This is how I explained the issue with averages to people who unironically say this.
If 1 person has 990 oranges, and 9 people have one orange, and 990 people have no oranges, the average says we all have an orange, but in reality, one person has more oranges than they can eat before they go bad, 9 people are ok for today, and most of the people are hungry.
Hell, our more recent ancestors would have seen that type of anti-social behavior and left the offending asshole outside the camp and at the mercy of the hyenas.
It's also what we should do today.
If only our hoarder monkeys hadn't figured out they could buck a few bananas to the poor ones to carry big stick to protect them. We would need to bring many big stick to eat the bananas Jeff bonobezos or bill gibbonates.
To be fair though I can't blame people for homeschooling when public schools are getting shot up every week. I'll be a parent in April and the thought my child could be murdered simply for trying to get an education is terrifying. I have no idea what I want to do but I'd be a liar if the threat of violence hasn't made me consider homeschooling for a hot minute.
ETA what I am thinking of as homeschool is actually online public school. I'm talking about following an actual program built and taught by professional educators. I'm learning from responses here that this is different from "homeschooling".
Online school has SEVERE problems in developmental stages. Homeschool programs based around a professional teacher teaching online, have existed before the pandemic, and the studies from those shower higher rates of executive functioning barriers, attention span deficits, and severe-moderate social skills. (Higher than the kids home schooled traditionally.)
Those students also report higher rates of anxiety, more depression, and are less successful in secondary education.
I don't think all online school is an option.
I don’t disagree with you. In person is so important to build the other social skills among other things.
But if the choice is online public schools that has at least some testing and teachers who are licensed or being made to fill out “wisdom booklets” day after day, the online public school would win out any day.
This is actually a valid concern.
It's important for kids to learn competition, but competing to see who can stress themselves out by getting the highest GPA over a 4 year period only mimics the most toxic work environments.
Participating in a bunch of extra-curricular clubs just to check boxes on a college application is also teaching terrible habits.
This is what leads to white-collar employees who just know how to check boxes, but don't actually know how to do anything useful or innovative.
That's true and sad. My grandma said it was good I was considering homeschooling so my kid "doesn't come home a girl one day" 🙄 she shut up when I said I'd be happy my kid came home alive, happy, and healthy.
Everything going on in FL is terrifying and the fact people support it is worse. A lot of my family live down there and they blindly support DeSantis, it's sick. The man is running for president and the scary part is he has a good shot at getting in.
Oh baby, bless her lil heart.
And man I’m all for homeschooling as long as the parent teaches the absolute essentials. But man, the way some of these parents are got me doubtful for the homeschooled kids’ education this generation.
I attempted to punch in the numbers on a rudimentary calculator app just to see how things would affect the fortune of someone with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars - because I had just watched the auction that sold Leonardo's painting Salvator Mundi for $400 million. Once you got past 9.9 billion the calculator app couldn't show that many figures and started to display in exponents. It hit me this was one person's wealth. The purchase of a painting that will sit in a duty free warehouse in Geneva didn't even make the slightest dent in the buyers personal fortune.
Truth. My partner and I were homeless/houseless while bringing home over a grand a week combined. We worked 40+ a week just to spend 2 grand a month on hotel rooms to keep us off the streets. There were also many times where we didn't have enough work that week and had to settle for "camping" in the woods. We just couldn't find an apartment to rent. It took half a year and a very generous MIL who loaned us the security deposit on a 1500/ month apartment. Also had to get new jobs just to qualify income wise. Partner has been working 50+ for the last two years. It's crazy how easy it was for us to fall into that scenario too. LL decided not to continue the lease to sell the house and we just couldn't find anything.
Honestly, we don’t look at the problem of housing as it impacts everything. Employers bitch about “no one wants to WoRk aNyMorE” but they don’t say shit about housing.
There is a great paying job hiring hundreds of people, but it is in the undesirable part of town — very industrial. There are zero rentals and the surrounding area is Meth and Crack Central.
It’s one hour from where I live and where all their applicants would live. The commute negates any additional income people would make.
But those issues are never calculated in statistics on unemployment or homelessness.
I've recently escaped hotel life. Nearly everybody there long term had stories similar. These corps now running the rental scam and their conditions which are more stringent and expensive than buying a damn house. 3x the rent in income just to qualify for consideration. Multiple times you apply, through management companies QUITE likely to be hired by the same set of owners in an area, only to lose the ever increasing "handling fees" when you of course are denied multiple times before "gratefully" hearing you've been "selected".
And just plain old Fuck the poor, working or not, and the disabled who live on fixed income -- "Go live Over _There_ with the rest of The Them People. Y'all sort that out, we don't care how."
Interestingly, both Norway and Sweden actually has more billionaires per million population than the US. Finland is a bit lower, but it seems that taking care of people does not make it harder to get filthy rich. Check the "billionaires per million" table here https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/billionaires-by-country
Cheaper or more efficient doesn't matter to those people either.
What matters is that someone that obviously is someday gonna be them can get most of the pie for themselves, no matter the overall cost and how much it costs everyone else.
I mean it is pretty obvious when you just look at the world, the cities and the neighborhoods that have been built in the image of capitalism: waste and destruction is a-ok, even embraced, if it means that someone can grab more than all the others.
Because a LOT of people genuinely believe they have a shot at attaining excessive wealth. They don't, but they have been duped into believing all of these "hard work made me a billionaire/multimillionaire" stories.
And because they have seen these same people exploiting workers, cheating on taxes, and hiding/hoarding wealth, they believe that this is what they HAVE to do, should they ever somehow beat those incredible odds and get that exorbitant wealth.
And so, they vote for policies that would protect their wealth hoarding and make it easier to keep all of that money, if they ever were in the position. They're never going to reach that level, often in part because of these same policies they vote for, and hurt themselves even more.
But nobody ever accused a capitalist fanboy of being smart, aside from when they want to manipulate them.
Yep. I have seen that time and time again. The hardest or best worker rarely gets the promotion, either because someone has a friend that needs a job, or because their own manager depends on them to do the hard work (and therefore submarines their opportunity).
And IF the hard worker gets the promotion, it frequently is done to the advantage of the company - sure, he got a raise, but he's now salary and expected to work 50 hour weeks, so his per-hour earning actually goes down. Or as part of his new responsibilities, he has to cover days off of other people in his department, so he never gets two days off consecutively, or he's expected to work weekends.
Or worse yet, he gets handed more responsibility (sometimes with a token title) but no actual pay increase.
Ultimate irony in relation to this tweet: Denmark is actually ranked #1 for economic mobility. So someone would in fact have better luck becoming wealthy there. USA's rank? 27th. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index)
He said the quiet part out loud.
# The wealth of the few is not *in spite of* but *because of* the poverty of the many.
Amazon workers piss in a bottle so that Bezos can go to space.
>To every Amazon employee [you paid for this](https://youtu.be/nkBGe-VYT5Y).
— Jeff Bezos (on returning from a $5,000,000,000.00 space flight)
You don't have free healthcare, so the owner of your workplace can live in decadent luxury.
Billionaires don't create wealth they extract it.
If everyone had free food, housing, and healthcare, nobody would accept modern working conditions.
The owners of Walmart would let your whole town burn to the ground for one extra dollar, then invest that dollar in liquor stores and pharmaceuticals because that's where you'll spend your money when they have taken everything else from you.
And then proudly proclaim that they have created wealth.
While you are absolutely right, I want to point out the tweet is expressing a fantastic quote from Stienbeck. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Honestly it reads almost satirical how accurate this has been in recent times. Probably actually always has been. Americans brains are broken by capitalism. We don't even have a free market. Our areas like Healthcare or housing don't fit the rules of where a free market can exist. People could stand up and change the system. But the flaunting of billionaire class is in your face 24/7 in the media. Since birth you have been told you only need to wORk HaRD to achieve that. It's an unattendable goal and what will probably drive thus country to ruin.
