It's all about the pathetic rationalization we have placed on greed and profit. We can make millions redundant with AI and still have a social safety net that keeps society stable and healthy.
But no, that wouldn't be "fair" to the people who generate millions of net worth every 5 minute.
Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. While US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. The number of billionaires has surpassed 3,000 for the first time, and the level of billionaire wealth is now higher than at any time in history. Meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich
And I believe this is useful and thought-provoking reading in this context of how unbridled Capitalism is exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots.
Wage slavery: The illusion of freedom: Exploitation Under Capitalism: Marx’s Analysis of Labor and Profit:
And no, the solution to the problems are not blind unchecked communism (which itself leads to fascism), but perhaps some more ethical & humane methods are needed for an overhaul of world society, and economic & geopolitical regimes.
If you could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire in the country, and sell all of them for market rate without putting any downward pressure on prices at all, that sum would not fund 10 months of the federal government's current spending levels, and even less if you wanted new programs.
If you cured 100% of all cancer it would only reduce US deaths by 20%. Clearly we should conclude that cancer isn't a problem and isn't worth curing, and also that heart disease and unintentional injuries and so on are also not problems and also not worth trying to fix.
They invented a dumb fix and complained that it wasn't good. Or, since we're being artistic in this thread: pulled a straw man out of their ass and complained that it smelled foul.
I did the same with cancer/mortality to demonstrate the same trick in a setting where its flaws were more obvious. It's true that I said the quiet part out loud in a way that the post I was mocking did not, but the quiet part is especially important to debunk so I make no apology for doing so.
You could make 900 people go from billionaires to high net worth individuals and nearly fund the exorbitant spending of the US government that directly supports 330 million people for a year.
I think you might be overselling how good that is.
Once we did that we'd have a lot less personal influence over that spending budget, at least.
But focusing on current assets and not accumulation of wealth is misleading. You'd also have to allocate the ongoing wealth accumulation to get a better sense of things.
Trump has added 2 trillion (unilaterally and illegally) to the debt with today's Supreme Court decision, while giving huge tax breaks to the wealthy.
The Republican policy for 40 years had been to create unsustainable and unworkable Federal government funding/spending instead of to work to creating a working, fiscally sane Federal government. It's hard to build a working government in a two party system when one side is malicious/duplicitous.
While ICE is the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the entire country now, their budget is still really just a drop in the bucket, and wouldn't make a meaningful difference in the fiscal picture. In fact, you could not only defund ICE, but the entire US armed forces, and that still wouldn't even eliminate the deficit - we'd still need to borrow over a trillion dollars a year.
That said, I'm all for the peaceful, lawful, orderly dissolution of as many federal government agencies as we can agree on dissolving. My preference would be "all of them", but I have no problem starting with ICE and revisiting the rest later :)
There is an issue with these folks though. They quite often are hyper-gatekeepers because of their own insecurity about not being "legit." They tend to be over-critical and thus quite tedious (& socially precarious) to talk to.
The "making one of the unique alien main characters look more human to be a better sell as a love interest to the audience" part is unfortunately ever present though. Then again, they already went in that direction between the pilot and the first episode.
In the 90s the same people who today refuse to admit the Mayans were, on the whole, less advanced than the Romans were 100%, absolutely, no-contest foaming at the mouth to lynch Samuel Huntington for being an unrepentant racist, I mean, for releasing "Clash of Civilizations"
Being told you no longer have the ability to provide for yourself is also violence, especially when the onus on finding a new means of provision is 100% up to you.
Clearly. And it’s also the 100 percent predictable outcome of every single employment situation. Employment is a stopgap measure on the road to something more stable.
Reaching high enough salaries so that you can coast 4-5 years between jobs is also an option, but at that point it’s not regular employment in any sense of the word, when your lawyer is drawing up your severance package.
