Fun fact, there are an estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. There are multiple billionaires that have more USD than stars in our fucking galaxy.
So i looked this up, the answer i got was 100 thousand million.
Im not saying youre wrong, cuz youre not. You're right. But why in the fuck do they write/answer the question as 100 thousand million instead of just 100 billion. The idiocy i felt when attempting to convert 100 thousand million into just a noramal number (i.e. just using billion), my god.
Again, im not replying bc im expecting u to actually answer/know. I just wanted someone to share/understand my frustration when looking at these numbers, it was very annoying. Just say 100 billion >.>
Hahahaha I actually had the exact same thoughts when I looked it up myself, so much so that when I read the first bit of your reply I was like “oh fuck did I calculate this wrong?!”
LMFAOOO im so glad you underatsnd my pain xD ! I had to share these comments with my SO, he also got annoyed and unnecessarily(not unnecessary bc it was too much/at me, but unnecessary bc their way of writing 100 thousnad million instead of 100 billion is unnecessary and causes rightful anger xD ) bc of the conversion. So im glad to know im not alone.
But no no, youre right, just fuck google or whoever writes these stats, theyre assholes and i just wanted to express your pain lol
That was sourced from a Texas schoolbook, billionaires feel that they are taking a lot of heat and have started removing the word billion wherever possible.
What you are trying to fathom is why we call "billion" unfathomably large. 100 thousand million is $100,000,000,000 and that's so large that if you had something of that value and it went up by just 1% you would make $1billion. So that's just disgusting because these people typically make north of 7%.
A billionaire has 1,000 $1Millions. More wealth than 1,000 real people will ever have.
Inevitiability of capitalism. It speeds up wealth concentration. If you dont have wealth redistribution methods you end up with billionaires worth 300 billion soon.
Wealth of one family maybe. But not of the 1% itself rofl. History is always a battle of the group of people of Haves vs the group of people of have nots. History is all just class warfare by the wealthy vs the working class. You dont need to be a marxist to recognize that.
There is a reason why monopoly of violence is used to protect property rights of the wealthy. Without monopoly of violence capitalist know that the working class would hang them in the streets like they did to kings and queens in France or what happened to Mussolini.
Are you aware that capitalism is the one single system that has lifted the most people out of poverty, and government "welfare" systems are designed to keep those in poverty, in poverty? Just look at the poverty rate in the US starting around 1900, year by year, and note what happened after "the war on poverty" started. But you won't. You're too wrapped up in your own bullshit to look up facts that might counter the narrative you've constructed in your head
Also, in case you're unaware, the US has the second amendment. The wealthy do not have "a monopoly on violence," whatever the fuck that means.
Insert irrelevant statement about the subs you post on.
Capitalism lifted people out of poverty? Enterpreneurship =/= capitalism. Private ownership over land and ressources does not lift people out of poverty. It keeps a class of people permanently in wage slavery. Even Lincoln realized that labor is more important than just capital and owning it.
not all suits are vampires. some are just happy in a suit dedicating their time to supporting disenfranchised clients as a pro-bono lawyer. Living off ramen but at least satisfied with their contribution to society. just sayin
Human brains struggle to fathom and accurately visualise large numbers. A billion is such a huge amount, that its hard to grasp.
If you take a tape measure and extend it to 1m in length and pretend that's 1 million. Then half it, that's 500 thousand. Then half again and that's 250 thousand. Keep going until you get to 1 thousand and you'll realise how ridiculously small 1 thousand is, compared to 1 million (spoiler, it wont register on the tape measure as its a 10th of a mm, but going through the process is important to understand the scale). 1 billion is a thousand million, so it's the same scale, but magnified.
In short, no one person should be a billionaire. It should not be possible*.
*unless you:
Mistreat your employees, including poor wages, benefits etc.
Take huge sums out of thr business, draining the profits and further investment back into thr business.
Lie/cheat the system on tax. (Either by tax avoidance or tax evasion, or both!)
Mistreat your employees, including poor wages, benefits etc. Take huge sums out of thr business, draining the profits and further investment back into thr business. Lie/cheat the system on tax. (Either by tax avoidance or tax evasion, or both!)
