Combined assets of $14.2tn are more than the GDP of every country except China and the US
Archived version: https://archive.ph/o2gaB
amazing is not the word I would have used
When was the last good year for poor people? Anyone? Bueller?
Probably 2020 and 2021 when we were excused from paying rent for awhile, and $1,000 magically appeared in our bank accounts a few times.
A lot of the world was jobless, rent became debt and lost a lot of family members. For me all of those along with getting depressed and still unable to recover to my normal appetite.
2020 was the best year of my life.
The last time was probably the Neolithic Revolution
Before it.
Agriculture actually made people’s lives much worse in many regards. Worse diet, women turned into commodities, shorter life spans due to increased infectious diseases, much less free time due to having to put more effort into getting food (somewhat surprisingly hunter-gatherers have way more free time) etc. It’s been great for rulers and population growth though. If anything, poor people were invented in the Neolithic Revolution
edit: see eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253633/, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm
post-depression new deal stuff was pretty good? right? the wealth made more sense from there until it was gutted in the 80s
70s recession based on skyrocketing oil prices because of fighting in the middle east is what made the 80s the way it was. Everyone got uncomfortable and upset that it wasn’t all perfect and started fighting to screw over everyone else to make their life better and it worked. The lead fumes also at that point likely didn’t help but yeah the 80s was just the time of action from people disliking the 70s that sent us on this slow painful crawl towards a failing economic system with a couple stops on the way to make it worse to keep the machine chugging along.
Isn’t it the “poor” people paying to see/hear TS?
Every year is an amazing year for rich people.
Yeah what’s better for them now?
An amazing year for rich people.
Nice to see them get something, just 225 years in a row.
Way longer than that. Really they had lost ground and wanted their slaves back but they’re trying to turn us all into slaves.
For sure. WW2 really shows the system for what it is now.
An utterly insane number of men were fighting or part of the logistics in WW2. It really was a crazy percentage of them. China was in full civil war and India sent huge numbers to fight also.
The rest, including vast numbers of women, were producing the tank, ships, ammunition etc. Needed for the war. Its estimated that around 4 tonnes of ammunition was expensed for every soldier killed. It really can’t be understated just how much production, from so many people, went into maintaining that global war.
Yet, despite this, there was more than enough food for everyone. The only outliers were due to incompetence and callousness by the UK in India and Germany trying to starve the UK. However, of course, these were preventable one way or another.
The only thing we lost was the ultra wealthy.
The period just after WW2 saw a historic level of equality that we will likely never see again. This, to me, clearly shows that we don’t all work as much as we do for the benefit of our community or anything like that. Its solely for the enrichment of the ultra wealthy, who then use their wealth to extract yet more wealth at ever greater rates.
The answer has and always will be the strategic refusal of work, outside of what is needed to maintain society. Its why we live in an employment based, market fundamentalist society. Its so the idea of doing anything like that seems like dangerous fundamentalism. But we have to ask ourselves, in what kind of a world is not spending 80% of your adult awake time working, mostly for other peoples benefit, producing the very power used to force this on us, thats killing our planets ability to sustain life, that works us all into an early grave, viewed as extremism?
It can’t be a very good or rational one and certainly not one worth defending.
There was a reason I picked that number. I see we have a 🤑 emoji but not one for guillotines.
🇫🇷 will have to do.
You know what would be great? A good year for everyone who is not filthy rich.
I promise I’m not a swifter or whatever they’re called, but “at least” Taylor has to “work” for it, if a major part of it comes from selling and performing songs? right?
Like I agree “billionaires shouldnt exist” - but she’s not high on my list of cruel offenders.
There’s no ethical way to become or stay a billionaire. Swift is among the best of the worst, and typically uses her spotlight to spread a positive message, but that doesn’t undue the unfathomably selfish lifestyle she lives.
So, while significantly less evil than other billionaires, she’s still a billionaire, and thus evil.
significantly less evil than other billionaires
How so? Genuine question.
It’s the messaging. She has a ridiculous amount of fame, and uses that spotlight to encourage others to do good - and her fans do listen.
Most billionaires live that unfathomably selfish lifestyle while overtly giving society the finger.
Don’t get me wrong - that whole spectrum is a subset of evil, but even it has its degrees of better vs worse.
She just says nice things? That’s it? I’m completely ignorant on celebrities or pop music. I find that WP has a page on the “Political impact of Taylor Swift”
It sounds she is no different from a corporation putting a rainbow flag to their logo for pride month. I mean, it’s something. One shouldn’t be too cynical. But it’s also kinda normal.
She’s donated quite a lot:
Now to be completely honest, with all her insane wealth, the amount she gives is proportionally very very little. But at least she does something, I guess?
Not that I’m defending the multi-billionaire.
saying “not that I’m defending a billionaire” while defending a billion doesn’t make you not defend them. she didn’t just donate very very little. she donates almost nothing of her wealth every time regardless of whether it’s a single person or the whole cause. she donates enough to make the news and no more.
Yup, that’s pretty much it, that’s how low the bar is for other billionaires. That’s all it takes to make her “the best of a very bad bunch”
Surely that is not ALL she does to get that amount of money. I’d assume she has it invested like any other rich person, stock market, real estate, tax evasion, all the trimmings. Just because she maybe does “less” of it, does not make her a good person.
you think she became a billionaire with just her music? her entire person is a corporation these days. there are many stakeholders that are not Taylor Swift with money in this game. every billionaire worked for it. the asshole part isn’t that they didn’t work for their money; it’s the fact they hoard this wealth without legitimate, worthwhile return to general society aside from they taxes they actively avoid paying.
Her shows are actually an insane amount of work, and it’s obvious when you watch them. My wife is a huge fan, myself not so much, but I can at least admit that her talent is undeniable.
She does 3-hour shows Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, then does it again the next week, and she’s been doing that for over a year. It’s honestly nuts.
And even between all those shows, she’s releasing a new album. If anyone actually works for her wealth, it’s Swift.
Hard disagree. She’s worth something but it ain’t billions.
No one should be worth billions. :(
Where’s my billion dollars for working a normal amount of hours?
Yeah, no one should be a billionaire but she is putting in some work. I could not do what she does and I respect her for it, even if I categorically disagree with the concept of someone accumulating that much proportional wealth.
And so it goes. People hate the big picture but every detail is fine. The mosaic won’t change while you keep every stone in place.
That “eat the rich” thing is taking permenent residence in my thoughts. Thought virus’s, eh.
You know how the right hates Taylor Swift? Perhaps this is the news that we can use to finally get them to agree to tax the rich.
No, because they don’t think along class lines but along identity lines.
As is intended. Can’t have all the proletariat on the same page
And not a single one doing anything that would benefit society with that wealth.
Memo: when people say “it’s not a zero sum game” they’re not talking about finite resource situations, which actually are that.
Good for them, but I’m here having an awful time
Nah f them
My good for them probably needed /s after it
That money will just become an arbitrary number. They’ll look back on this in about 20 years thinking what a funny thing, people thought a number on a computer screen meant something. If you can’t turn your money into something with fundamental value then what is it anyway?
20 years is extremely optimistic.
With hard work and hungry stomachs we can decrease that number!
Cool cool cool
Everyone else will just burn up
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