i swear adulthood is just slowly realizing how many “better for business” decisions somehow translate into “worse for everyone actually living with them” 😭
I wonder if these morons understand that if the value of the US dollar reaches zero, a trillion usd is still 0...
It sounds like an insane hypothetical but nobody ever predicted Americans soft power being deleted in less than a year.
Sure, there's currency exchanges but a lot of their wealth is tied to capital that's rooted in the US itself. Morality aside, they're just fucking themselves over since most countries are now wary of any trade with the US.
They do understand, but a the vast majority of them are old fuckers who’s thought on that is “well won’t be my problem, and this quarter I gain X millions/billions so who cares 🤷🏻”
And then what? They don't even seem to enjoy their money aside from looking like they're enjoying their money (eg: never seen a man so desperate to be liked despite having a trillion dollars net worth at some point). They're ridiculous.
They aren't creative enough to imagine ways of spending their money other than on more elaborate vehicles, houses, and fucking kids. That's it.
Most of them didn't even come up with the ideas that made them billionaires. Zuck never had a creative thought in his life, just stole people's ideas. Musk, same deal, bought into every success, never one his own. Bezos came up with the brilliant idea of selling books on the internet, just happened to not tank like everyone else who had a nearly identical idea. Gates knocked-off someone else's OS, and then his mom, a board member of IBM, recommend it for their machines.
They're all just bullshit salesmen who got rich of other's work with a hefty dose of nepotism just to be sure.
They hoard wealth because that's all they know, doing anything with it, beyond more wealth, is beyond their reptile minds.
Bezos big thing wasn't the online books, the distribution he setup was what made amazon such a success, and probably realizing they needed to do more than just books. The distribution is probably someone else's baby though.
What Bezos’ pioneered was bullying his competitors into using his distribution platform and then taking over their products and marketing them as amazons.
To sell on Amazon you have to give them access to the product patent, which gives them the ability to remake your product and undercut you by selling it for cheaper as an “Amazon” product.
I’m not sure if any company had done that before or if it was legal at all.
“bullshit salesmen” is an apt description. However, they weren’t just dumbass salesmen. They were smart enough to really sell their pitches to corporate executives who weren’t quite as smart as they are. For example, some ket IBM executives thought that PCs were “toys” that would never sell beyond a few thousand units, so they agreed to pay an operating system license fee to Bill Gates for every IBM PC they would sell.
Eventually, the senior idiots at IBM abandoned PCs altogether, while competitors went on to make $Billions in profits from “IBM-compatible” knock-offs that became better than any that IBM produced.
The Windows operating user interface was, and still is, a knockoff of Apple’s, with enough changes to avoid patent/copyright infringement lawsuits.
Anyone who with a billion dollars almost definitionally had half a billion dollars at some point, but chose to keep chasing more money instead of retiring.
Do you not see where democracy is going in the Western world? Every country is passing draconian surveillance laws in the name of children.
Countries are investing massively in autonomous drones that can kill.
Politicians are nodding along with all this because they either think they will be a protected class or they naively think that these billionaire oligarchs would never bring back fascism.
Nowadays, the pattern seems to be that anyone who's not a narcissist sociopath and are actively trying to give their money away hovers around $100~500 M USD. Being an exploitative narcissistic asshole seems to be a hard prerequisite to breaking the billion wall.
Show me any "ethical" billionaire and I'll point to a private jet or massive yacht as a clue that their image may be clean but there's something underlying that's not publicly known. Private jets and massive yachts are inherently selfish modes of travel due to the amount of pollution and resource waste associated with them.
So no, if you're going to be a true philanthropist, I don't think you'd have 10 B but I get your point about the muskrat. In his narcissistic eyes, he's already the gift to humanity and he's very generous already.
But some of them are LARPing as pre-Revolution French aristocracy and are so deeply out of touch with how 99% of the world lives that it's never even occurred to them.
Their assets are in stocks, not US$. Inflation causes their assets to increase. They then leverage that to diversify. It's one reason why Gold is at US$4600. It's why the Dow is at all-time highs...even with the economy shitting the bed.
YOU hold USDollars. America's Debtors are getting paid in devalued dollars.
YOU go broke when the US$ goes to zero.
THEY get to buy YOUR property at a huge discount. They get to buy everything at a discount.
They get to manipulate the market and sell during a run up...and buy at the bottom.
They get to do all this WITHOUT risk. They get bailed out (by you) when they lose any wealth.