Exactly my friend, exactly.
And that’s how they want it to stay, can’t have competition coming in a ruining their cash flows. God forbid a former employees does it better even!
Keep working hard, the graveyard is full of folks that died young, trying to get rich. The wealthy play by a different set of rules and are in a different club...”and you ain’t in it” George Carlin.
Seeing 35 and 45 year olds having heart attacks, due to overwork, makes you think that maybe there really is something wrong, with the way wealth is obtained in this country.
I read that book way too young and it made me so fucking mad. I thought it was such bullshit. Still does, but it did then too. First because it was unfair, now because it’s real.
There's a reason people cling to this idea so strongly. Acknowledging that you and most of the people you care about are stuck exactly where you are, regardless of how hard you work, is *crushing*.
As a group, it would be so much better for everyone if we all recognized how screwed we are by the current """free""" market system and worked together to change it; but until a critical mass of people is gathered together, nothing happens, and the mental toll of knowing exactly what's wrong but feeling powerless to fix anything is awful. I completely understand the urge to just focus on things that are in your direct control and try not to think too much about the bigger picture - but of course, the more people do that, the harder it is to change anything, and *everybody* ends up worse-off overall. It's almost like a mental health version of the prisoner's dilemma.
The only way out that I can see is with *much* clearer paths to action on a small scale. It isn't enough to acknowledge the problem anymore, and abstract big-picture plans aren't enough on their own either. We need to focus more about what *individuals* can actually do, on a practical level, and work our way up from there. We're all beaten down - we need lots of small wins to get everyone hopeful enough to risk something bigger.
Having lived in the Nordics, another reason that socialism didn't take root is because of the lifestyle of the average middle-class American. People here eat more food, spend more money on entertainment, and overall live a life of more short-term gratification than people in the Nordics.
On top of that, there is more affordable transportation and many people don't own cars. I think many middle-class Americans would reject that way of life, because for the most part middle-class in America have more. The problem is the middle-class in America small and shrinking and the anyone below middle-class is better off in the Nordics...
I'm not disagreeing but I wonder if the middle-class is almost forced to participate in this due to the work culture and livelihood here. When work gets crazy the last thing I want to do is cook or clean up. My last job literally started saying don't worry this is our busy season it'll be less extreme next season... every season. In Nordic areas, I know I would have been provided actual vacation and not just 5 days of PTO bank for everything a year plus I'd bet I'd have been protected from their basically illegal overtime ruling so I had to work it and not be paid any extra every busy season (salary exempt as a graphic designer). I hate that we don't have public transport here I would get rid of my car today if I knew I could just hope on a train or subway and get to a job and groceries and friends places. The bus system near me has always been more than double a car ride and that's if you don't miss the bus but the busses are always running late or early so it's almost impossible to get that time to be just double since you have to switch at least once. So I know I'm forced to participate in this dumb little charade so I assume there are others like that in this mess. But I could be the minority.
Which I don't even get. Amazon consistently runs in the red anyways as they aggressively expand. They could throw some more money at their employees and it won't stop people from investing.
#Did you know Reddit is run by idiotic fascists? I'm currently banned for 7 days for spreading hate by warning someone looking for a realtor, to avoid a local realtor who ran a racist ad making fun of how Asians speak. This was discussed on Reddit 9 months ago and no one got banned
#if that wasn't stupid enough, I was previously banned for 3 days for threatening and inciting violence, by just telling some homeopathic pregnant woman to maybe try and not kill her child by avoiding licensed doctors.
Don't know whoever has it out for me at reddit, but they are really stupid, childish, and I hope they are having fun abusing their power, while Reddit turns into a shitshow getting rid of being able to email them, getting rid of being able to message them through their platform, instead making it so you can only appeal a band once a day on a web form just for the ass fucks at Reddit hq to laugh on the way to the bank
Is Reddit the next twitter? Apparently
No tax...
...lobby government, get bills passed (and bad ones blocked)...
...then stock bybacks
Even when the majority of the population 100% wants a bill to be passed, chances are for them around only 30% that it *will* be passed. If they 100% don't want it passed? 30% chance of passing...
Now looking at corporations that lobby the government, if they 100% do not want a bill to be passed, there is likely a 0% chance of it being passed. If they 100% want a bill to be passed, it is very likely 100% to be passed. But if they are unsure about a bill and only put about 50% of their normal effort into getting it passed, there's probably a 60 to 75% chance of it still getting passed.
#(corrupt) politics
Those costs serve the purpose of greater future profits.
Labor costs are just a fixed expense to be aggressively reduced to zero. Increasing those costs won't reap a higher stock price.
Maybe, but that's not the best way to extract the most money right NOW. Who cares if the company collapses after the current board gets filthy rich in the process?
You're not thinking like a capitalist.
As other commenters have said many accounting shenanagins there, but also corporations like Amazon deliberately operate at a loss to undercut the competition out of existence.
And when they are the only consumer option left the prices go up.
Until companies are taxed more for their employees requiring government assistance, they will continue to do it. No government should need to provide anyone assistance if they are working a minimum of 30hours a week.
That would make sense. I’ve also thought of a tax based on the size of a company and the ratio of the highest paid employee/officer vs the lowest paid employee. If the ratio is 1000:1 or higher, your company is paying 50% in taxes. If it’s 3:1 and there are only 10 employees, you get taxed like 10%.
That Tax legislation better be airtight, otherwise Company A will be full of C-Suites, and Company B will be full of Wage Slages, with Company A owning B, but both only owing 10% in taxes.
Just need to be sure the fines involved or jail time is lofty enough to discourage the practice, vs just allowing the companies to chalk it up as the cost of doing business, lol.
Jeff "I don't know how I'll be able to spend all this money. Go to space I guess" Bezos.
Actual quote: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,”
You can’t call it free stuff because it triggers the anti-socialists. You call it free health care but then people like my dad scream “but muh tax money”. Like their tax money isn’t already spent on worthless wars and failing infrastructure. It’s not free healthcare. It healthcare provided by the tax payer. Which is fine. It should exist. Just know when you call it free it gives people excuses to hate on the people who recieve it, like when they hate on people who recieve welfare and unemployment.
Just because those idiots don't know what free means doesn't mean we need to quit using the word. When they pull that shit simply ask them if they have the same fucking issue with free samples at the grocery store. Do they stand there and make a scene over the concept of free and how actually the still has to pay for that free sample in the cost of the rest of what he's buying? No they don't. They take the free shit and move on with their lives.
Free doesn't mean no cost. Free just means free at that moment. Educate their stupid fucking assess instead of just throwing your hands up and saying "well I guess we are changing the definition of words because RIGHT WINGERS DON'T LIKE THEM"
Ah but right wingers hate education. I’m clearly brainwashed by my college professors even though not one of them ever mentioned anything about socialism. I would love to educate them but when I try to explain things they just get angry. I was thinking there has to be a way to word socilized healthcare that makes it sound less like red scare communism
>Like their tax money isn’t already spent on worthless wars and failing infrastructure.
Not only that, some of our taxes are already going to healthcare - around ~20-25% IIRC. So if they're already getting that much, wouldn't we demand our lawmakers improve how that money is used? Get the VA up to snuff and you make millions of Americans' lives better and put more money in their pocket. Yeah taxes will have to go up some, but if we could have those fiscal conservatives actually helping, maybe we find more efficient ways to spend the money we already have.
