this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59587 readers
2940 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Good luck, you are talking to people who think that if the billionaires passed out all their money to everyone, then we would all be able to afford way more stuff. They have no idea that more cash doesn't mean way more products appear. Supply and demand is such a simple concept, but to them, it might as well be rocket science.
Who's they? Are you schizophrenic?
Anti-rich/billionaire/capitalism agenda is quite widely subscribed to by a large amount of Lemmings
The same people that think energy use is a bad thing are the people that think that if we pass out all the billionaires money, then we can all have way more value. They are teenagers or people who never learned anything beyond what they teach in middle school. They think their gut instinct must be fact, so they spew it over and over. I'm sure you're not one of them.
The dude's tilting at windmills.
Imagine being so naive as to believe massive wealth hording deprived others! What turkeys! Amirite?
Imagine if you will that there are 5 items to be had, everyone wants them. Everyone except for the evil rich man has 10 tokens. The evil rich man has a billion tokens. Right now people are willing to sell an item for 4 tokens. One day the people kill the evil rich man and spread out all his money evenly. There's still 5 items! They just go up in price! The rich man's blood doesn't create more items! It isn't complicated. It's very simple.
Ok but the way I see it there are 100 people and 1000 tokens. Instead of every person getting 10 tokens, one guy has 998 tokens and everyone else argues over the remaining 2. Would killing the one rich guy not free up some tokens for the rest of us?
Yes, it frees up tokens, but it doesn't make there be more items. As a result, people pay more for the items that do exist. It is the same as people saying the government should print a bunch of money to end poverty. They have the machines. They just don't want us to have money, they could just print us all into being billionaires, and we could all live happily ever after!
I see what you're saying, the tokens represent access to a finite amount of resources and creating more tokens won't create more resources. I get that.
But if the problem isn't with the amount of resources but with their distribution, then redistributing the existing tokens out of the hands of the greedy hoarders must help the rest, mustn't it?
Edit: I can't believe I'm sitting here arguing with someone on the goddamn Internet. Must be out of my damn mind
Yeah, so if bezos is actually eating 50,000 peoples worth of food every day, then splitting up his money/food would make a whole lot more people be fed. He doesn't seem very fat to me, though. I do realise that he has a personal jet and uses lots of fuel and energy, much more that the average person. Guess who uses more energy/resources than him, though? The number of people born in a single hour. Those people far exceed his resource usage. So we could kill him and spread out all his money, but if there is really such an extreme shortage of resources, then this would be like throwing out a handful of water instead of plugging massive gushing leaks in the boat.
Now you imagine that the rich man undermined democracy and the rule of law, monopolized industries, and charged everyone 5 tokens a year for basic necessities.
I don’t think it’s everyone else who has a child’s understanding of economics.
And yet somehow despite all this, nearly everyone is living a much better standard of life than they would have 50 years ago, land we all far excited the kings of 200 years ago. We are rapidly progressing due to our extradoniary ability to work together. Complaining that this beautiful system of cooperation isn't working as fast as you imagine does nothing.
You’ve got to be dumber than dogshit to not realize that unregulated CAPITALISM empowers those with CAPITAL at the expense of those without it. That’s the whole fucking point. Your dumbass example ignores an entire academic discipline’s worth of understanding, backed by empirical observation. JFC.
What system ever worked better? What do you compare how good standard of living should be to? The past? Well guess what, we are all hell of better off than the wealthiest 100 years ago. Do you just imagine a much better world than we have now and decide that you have somehow developed a system to get there and not enough people want it? Wow, you must be a genius to have outsmarted everyone across all cultures!
I'm gunna guess no. You don't have an almighty better system, you've just fallen for the trap of thinking that nothing is connected. You think you can have all the benefits of systems you don't like while having none of the connected realities. You are like a child putting whiteout all over their homework to make there be no questions so they always get 100%. Eventually, you will grow, realise people are trying their hardest, we have ways to improve and we are working on them. What doesn't help is spoiled teenagers complaining that they have to do chores while saying their parents are mean because they won't always buy them every new video game. Burning everything down that gave you everything you live won't help. Ever.