• 3 Posts
  • 155 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle











  • Billionaire math

    Average USA billionaire has about $7b in wealth.

    2026 * 365 ‎ = 739,490

    $7,000,000,000 / 739,490‎ = $9,465.98

    You would need to make $9k per day, for 2026 years, to catch up to the average billionaire wealth right now.

    It’s estimated in 2026 that it would cost $37b to end world hunger until 2030.

    Also note that Musk, Bezos, and other extreme billionaires are up to 100x of the average here ($700b for Musk). Who is making $900k per day?

    This is not natural, it’s not rational, and it’s completely bullshit. You can come up with whatever distraction you want (“wealth & income aren’t the same”), but we should be taxing every dollar above $1b at 99% or higher.

    30 years * 365 day = 10,950

    $1,000,000,000 / 10,950 ‎ = $91,324.20

    I could easily live off of $91k per DAY for 30 YEARS.

    If you put these numbers against a human time scale we can understand, I don’t see the argument for this level of wealth, especially not as people go hungry, without clothes or food, and children die.




  • A lot of people are saying there isn’t a rights argument, which I think is true.

    Considering this through the lens of a video game, is it morally bad if I pay a hooker in GTA, use their services, and then kill them? I don’t think there is harm. I don’t think there are rights. It wouldn’t matter if everyone was cruel to GTA NPCs.

    Having said that, from a behavioral position, I don’t think it’s morally good. Put another way, this sort of behavior isn’t a good thing to emulate. I don’t think it’s a good idea to cultivate a habit of emulating cruelty.

    As others have said, there’s still the risk of AGI in the future as well.

    With where we are right now, I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I’m not interested in entertaining new slurs, fictional or real.


  • Maybe the largest difference for me is how the federated nature changes the social dynamics. For instance, people from Instance X don’t like those from Instance Y, or may even ban them.

    This was prevalent on Reddit, buuuut banning can be instance or node based compared to subreddit.

    I likely have some opinions or takes I wouldn’t post on lemmy.ml because lemmy.ml has a particular bent. I agree with a lot of it, but I wouldn’t want to offend with what doesn’t align or would get me banned. The ban cascades further out, and how servers interact as wholes with one another in terms of federation is similar.

    The social platform mechanics are also different. Upvote has a different impact compared to Reddit (I don’t fully remember the specifics). I think saving has its own relevancy or something?

    It’s mostly the same though.