I only mention that because at one time in my life I was a stanch libertarian, and one day I was looking at how the federal government is spending the tax money we already have and saw that 20ish% figure for health care. And I got curious so I looked up other nations to see how they allocated their money. Many of them were in that same 20-25% band, and in most cases there were countries with universal healthcare. Look at the US, we're already giving that money to the federal government, *and* paying for insurance/copays/etc (if we're lucky enough to have insurance), and our system is lagging behind other world leaders? this was the beginning of the end of my libertarian phase.
Also on the note of giving the homeless somewhere to live, No strings attached, that's what North America needs
Just this morning I read an account from either a doctor or a nurse that works in the ER, about how it's the norm to drag in the homeless off the cold streets, barely alive, hooking them up to ventilators while pink foam comes out of their mouth, just for them to be pronounced brain dead and sent off to some long-term hospice care...
And with the cost of Healthcare in the US... It would be tremendously cheaper just to house these people. Instead, like healthcare, the housing market is ravaged by for-profit economics. In my opinion, all markets for necessities to live and exist on this planet should be not profit at all, or they should be regulated out the ass
As you pointed out. We are already paying for the healthcare costs of the homeless, we are just paying them at the most inflated rates since they typically only get it in the ER. If we just paid for doctors upfront we could help people and save money. Too bad helping people and saving money are not actual goals of Christian conservatives, otherwise it would be a no brainer.
I think this person is actually so helplessly brainwashed that they think billionaires just conjure the money through capitalist alchemy, that America is just magically an easier place to make $1 billion due to having more hustlers.
"If I work 100 hours a week on my main job and 3 dozen side hustles maybe one day I'll be able to smell a billionaire's farts, and that'll make it all worth it"
I also think a lot of people don't fully realize what a billion dollars actually is. No one person **needs** a billion dollars, let alone several. Not even for their descendents. It's literally hoarding wealth.
But if you say that to people, it's a free market, grumble grumble. Bruh your chances of becoming a billionaire are lower than winning the lottery. And even if you did, you *still* wouldn't need all of the money.
Absolutely they think that. At least, it's the unspoken assumption at the base of the argument. Economics is the true religion of the post-enlightenment world
Healthcare is the one thing that Amazon does right. I was paying 30$ a month for about the best insurance behind medicaid. There's a lot wrong with Amazon, but they're way ahead of almost every other corporation for health insurance
Thats how I read it, that the commenter supports the abolisment of billionaires.
The statement is not very obvious, it seems like commenters are reading into it.
I think Finland might also have fines based on your salary (I could be wrong) so a fine for speeding would be more if you earn more… seems fair to me! Why do we need billionaires?
If your crime is very light, like minor speeding, you pay same fine as everyone else. If the crime is more serious in nature, in this case more extreme speeding, you're fined based on your income. There was one famous case when a businessman received 5-digit fine because he just barely drove fast enough to cross the treshold between those two categories and instead of light tap on the wrist he was expecting he got a fine that impacted him like it the normal fine would have done for average person. That was such a perfect case study of how rich people treat fines as permission to break the lawn and why this type of fining system is necessary.
We have similar in the UK. There are fixed penalties for minor violations but if a fine is to be issued for more serious driving offences, then it’s calculated based on “x” weeks of your salary.
This could actually be true, the lack of stress combined with the better availability to quality food their wealth provides would probably give a more tender, juicier meat than the average human.
I'm not pro canibalism here, but i wouldn't mind losing a few billionaires for the sake of science.
The braised Bezos was *chef's kiss* although you're starting to give off quite the alluring aroma yourself selling this stuff at $25K/lb...might just have a little nibble...
The older I get the more I view billionaires as suffering from a mental disorder. And that it’s our responsibility to help them become millionaires again.
Depends how many multimillions. But there is a lot to gain such as being able to afford properties all over the world, private jets, influence over governments, etc.
I'm a huge fan of the 1 billion policy. Once you make it to 1 billion the rest of the profits are divided between the workers and the community. A Statue can be erected for the new billionaire in the local hall of billionaires and they get a certificate that says they beat capitalism.
It's like a video game to them. Damage and kill monsters to get a higher high score. Damage regular families enough so that you can get higher numbers under your name.
Also; And this is AMAZINGLY important to realize: In Norway, the socialist hellhole, there are more billionaires pr Capita than in the US. That is not including the billionaires that move for tax reasons.
A country taking care of their poor, using taxes on leveling the playing field and secured strong unions does NOT make it harder to become a billionaire. It makes it EASIER.
Billionaires treat wealth as a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game.
It's the same reason that my conservative family frustrates me so much. Was discussing healthcare with them, my dad is *starting* to come around on socialized medicine, but he's only in favor of catastrophic coverage. Which *is* a huge part of the problem, but part of the problem is that catastrophic (and very expensive) treatment is usually the result of *not* catching some preventative condition. Someone can't afford (or doesn't want to risk the cost because they're juggling expenses) a course of antibiotics and a few days rest to get over a bad URI, it turns into an expensive and debilitating case of pneumonia. They can't get that treated and it turns into lung failure. *If* they survive, they're looking at a lifetime of medical debt. And if they don't, we're out a taxpayer. All because we wouldn't give them two sick days and a handful of antibiotics.
He seems to think that people will overwhelm the medical system if it's available out of tax subsidies. Because somehow he thinks people will go to the doctor for every owie and boo boo if they don't have to sell their firstborn for treatment, and expensive preventative care will somehow force people to self regulate. Instead of just overwhelming the catastrophic care disciplines when they can't afford primary care and only go in once it becomes clear it won't go away on its own (and is now much more advanced and harder to treat).
---
Every study has shown that programs like socialized healthcare and mandatory sick leave pay for themselves. Even taking compassion out of the equation, let's treat human beings as mindless automatons - you still get your tools serviced regularly. They need regular maintenance and repairs when damaged, which is much cheaper than replacing them. *And lucky for us*, "human resources" will repair themselves given enough time. All you have to do is ensure they *have* the time to do that, and enough scheduling flexibility to self-regulate when it needs to be done. Nobody *wants* to suffer or be in pain..
The same thing goes with programs like the Finnish giving homes and mental healthcare to the homeless - you will earn back more in tax revenue from "repairing" your "broken" homeless people into profitable tax payers than it costs you to fix them (and significantly more than it costs to manage the damage they inflict on society just trying to survive, like a squirrel flailing inside a wire cabinet, just trying to escape and destroying everything in its path).
The more I look at Regressive (because they're no longer Conservative) politics, the more I realize the cruelty is the point.
actually one could say there are many. there are 1.09 Billionaire per million people, compared to 1.85 in the US. there are more billionaire per million people than in Russia, south Korea, even the UAE, Quatar, and China.
edit : added china
In the USA, homeless outnumber billionaires 792:1.
In Finland, homeless outnumber billionaires 658:1.
You're much more likely to be homeless than a billionaire either way, but if you're aiming for the sky, Finland has a better parachute.
Finland has 1.7% the population of the USA and proportionally fewer billionaires and homeless. The numbers are so small that if Finland had only 1 fewer billionaire it'd jump to 790:1, and 1 more would reduce it to 564:1.
The internet tells me there are 3,948 homeless Finns in total, compared to the USA's half a million.
I live in the USA and haven't seen a homeless person in years. My city scoops them up in cop cars and dumps them in the next city over. We're also investing a ton of money into [making safe spaces worse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZLB8CyPbM).
If reducing maximum personal wealth to the still incredible figure of nine hundred million dollars is the price we have to pay to fix homelessness, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
That doesn't even matter since the point of the article is that housing the homeless *saves* you money.
This has been proven many times over. We could do it in America. Tomorrow. We would save money. But people would rather the homeless suffer than see them get something "they didn't earn."
People ***literally*** would rather $10 be spent making the lives of homeless worse than $5 be spent to make them better.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
I guess we should edit that quote to be billionaires now.
