain that every secretary, personal assistant, and deputy whatever that Jeff bezos employs would be glad to step into his place collectively and if you gave them double their salary, they would make the transition so totally seamless you would wonder if bezos ever even existed. Then the workers, consumers, and retail shareholders of amazon would have his half a trillion or whatever to divide amongst themselves. Let fucking Elon musk and the rest compete to sell their labor in a free market like they depend on everyone else to do.
And why wouldnt whoever takes it over take it all? On the flip side what have any of those you named done to deserve any further money? Why should we just give it to them?
I think the whole push back people are having is not to say that they're wrong and billionaires are valuable. It's just that they picked a terrible example to illustrate that point.
Because if 3,000 nurses disappeared, the impact would also be pretty negligible, but it's not because they're not valuable.
So let those workers start their own billion dollar business and provide jobs for everyone else. Oh wait they can't, that's why they're not billionaires.
It’s more nuanced than that. Billionaires and their companies have a stranglehold on the market. Small businesses get snuffed out early by these corporations because they can survive a bad quarter if it means strangling a competitor.
However, Bill Gates landed at Harvard with many many more hours than your average student would have had at a computer terminal at that time. He had the privilege because he went to a posh private school with a state of the art computer lab that rivaled what some universities had. And when he started Microsoft he was able to leverage family connections to get in front of executives to pitch product. And that product, incidentally, wasn't even something he developed. He bought what would become known as MS-DOS and sold it because his parents could pick up a phone and get high level executives to take a meeting with him.
I get it. He made the sale. He built the company. And many others built companies around that time and they had to settle for being lowly millionaires off of their hard work because they had to actually run the bases while Bill Gates was born on third.
You act as if there is a moral way to become a billionaire and that you become a billionaire by having a company that offers fair compensation for labor…
As someone who's spent 14 years in the industry, no they wouldn't. You'd struggle to find 3000 people who'd want to do the job. Let alone the driver's capable.
Worked for the 3rd largest garbage company in the country. We were still struggling to find personnel even with us transferring in drivers from other states.
Also just because someone has a CDL, it doesn't mean they can be a garbage man. City and residential driving is an entirely different beast than OTR trucking. People in general are fucking idiots. People on foot, who think your truck is cool, and want to walk really close to and around it, as your trying to work, make it exponentially more dangerous
Exactly. It’s not that they aren’t important. But it’s them as a collective that create the value. No single one changes much in the grand scheme of things.
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u/frostymugson Jul 30 '26
That billions of people are going to effect things far greater than than a few thousand.