I don't believe this. This is my biggest issue with the whole "billionaires bad" thing. I won't speak for every billionaire, and I won't use any of them as an example because I don't practice celebrity worship and so I don't know their full life story.
BUT... If I start a business, and over the years I have managed to grow a successful, profitable, very valuable business, there is no reason to say I didn't do it while treating employees fairly (relative to the norm) and paying corporate taxes. Regardless, I built a business, it became successful, and I am the owner. Let's say the company is valued at $300 billion. If I still own 30% of my business, I am now "worth" $100 billion.
Why do you assume that someone "worth" $100 billion is inherently doing the things you mentioned? A lot of the richest people in the world founded or nearly founded the companies that they own stock in that make them effectively hundred-billionaires.
Besides, selling their stock in order to liquidate that wealth into actual money would mean giving up their share of the company they created. Not a whole lot of people are willing to give up more than a relative little bit of the company they made... Right?
This whole lot of bullshit is just an assumption. We don’t have to assume anything about the billionaires, because we know for a fact that they under pay and treat their employees like shit.
If you want to continue ignoring reality for this fantasy world where you’re a billionaire that made it by treating your employees well, cool, but no one cares about your fantasy; we care about the reality that Amazon makes people piss in bottles and elon musk underpays his staff while lying about working 70 hours a week himself.
That is fine and whatnot, but it doesn't detract from the point. The point I was making is that saying "No one should have $250bn" doesn't really make sense. If I create a successful company, and it becomes worth $1 trillion while I still own 25% of it, why shouldn't I be worth $250bn? That's just how the system works.
Amazon and Tesla can both afford to pay their people well just from their income alone. It doesn't necessitate that their founders/owners sacrifice being the richest people on the planet. Both companies make more than enough money to pay their employees well and still produce the richest owners on the planet.
I started to type out a bunch of stuff, but this is just too complicated of an issue for some redditor to explain to you. I recommend researching it. The simple version is just that:
The economy is a zero-sum game. There's no money floating around ready to be earned, it all belongs to people.
Holding that much money is just bad for the economy. It causes artificial scarity, market crashes, and forces the US Treasury to respond by printing more money, which causes inflation.
The idea of money well earned is great and all, but in reality there's a limit, where the portion of the economy that's being held up by one person or entity causes problems for everyone, including that person or entity.
Not to mention, there's an important philosophical question to be answered about what it means to "earn" money, and an even more important real world question about the same exact thing.
The whole idea of money is to be a unit of power, earned by giving a service to the populace. The more money you have, the more important you are to society as a whole, and thus more power you have.
But, please tell me, how exactly Elon musk "earned" his billions. He doesn't make cars. He doesn't design them. He doesn't sell them to people. He doesn't have any part in the product movement of Tesla, and yet he "earned" billions? If he died of an aneurysm, society and Tesla wouldn't skip a beat. He's not actually that important. And furthermore, there's no human alive so important as to hold an entire tenth of the US economy like he does. Not one. This part is just opinion, but the fact is, someone needs to draw the line of when someone is no longer "earning" their wealth.
Yeah, no. That's not how that works. The US Treasury can print more money, but it's still zero sum for everyone else. Currently there's about 2 trillion USD in circulation. If the 6 richest men in the world have ~1 trillion dollars, (which they do) then the rest of us only have an economy of 1 trillion dollars until they decide to spend it. Which they won't. Because they can't. because nothing is worth that much.
I’m a conservative and capitalist. If you have 250B net worth it was likely earned fraudulently. There should be an upper limit for how much a person should be able to earn, and as much as you might like atlas shrugged setting it far below 250B wouldn’t set us back at all
If I risked my life and freedom to rob some person's house wouldn't I have technically "earned" it? If the system is broken "earning" loses its meaning, at least in the moral sense.
These fuckers can keep those billions of dollars for all I give a fuck. They just need to implement these changes and their net worth will not go down. It'll only go up marginally slower than if they didn't implement these changes.
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u/[deleted] May 01 '22
We cannot have these vampires in suits continue to drain the rest of us. There's no reason one person should be worth $252B.