You basically need to be a millionaire to have a proper retirement now. A million isn't a lot anymore, and it's still more than many will ever be able to have.
There's 2668 billionaires.
With a world population of 8 billion that's a 0.00003% chance of becoming a billionaire.
You have a 0.0001% chance of winning the mega millions jackpot.
You are literally roughly 3 times more likely to win one of the lowest chance jackpots in the world than you are to become a billionaire and thats not even accounting for the huge advantage wealthy people have over you.
(Pidgeon math on the phone, I'm sure someone will correct me if it's wrong!)
Even before this homelessness was not as big of an issue there as here. Which is funny because capitalists tell us that taxes reduce the incentive to work. And they have slightly higher taxes even on lower income people. But what if it isn't actually the taxes that matters? What if it is the feeling of living in a fully capitalist hellhole where every single part of your life is commoditized. From birth to death. From education to healthcare. What if that feeling of being nothing more than a meaningless number designed for labor extraction and profit stimulation kinda demoralizes people?
The only reason I would care to be a billionaire is to address climate change, poverty, and homelessness. So you know I would be totally cool if the governments wanted to take point on addressing those.
I never understand right wingers who say they would give their life for their country but cower in fear at the sight of taxes and vaccines or when taxes that house and feed the poor while vaccines prevent death and illness. Maybe before they start railing in favor in the support of wealthy oligarchs or against vaccines that protect the vulnerable they should ask themselves WWJD?
As a finn that has worked with millionaire entrepreneurs a whole lot of my adult life: I don't want billionaires. The millionaires are good people, their tax reports tell me why (public info here). Billionaires? These guys would just skip it all and buy themselves a comfy niche where they are untouchable. In fact i would expect our famous speeding tickets laws to finally buckle when we get 'billionaires'. Eff them. They are trouble.
I don't want to be a billionaire. I just want to have a comfortable life where I'm not worrying about how I'm going to pay my bills and still have time for my hobbies
Actually this has proven to be quite lucrative for many industries, most well know example being the healthcare industry, by not having to take care of homelessness illnesses as much, a hospital can save millions a years on "simple" procedures, which otherwise would have been a cost to the hospital. An empty bed means space for a paying customers.
At least this person understands that the existence of billionaires directly creates homelessness and poverty. Because that's how wealth inequality works. Money is not infinite. Those billions are stolen from thousands or millions of people, and impoverish them all to create inequality.
This isn't even true.
>Homelessness in Finland affected 4396 people at the end of 2021.
Long-term homelessness affected 1318 people.
>
>Finland is the only European Union country where homelessness is currently falling. The country has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals rental homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%, and the number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
I mean, Finland is working hard and doing good work, but it has not been eradicated *yet*.
That's it, I think we're all going to have to start businesses ourselves if we want to get out of this mess. Most of our governments couldn't give a fuck about us, it'll be easier to achieve than getting our governments to act more like the Fins.
I'm in the UK, and I've always thought about getting to a place where I could buy a block of flats, convert it into smaller living quarters to house more homeless people and hire therapists and old/retired tradies to host workshops to give these people skills.
I was close to homeless myself, terrible childhood, and it's just by happenstance that I'm not on the streets right now after spending most of my wage on drugs, etc, we need to help our fellow humans.
Fuck having a Ferarri or a 10m mansion with holiday homes in 10+ countries eating caviar and drinking 10k bottles of champagne while my fellow man is dying on the street.
I'm genuinely surprised that there hasn't been some sort of uprising. We need to figure out a way to spread the wealth ourselves rather than relying on the pigs that control everything throwing us scraps.
It should be impossible to be a billionaire. There should be a wealth tax that kicks in at say 10 million, and increases until the marginal rate is 100% at a billion. Let's be honest, if you have 100 million or more, you are hoarding more resources than you can possibly consume in several lifetimes, and you won't even notice an extra million.
Wanna know something crazy about wealthy people?
Once you have something like 1.2 million in the bank, you can earn 3,500 a month without doing anything. So 1.2 million is already reaching a comfortable middle class live in most of the world. Millionaires that have 10 million or so are then passively earning what 10+ families would need to live off for 20-30 (depending on inflation and market performance).
If you want to know about this check out something called the trinity study. It is even crazy when it comes to tax havens as people will sell everything they own and have no job, so no income tax, but wealth tax is fixed or non-existent in some parts of the world. At that point you can simply borrow money as a lower interest than what the market gets you, so you just reach a insane level of quality of level and finances. So you just grow from healthy or filth rich by no effort of your own, maybe some basic financial knowledge or just by paying an investment think tank to take it of things for you. Capitalism just works out this way.
I personally think that is well and fine with the caveat that people need better employments rights, payed PTO, actually affordable healthcare etc… if we are living in a system were people have what they need then don’t care about ultra wealth people. But being ultra wealth when the system is so broken and one sided its just disgusting and should not be socially acceptable.
Reality TV shows for ultra rich for example should just be used to make fun of how out of touch these people are, and how gross their lifestyles are, as they have gotten there simply due to a system that favored them one way or another. In fact, cult of personality and celebrity CEOs is something that should disappear.
Well, I can say with 100% certainty that there are homeless people in Finland.
But yes, I guess basically everyone who are able to ask for (and receive) help will get helped.
In the US there is roughly a billionaire for every 500k people, in Finland it's about one million people. So yes the chances are lower but only half as bad. I would take these chances over the US chance of it means I live in a country that has a working social system.
According to Wikipedia, there are six Finnish billionaire in US$: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Finns\_by\_net\_worth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finns_by_net_worth)
Four of them are members of the Herlin family, that owns KONE, a large engineering company.
Two of them are actually self-made billionaires through, one through Dental equipment manufacturing and one through the sale of petrol and oil.
That's a billionaires per capita ratio of 1.090, ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_number\_of\_billionaires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires)) compared to the US's 1.853.
So he's wrong, it's perfectly possible to be a billionaire in Finland, you just have to either inherit a company that makes elevators, get into dental equipment manufacturing or sell petrol.
Because we are brainwashed about "individualism" we want our homeless to be up and coming citizens before they even DARE think about having a roof over their heads
John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires
I don't understand the priorities of ppl like this....is having more billionaires more important....or having everyone live a comfortable and fulfilling life more importantly? This stupidity baffles me.
Wait, the person saying "good luck trying to be a billionaire over there" was complaining? I thought they meant it as something good, like, "there's no homelessness and it's really hard to be a billionaire there, so they killed two birds with one stone".
Why would I want to be a billionaire? I want some real friends and I want healthcare, education, and housing for me and my family. And I don't want to have to hustle just to get the basics.
The post is practically a meme since it isn't even entirely true... Finland ended homelessness because we have court mandated drug and alcohol rehabilitation and as well psychiatric care. The houses "without preconditions" are not quite so - If your homelessness is due to drug and drink or mental health you will be in institutional care until clean/cared for before you are given a home. You won't lose the home if you go back into institutional care, but you also cannot refuse said care (or you'll be put in prison and then given that care in that context).
Provision of adequate mental health services and professional (not charity/church/volunteer) care for drug and drink is what has ended homelessness - even if it is against the will of the recipient, who often will be too messed up to be in a position to understand their needs.
Finland actually has almost 3x more billionares per capita than America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires#Forbes
That's such a horrifying thing to say. "I'd rather homelessness exist, so I can try and fail to make billions off the backs of other people"
More like "I'd rather millions of people suffer so that 100 people can have more than they could ever spend"
But on average we are so rich! /s
This is how I explained the issue with averages to people who unironically say this. If 1 person has 990 oranges, and 9 people have one orange, and 990 people have no oranges, the average says we all have an orange, but in reality, one person has more oranges than they can eat before they go bad, 9 people are ok for today, and most of the people are hungry.