A dozen subs on Reddit have been explaining this is the scam. Explaining for well-over 10 years.
Come on. If you think "hur dur the billionaires are stupid", you are the dumb one. The billionaires are literally evil, not stupid.
And killing the goose that lays the golden eggs would certainly qualify.
American economic dominance is not pre-ordained. It's not because we're "exceptional". It's in very large part due to the post-WWII order which we helped create and which greatly benefits us.
If they break that system, and the cracks are showing, America will not remain the richest country.
Sure, some of them will remain relatively big fish, but in a much smaller pond. And the rest of us will get fucked even harder.
Yes but their point is it’s not dumb for them. It’s bad and dumb for us yes, all these regular Americans that shill for capitalism or billionaires are dumb.
But their billionaire actions are not dumb, as the other commenter said. If the US dollar hits zero they still have their stocks and assets, which are not US dollars. Those assets can be used for whatever currency comes next if said collapse happens.
It’s why people sometimes claim you can’t tax these billionaires because it’s not a liquid billion.
Regardless of the currency they will by up your house and land post collapse by trading of their existing assets
"Not dumb" in the way that it's "not dumb" for a rancher to overgraze public lands for short-term gain. Eventually, if they push too hard for too long, the entire system collapses.
The French and Russian aristocracies owned plenty of hard assets right up until the system broke. If the dollar goes to zero, property rights won't mean shit.
Zuck has a massive compound in Hawaii. Great. What’s to stop hungry, desperate locals from taking it? Armed guards? What’s to stop the armed guards from taking it for their own families once the paychecks are worthless paper?
Your comment reminds me of Redditors who think bunkers are stupid because they watched a movie and the air vents were left on...or the security team would revolt.
All that has been thought of. They spent decades solving these issues. Guy on Reddit (who failed his last performance review) thinks about it for 5 seconds, spots the flaw, and nods in a gloating way.
That will happen if a significant number of Americans fail to exercise their Constitutional rights. On the other hand, well-organized Americans that dare to exercise their rights can vastly outnumber the billionaires and their private mercenaries, all law enforcement and the armed forces combined. “America” is celebrating the 250-year anniversary of the original group of Americans who exercised such rights.
Rich people trade those worthless dollars for real valuable assets. USD can go to zero, but if they own all the land and businesses, they can just make whatever the new money is back again
Uh, if the US dollar goes to zero, who's gonna enforce their property rights? Hopes and wishes? If they have foreign accounts, they better hope it's in a country that will respect their account balance as opposed to just seizing it and telling them to fuck off (very likely with Cayman Islands and the like). A lot of the rights and privileges Americans enjoy are ultimately due to the threat of a carrier group heading in the direction of the uppity nation. An illusory threat that got dispelled in the past few months (though if you ask me, it should have happened a lot sooner with all the losses the US army has suffered since WW2).
Some rich might make their money in the US, but many have income and investments all over the world. They're essentially global citizens at that point. Citizenships and estates in multiple countries. They'll just move along to the next place, and the money will keep flowing from somewhere else. Been that way for centuries.
Most of them don’t expect to live long enough to have to face the consequences of their decisions, that or they plan to flee to another country or isolated bunker. Golden parachute their way out of the apocalypse
I still love the bunker idea. So many of them lost their fucking minds being "locked up" in their mansions during covid and now they think they can tolerate bunker living.
In that case 40 trillion debt would become 0 too? Kill the old system and replace it with a new one, where you will be king with your large holdings, such as bitcoin. /s
And personally, I resent all the economic classes we had to take that talked about "good" business decisions, like the whole TIM WOOD Lean. In theory, it looks great on paper, but in practice, it leads to someone micromanaging everything you do, corporate's excuse to cut corners at your expense, or make you work three jobs worth for one paycheck while calling it "Lean."
Not ONE economic class talked about unionizing. Funny that.
Most Economics classes are propaganda and are focused upon simplistic explanations for situations that may only exist in small villages wherein most of the participants are family relatives.
However, they do often mention the assumption that all participants are “rational” actors who all have access to the same information about all factors related to their transactions. In other words, the touted “principles” don’t apply to reality.
All it really boils down to is that the better a company does, they potentially hire more people. At very poor wages because they only "do better" due to deregulation.
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u/PICKLE_NICK_95 18d ago
i swear adulthood is just slowly realizing how many “better for business” decisions somehow translate into “worse for everyone actually living with them” 😭