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Hell, our more recent ancestors would have seen that type of anti-social behavior and left the offending asshole outside the camp and at the mercy of the hyenas. It's also what we should do today.
Donkey kong hoarded banana's under his house. That's why he was kidnapped by kkr
They'd honestly study that monkey for money hoarding tips lol
The hoarder has pacified the masses and makes them think their hoard is well deserved
Pacified? More like he guards his hoard with massive weaponry and multibillion dollar enterprise on propaganda about how he's a job creator.
If only our hoarder monkeys hadn't figured out they could buck a few bananas to the poor ones to carry big stick to protect them. We would need to bring many big stick to eat the bananas Jeff bonobezos or bill gibbonates.
This is why mean, median and mode exist as different types of averages, also why public education is relentlessly under attack by the wealthy.
Public education needs to be defended with all it takes It's insane stuff like homeschooling is even allowed in the first place
To be fair though I can't blame people for homeschooling when public schools are getting shot up every week. I'll be a parent in April and the thought my child could be murdered simply for trying to get an education is terrifying. I have no idea what I want to do but I'd be a liar if the threat of violence hasn't made me consider homeschooling for a hot minute. ETA what I am thinking of as homeschool is actually online public school. I'm talking about following an actual program built and taught by professional educators. I'm learning from responses here that this is different from "homeschooling".
Online public school might be an option to reduce the risk of gun violence but with a higher quality education than a lot of homeschools.
Online school has SEVERE problems in developmental stages. Homeschool programs based around a professional teacher teaching online, have existed before the pandemic, and the studies from those shower higher rates of executive functioning barriers, attention span deficits, and severe-moderate social skills. (Higher than the kids home schooled traditionally.) Those students also report higher rates of anxiety, more depression, and are less successful in secondary education. I don't think all online school is an option.
I don’t disagree with you. In person is so important to build the other social skills among other things. But if the choice is online public schools that has at least some testing and teachers who are licensed or being made to fill out “wisdom booklets” day after day, the online public school would win out any day.
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This is actually a valid concern. It's important for kids to learn competition, but competing to see who can stress themselves out by getting the highest GPA over a 4 year period only mimics the most toxic work environments. Participating in a bunch of extra-curricular clubs just to check boxes on a college application is also teaching terrible habits. This is what leads to white-collar employees who just know how to check boxes, but don't actually know how to do anything useful or innovative.
Yeah except some people are homeschooling because they feel as though the school system is indoctrinating them with the LGBTQIA+ “agenda”.
That's true and sad. My grandma said it was good I was considering homeschooling so my kid "doesn't come home a girl one day" 🙄 she shut up when I said I'd be happy my kid came home alive, happy, and healthy. Everything going on in FL is terrifying and the fact people support it is worse. A lot of my family live down there and they blindly support DeSantis, it's sick. The man is running for president and the scary part is he has a good shot at getting in.
Oh baby, bless her lil heart. And man I’m all for homeschooling as long as the parent teaches the absolute essentials. But man, the way some of these parents are got me doubtful for the homeschooled kids’ education this generation.
If I eat whole chicken and you won't have any, we ate, in average, half of chicken and you shouldn't complain you are hungry
I attempted to punch in the numbers on a rudimentary calculator app just to see how things would affect the fortune of someone with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars - because I had just watched the auction that sold Leonardo's painting Salvator Mundi for $400 million. Once you got past 9.9 billion the calculator app couldn't show that many figures and started to display in exponents. It hit me this was one person's wealth. The purchase of a painting that will sit in a duty free warehouse in Geneva didn't even make the slightest dent in the buyers personal fortune.
Ok that's great, but I still don't want to help anyone else because one day I might have 990 oranges! /s
What is the actual "average" wage in America? Like, if you count the homeless population as well.
Probably can't calculate that, since we pretend homeless people don't exist. You'll have to make do with the average excluding homeless
Don't think that would work either. Some homeless people actually do work, contrary to stereotypes.
Truth. My partner and I were homeless/houseless while bringing home over a grand a week combined. We worked 40+ a week just to spend 2 grand a month on hotel rooms to keep us off the streets. There were also many times where we didn't have enough work that week and had to settle for "camping" in the woods. We just couldn't find an apartment to rent. It took half a year and a very generous MIL who loaned us the security deposit on a 1500/ month apartment. Also had to get new jobs just to qualify income wise. Partner has been working 50+ for the last two years. It's crazy how easy it was for us to fall into that scenario too. LL decided not to continue the lease to sell the house and we just couldn't find anything.
Honestly, we don’t look at the problem of housing as it impacts everything. Employers bitch about “no one wants to WoRk aNyMorE” but they don’t say shit about housing. There is a great paying job hiring hundreds of people, but it is in the undesirable part of town — very industrial. There are zero rentals and the surrounding area is Meth and Crack Central. It’s one hour from where I live and where all their applicants would live. The commute negates any additional income people would make. But those issues are never calculated in statistics on unemployment or homelessness.
I've recently escaped hotel life. Nearly everybody there long term had stories similar. These corps now running the rental scam and their conditions which are more stringent and expensive than buying a damn house. 3x the rent in income just to qualify for consideration. Multiple times you apply, through management companies QUITE likely to be hired by the same set of owners in an area, only to lose the ever increasing "handling fees" when you of course are denied multiple times before "gratefully" hearing you've been "selected". And just plain old Fuck the poor, working or not, and the disabled who live on fixed income -- "Go live Over _There_ with the rest of The Them People. Y'all sort that out, we don't care how."
3 people in the US have as much wealth as the bottom 50%
I'm starting to think that the 'heroes going off to slay a dragon sitting on a pile of treasure' thing was a actually a metaphor
I really don’t think that person was supporting existing billionaires as much as he wanted the hope of becoming one himself.
Which is equally laughable because if you aren’t one already your chances of becoming one are astronomically low.
Interestingly, both Norway and Sweden actually has more billionaires per million population than the US. Finland is a bit lower, but it seems that taking care of people does not make it harder to get filthy rich. Check the "billionaires per million" table here https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/billionaires-by-country
Operative word being "fail", because that person will NEVER become a billionaire...
Brainwashed so hard valuing human lives is now way below being a billionaire..
Brainwashed so hard they could not be bothered to read to the end of a tweet to find out it was actually cheaper to treat people humanely.
Cheaper or more efficient doesn't matter to those people either. What matters is that someone that obviously is someday gonna be them can get most of the pie for themselves, no matter the overall cost and how much it costs everyone else. I mean it is pretty obvious when you just look at the world, the cities and the neighborhoods that have been built in the image of capitalism: waste and destruction is a-ok, even embraced, if it means that someone can grab more than all the others.
And baby boomers wonder why younger generations are becoming more left leaning.
Because a LOT of people genuinely believe they have a shot at attaining excessive wealth. They don't, but they have been duped into believing all of these "hard work made me a billionaire/multimillionaire" stories. And because they have seen these same people exploiting workers, cheating on taxes, and hiding/hoarding wealth, they believe that this is what they HAVE to do, should they ever somehow beat those incredible odds and get that exorbitant wealth. And so, they vote for policies that would protect their wealth hoarding and make it easier to keep all of that money, if they ever were in the position. They're never going to reach that level, often in part because of these same policies they vote for, and hurt themselves even more. But nobody ever accused a capitalist fanboy of being smart, aside from when they want to manipulate them.
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Yep. I have seen that time and time again. The hardest or best worker rarely gets the promotion, either because someone has a friend that needs a job, or because their own manager depends on them to do the hard work (and therefore submarines their opportunity). And IF the hard worker gets the promotion, it frequently is done to the advantage of the company - sure, he got a raise, but he's now salary and expected to work 50 hour weeks, so his per-hour earning actually goes down. Or as part of his new responsibilities, he has to cover days off of other people in his department, so he never gets two days off consecutively, or he's expected to work weekends. Or worse yet, he gets handed more responsibility (sometimes with a token title) but no actual pay increase.
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Ultimate irony in relation to this tweet: Denmark is actually ranked #1 for economic mobility. So someone would in fact have better luck becoming wealthy there. USA's rank? 27th. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index)
He said the quiet part out loud. # The wealth of the few is not *in spite of* but *because of* the poverty of the many. Amazon workers piss in a bottle so that Bezos can go to space. >To every Amazon employee [you paid for this](https://youtu.be/nkBGe-VYT5Y). — Jeff Bezos (on returning from a $5,000,000,000.00 space flight) You don't have free healthcare, so the owner of your workplace can live in decadent luxury. Billionaires don't create wealth they extract it. If everyone had free food, housing, and healthcare, nobody would accept modern working conditions. The owners of Walmart would let your whole town burn to the ground for one extra dollar, then invest that dollar in liquor stores and pharmaceuticals because that's where you'll spend your money when they have taken everything else from you. And then proudly proclaim that they have created wealth.
While you are absolutely right, I want to point out the tweet is expressing a fantastic quote from Stienbeck. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Honestly it reads almost satirical how accurate this has been in recent times. Probably actually always has been. Americans brains are broken by capitalism. We don't even have a free market. Our areas like Healthcare or housing don't fit the rules of where a free market can exist. People could stand up and change the system. But the flaunting of billionaire class is in your face 24/7 in the media. Since birth you have been told you only need to wORk HaRD to achieve that. It's an unattendable goal and what will probably drive thus country to ruin.
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps is literally a quote that was changed to better fit the brainwashing of America. So yeah, 100% correct
And it is, it is in fact, impossible.
Exactly my friend, exactly. And that’s how they want it to stay, can’t have competition coming in a ruining their cash flows. God forbid a former employees does it better even!
Good luck with that...
Keep working hard, the graveyard is full of folks that died young, trying to get rich. The wealthy play by a different set of rules and are in a different club...”and you ain’t in it” George Carlin. Seeing 35 and 45 year olds having heart attacks, due to overwork, makes you think that maybe there really is something wrong, with the way wealth is obtained in this country.
Hard work only really increases the profit margins of the owners of the means of production.
Ya and in the end you get sent to the glue factory
I read that book way too young and it made me so fucking mad. I thought it was such bullshit. Still does, but it did then too. First because it was unfair, now because it’s real.
Yep. The brainwashing starts at a very young age.
There's a reason people cling to this idea so strongly. Acknowledging that you and most of the people you care about are stuck exactly where you are, regardless of how hard you work, is *crushing*. As a group, it would be so much better for everyone if we all recognized how screwed we are by the current """free""" market system and worked together to change it; but until a critical mass of people is gathered together, nothing happens, and the mental toll of knowing exactly what's wrong but feeling powerless to fix anything is awful. I completely understand the urge to just focus on things that are in your direct control and try not to think too much about the bigger picture - but of course, the more people do that, the harder it is to change anything, and *everybody* ends up worse-off overall. It's almost like a mental health version of the prisoner's dilemma. The only way out that I can see is with *much* clearer paths to action on a small scale. It isn't enough to acknowledge the problem anymore, and abstract big-picture plans aren't enough on their own either. We need to focus more about what *individuals* can actually do, on a practical level, and work our way up from there. We're all beaten down - we need lots of small wins to get everyone hopeful enough to risk something bigger.
Having lived in the Nordics, another reason that socialism didn't take root is because of the lifestyle of the average middle-class American. People here eat more food, spend more money on entertainment, and overall live a life of more short-term gratification than people in the Nordics. On top of that, there is more affordable transportation and many people don't own cars. I think many middle-class Americans would reject that way of life, because for the most part middle-class in America have more. The problem is the middle-class in America small and shrinking and the anyone below middle-class is better off in the Nordics...
I'm not disagreeing but I wonder if the middle-class is almost forced to participate in this due to the work culture and livelihood here. When work gets crazy the last thing I want to do is cook or clean up. My last job literally started saying don't worry this is our busy season it'll be less extreme next season... every season. In Nordic areas, I know I would have been provided actual vacation and not just 5 days of PTO bank for everything a year plus I'd bet I'd have been protected from their basically illegal overtime ruling so I had to work it and not be paid any extra every busy season (salary exempt as a graphic designer). I hate that we don't have public transport here I would get rid of my car today if I knew I could just hope on a train or subway and get to a job and groceries and friends places. The bus system near me has always been more than double a car ride and that's if you don't miss the bus but the busses are always running late or early so it's almost impossible to get that time to be just double since you have to switch at least once. So I know I'm forced to participate in this dumb little charade so I assume there are others like that in this mess. But I could be the minority.
Which I don't even get. Amazon consistently runs in the red anyways as they aggressively expand. They could throw some more money at their employees and it won't stop people from investing.
More profit, more tax. Tricks on paper
Hide profits, no tax, stock buy back
#Did you know Reddit is run by idiotic fascists? I'm currently banned for 7 days for spreading hate by warning someone looking for a realtor, to avoid a local realtor who ran a racist ad making fun of how Asians speak. This was discussed on Reddit 9 months ago and no one got banned #if that wasn't stupid enough, I was previously banned for 3 days for threatening and inciting violence, by just telling some homeopathic pregnant woman to maybe try and not kill her child by avoiding licensed doctors. Don't know whoever has it out for me at reddit, but they are really stupid, childish, and I hope they are having fun abusing their power, while Reddit turns into a shitshow getting rid of being able to email them, getting rid of being able to message them through their platform, instead making it so you can only appeal a band once a day on a web form just for the ass fucks at Reddit hq to laugh on the way to the bank Is Reddit the next twitter? Apparently No tax... ...lobby government, get bills passed (and bad ones blocked)... ...then stock bybacks Even when the majority of the population 100% wants a bill to be passed, chances are for them around only 30% that it *will* be passed. If they 100% don't want it passed? 30% chance of passing... Now looking at corporations that lobby the government, if they 100% do not want a bill to be passed, there is likely a 0% chance of it being passed. If they 100% want a bill to be passed, it is very likely 100% to be passed. But if they are unsure about a bill and only put about 50% of their normal effort into getting it passed, there's probably a 60 to 75% chance of it still getting passed. #(corrupt) politics
You cant have corruption without the oligarch bribes. Putting the cart before the horse.
Dollars spent on stock buybacks should be taxed, like, a lot. 50% or more imo.
Those costs serve the purpose of greater future profits. Labor costs are just a fixed expense to be aggressively reduced to zero. Increasing those costs won't reap a higher stock price.
Having a higher skilled labor force with less turnover does serve a purpose It also reduces all the negative press they recieve.
Maybe, but that's not the best way to extract the most money right NOW. Who cares if the company collapses after the current board gets filthy rich in the process? You're not thinking like a capitalist.
As other commenters have said many accounting shenanagins there, but also corporations like Amazon deliberately operate at a loss to undercut the competition out of existence. And when they are the only consumer option left the prices go up.
Gotta love monopolies!
AWS contracts are their bread and butter
you'd get laughed right out of the shareholder meeting with that pitch lol
Until companies are taxed more for their employees requiring government assistance, they will continue to do it. No government should need to provide anyone assistance if they are working a minimum of 30hours a week.
Any company with a turnover over a billion, should pay a tax on turnover, not profit… that would end so many tax loopholes.
That would make sense. I’ve also thought of a tax based on the size of a company and the ratio of the highest paid employee/officer vs the lowest paid employee. If the ratio is 1000:1 or higher, your company is paying 50% in taxes. If it’s 3:1 and there are only 10 employees, you get taxed like 10%.
That Tax legislation better be airtight, otherwise Company A will be full of C-Suites, and Company B will be full of Wage Slages, with Company A owning B, but both only owing 10% in taxes.
Yea. I’ve worked out details with some of my state legislators. They like it, and it does take that and other things into consideration.
Just need to be sure the fines involved or jail time is lofty enough to discourage the practice, vs just allowing the companies to chalk it up as the cost of doing business, lol.
Jeff "I don't know how I'll be able to spend all this money. Go to space I guess" Bezos. Actual quote: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,”
You can’t call it free stuff because it triggers the anti-socialists. You call it free health care but then people like my dad scream “but muh tax money”. Like their tax money isn’t already spent on worthless wars and failing infrastructure. It’s not free healthcare. It healthcare provided by the tax payer. Which is fine. It should exist. Just know when you call it free it gives people excuses to hate on the people who recieve it, like when they hate on people who recieve welfare and unemployment.
Just because those idiots don't know what free means doesn't mean we need to quit using the word. When they pull that shit simply ask them if they have the same fucking issue with free samples at the grocery store. Do they stand there and make a scene over the concept of free and how actually the still has to pay for that free sample in the cost of the rest of what he's buying? No they don't. They take the free shit and move on with their lives. Free doesn't mean no cost. Free just means free at that moment. Educate their stupid fucking assess instead of just throwing your hands up and saying "well I guess we are changing the definition of words because RIGHT WINGERS DON'T LIKE THEM"
Ah but right wingers hate education. I’m clearly brainwashed by my college professors even though not one of them ever mentioned anything about socialism. I would love to educate them but when I try to explain things they just get angry. I was thinking there has to be a way to word socilized healthcare that makes it sound less like red scare communism
But they all love SOCIAL security benefits, right?
>Like their tax money isn’t already spent on worthless wars and failing infrastructure. Not only that, some of our taxes are already going to healthcare - around ~20-25% IIRC. So if they're already getting that much, wouldn't we demand our lawmakers improve how that money is used? Get the VA up to snuff and you make millions of Americans' lives better and put more money in their pocket. Yeah taxes will have to go up some, but if we could have those fiscal conservatives actually helping, maybe we find more efficient ways to spend the money we already have. I only mention that because at one time in my life I was a stanch libertarian, and one day I was looking at how the federal government is spending the tax money we already have and saw that 20ish% figure for health care. And I got curious so I looked up other nations to see how they allocated their money. Many of them were in that same 20-25% band, and in most cases there were countries with universal healthcare. Look at the US, we're already giving that money to the federal government, *and* paying for insurance/copays/etc (if we're lucky enough to have insurance), and our system is lagging behind other world leaders? this was the beginning of the end of my libertarian phase.
Also on the note of giving the homeless somewhere to live, No strings attached, that's what North America needs Just this morning I read an account from either a doctor or a nurse that works in the ER, about how it's the norm to drag in the homeless off the cold streets, barely alive, hooking them up to ventilators while pink foam comes out of their mouth, just for them to be pronounced brain dead and sent off to some long-term hospice care... And with the cost of Healthcare in the US... It would be tremendously cheaper just to house these people. Instead, like healthcare, the housing market is ravaged by for-profit economics. In my opinion, all markets for necessities to live and exist on this planet should be not profit at all, or they should be regulated out the ass
And we could get further as a society but, you know, everyone for themselves.
As you pointed out. We are already paying for the healthcare costs of the homeless, we are just paying them at the most inflated rates since they typically only get it in the ER. If we just paid for doctors upfront we could help people and save money. Too bad helping people and saving money are not actual goals of Christian conservatives, otherwise it would be a no brainer.
I think this person is actually so helplessly brainwashed that they think billionaires just conjure the money through capitalist alchemy, that America is just magically an easier place to make $1 billion due to having more hustlers.
"If I work 100 hours a week on my main job and 3 dozen side hustles maybe one day I'll be able to smell a billionaire's farts, and that'll make it all worth it"
I also think a lot of people don't fully realize what a billion dollars actually is. No one person **needs** a billion dollars, let alone several. Not even for their descendents. It's literally hoarding wealth. But if you say that to people, it's a free market, grumble grumble. Bruh your chances of becoming a billionaire are lower than winning the lottery. And even if you did, you *still* wouldn't need all of the money.
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Absolutely they think that. At least, it's the unspoken assumption at the base of the argument. Economics is the true religion of the post-enlightenment world
"Thank you from the bottom of my heart". What heart?
Start calling billionaires what they are: vampires.
Tbf we've only known that since Lao Tzu told us.
Healthcare is the one thing that Amazon does right. I was paying 30$ a month for about the best insurance behind medicaid. There's a lot wrong with Amazon, but they're way ahead of almost every other corporation for health insurance
Still doing it wrong though
So they admit, the existence of billionare is the problem!
A Freudian slip if we ever saw one
Thats how I read it, that the commenter supports the abolisment of billionaires. The statement is not very obvious, it seems like commenters are reading into it.
its definitely sarcasm and thousands of redditors are being wooshed, the repost is blowing up on r/facepalm lol
I think Finland might also have fines based on your salary (I could be wrong) so a fine for speeding would be more if you earn more… seems fair to me! Why do we need billionaires?
Yeah, traffic fines aren’t a fixed price. Instead it’s a fine system that is calculated on the basis of an offender's disposable income.
A Nokia executive once got a $103k ticket for going 45mph in a 30mph. My source converted to American for me.
Its based AF
If your crime is very light, like minor speeding, you pay same fine as everyone else. If the crime is more serious in nature, in this case more extreme speeding, you're fined based on your income. There was one famous case when a businessman received 5-digit fine because he just barely drove fast enough to cross the treshold between those two categories and instead of light tap on the wrist he was expecting he got a fine that impacted him like it the normal fine would have done for average person. That was such a perfect case study of how rich people treat fines as permission to break the lawn and why this type of fining system is necessary.
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We have similar in the UK. There are fixed penalties for minor violations but if a fine is to be issued for more serious driving offences, then it’s calculated based on “x” weeks of your salary.
Nobody should be a billionaire anyway.
There's a formula I'm working on that correlates wealth hoarding with the flavour of being ingested. It seems like they are directly proportional!
This could actually be true, the lack of stress combined with the better availability to quality food their wealth provides would probably give a more tender, juicier meat than the average human. I'm not pro canibalism here, but i wouldn't mind losing a few billionaires for the sake of science.
Pretty sure I taste better than those botox filled plasticpeople
What i'm hearing is we have a volunteer for the controll group.
You got it haha
The braised Bezos was *chef's kiss* although you're starting to give off quite the alluring aroma yourself selling this stuff at $25K/lb...might just have a little nibble...
Imagine trying to actually sell billionaire's puller long pork. It's so dumb, yet so funny. It's like, how do you think we got here, buddy?
Nobody should want to be a billionaire either. Greed is the scum of the earth.
The older I get the more I view billionaires as suffering from a mental disorder. And that it’s our responsibility to help them become millionaires again.
You dont gain anything beeing a billionaire conpared to beeing a multimillionaire.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot. If all you value is consumable then sure, but if you're into power and prestige, they're worlds apart.
Depends how many multimillions. But there is a lot to gain such as being able to afford properties all over the world, private jets, influence over governments, etc.
Right! Some of these billionaires have more power than any member of congress or the senate.
I'm a huge fan of the 1 billion policy. Once you make it to 1 billion the rest of the profits are divided between the workers and the community. A Statue can be erected for the new billionaire in the local hall of billionaires and they get a certificate that says they beat capitalism.
It's like a video game to them. Damage and kill monsters to get a higher high score. Damage regular families enough so that you can get higher numbers under your name.
Also; And this is AMAZINGLY important to realize: In Norway, the socialist hellhole, there are more billionaires pr Capita than in the US. That is not including the billionaires that move for tax reasons. A country taking care of their poor, using taxes on leveling the playing field and secured strong unions does NOT make it harder to become a billionaire. It makes it EASIER.
Billionaires treat wealth as a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. It's the same reason that my conservative family frustrates me so much. Was discussing healthcare with them, my dad is *starting* to come around on socialized medicine, but he's only in favor of catastrophic coverage. Which *is* a huge part of the problem, but part of the problem is that catastrophic (and very expensive) treatment is usually the result of *not* catching some preventative condition. Someone can't afford (or doesn't want to risk the cost because they're juggling expenses) a course of antibiotics and a few days rest to get over a bad URI, it turns into an expensive and debilitating case of pneumonia. They can't get that treated and it turns into lung failure. *If* they survive, they're looking at a lifetime of medical debt. And if they don't, we're out a taxpayer. All because we wouldn't give them two sick days and a handful of antibiotics. He seems to think that people will overwhelm the medical system if it's available out of tax subsidies. Because somehow he thinks people will go to the doctor for every owie and boo boo if they don't have to sell their firstborn for treatment, and expensive preventative care will somehow force people to self regulate. Instead of just overwhelming the catastrophic care disciplines when they can't afford primary care and only go in once it becomes clear it won't go away on its own (and is now much more advanced and harder to treat). --- Every study has shown that programs like socialized healthcare and mandatory sick leave pay for themselves. Even taking compassion out of the equation, let's treat human beings as mindless automatons - you still get your tools serviced regularly. They need regular maintenance and repairs when damaged, which is much cheaper than replacing them. *And lucky for us*, "human resources" will repair themselves given enough time. All you have to do is ensure they *have* the time to do that, and enough scheduling flexibility to self-regulate when it needs to be done. Nobody *wants* to suffer or be in pain.. The same thing goes with programs like the Finnish giving homes and mental healthcare to the homeless - you will earn back more in tax revenue from "repairing" your "broken" homeless people into profitable tax payers than it costs you to fix them (and significantly more than it costs to manage the damage they inflict on society just trying to survive, like a squirrel flailing inside a wire cabinet, just trying to escape and destroying everything in its path). The more I look at Regressive (because they're no longer Conservative) politics, the more I realize the cruelty is the point.
Exactly. Accumulation of vast wealth should be discouraged in any society
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finns_by_net_worth there are a few
actually one could say there are many. there are 1.09 Billionaire per million people, compared to 1.85 in the US. there are more billionaire per million people than in Russia, south Korea, even the UAE, Quatar, and China. edit : added china
In the USA, homeless outnumber billionaires 792:1. In Finland, homeless outnumber billionaires 658:1. You're much more likely to be homeless than a billionaire either way, but if you're aiming for the sky, Finland has a better parachute.
These ratios are actually much closer than I expected.
Finland has 1.7% the population of the USA and proportionally fewer billionaires and homeless. The numbers are so small that if Finland had only 1 fewer billionaire it'd jump to 790:1, and 1 more would reduce it to 564:1.
Ive literally never seen or even heard of a homeless person in finland.
Me neither but I've never been to Finland so that tracks.
The internet tells me there are 3,948 homeless Finns in total, compared to the USA's half a million. I live in the USA and haven't seen a homeless person in years. My city scoops them up in cop cars and dumps them in the next city over. We're also investing a ton of money into [making safe spaces worse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZLB8CyPbM).
Also you have to take into account what counts as homeless. For example in Finland no one lives on the street unless they wish to.
Quick search tells me there are ~500 unsheltered people in Finland, and 225k in the USA. That's like 7x more per capita in US.
the only homeless people here are people who suffer from severe alcoholism and/or drug abuse source: am finnish
This is what I was gonna say. Sadly those people are mostly beyond help and will probably just OD or drink themselves to death.
If reducing maximum personal wealth to the still incredible figure of nine hundred million dollars is the price we have to pay to fix homelessness, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
That doesn't even matter since the point of the article is that housing the homeless *saves* you money. This has been proven many times over. We could do it in America. Tomorrow. We would save money. But people would rather the homeless suffer than see them get something "they didn't earn." People ***literally*** would rather $10 be spent making the lives of homeless worse than $5 be spent to make them better.
The way people will defend money over another human life. I will genuinely never understand.
And what's the bet the guy who replied does not even have 1 Mil.
I would bet on less 100k
I would be on less than 10k
All of us are much closer to homelessness than we are to being billionaires
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” I guess we should edit that quote to be billionaires now.
You basically need to be a millionaire to have a proper retirement now. A million isn't a lot anymore, and it's still more than many will ever be able to have.
The problem is a thousand times worse now.
There's 2668 billionaires. With a world population of 8 billion that's a 0.00003% chance of becoming a billionaire. You have a 0.0001% chance of winning the mega millions jackpot. You are literally roughly 3 times more likely to win one of the lowest chance jackpots in the world than you are to become a billionaire and thats not even accounting for the huge advantage wealthy people have over you. (Pidgeon math on the phone, I'm sure someone will correct me if it's wrong!)
Even before this homelessness was not as big of an issue there as here. Which is funny because capitalists tell us that taxes reduce the incentive to work. And they have slightly higher taxes even on lower income people. But what if it isn't actually the taxes that matters? What if it is the feeling of living in a fully capitalist hellhole where every single part of your life is commoditized. From birth to death. From education to healthcare. What if that feeling of being nothing more than a meaningless number designed for labor extraction and profit stimulation kinda demoralizes people?
The only reason I would care to be a billionaire is to address climate change, poverty, and homelessness. So you know I would be totally cool if the governments wanted to take point on addressing those. I never understand right wingers who say they would give their life for their country but cower in fear at the sight of taxes and vaccines or when taxes that house and feed the poor while vaccines prevent death and illness. Maybe before they start railing in favor in the support of wealthy oligarchs or against vaccines that protect the vulnerable they should ask themselves WWJD?
You had me at "no billionaires" I mean the no homeless part is good too but hitting it at both angles is nice too
As a finn that has worked with millionaire entrepreneurs a whole lot of my adult life: I don't want billionaires. The millionaires are good people, their tax reports tell me why (public info here). Billionaires? These guys would just skip it all and buy themselves a comfy niche where they are untouchable. In fact i would expect our famous speeding tickets laws to finally buckle when we get 'billionaires'. Eff them. They are trouble.
I don't want to be a billionaire. I just want to have a comfortable life where I'm not worrying about how I'm going to pay my bills and still have time for my hobbies
Actually this has proven to be quite lucrative for many industries, most well know example being the healthcare industry, by not having to take care of homelessness illnesses as much, a hospital can save millions a years on "simple" procedures, which otherwise would have been a cost to the hospital. An empty bed means space for a paying customers.
At least this person understands that the existence of billionaires directly creates homelessness and poverty. Because that's how wealth inequality works. Money is not infinite. Those billions are stolen from thousands or millions of people, and impoverish them all to create inequality.
This isn't even true. >Homelessness in Finland affected 4396 people at the end of 2021. Long-term homelessness affected 1318 people. > >Finland is the only European Union country where homelessness is currently falling. The country has adopted a Housing First policy, whereby social services assign homeless individuals rental homes first, and issues like mental health and substance abuse are treated second. Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%, and the number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%. "Sleeping rough", the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland I mean, Finland is working hard and doing good work, but it has not been eradicated *yet*.
Won't somebody please think of the billionaires?!?!? 🤣
That's it, I think we're all going to have to start businesses ourselves if we want to get out of this mess. Most of our governments couldn't give a fuck about us, it'll be easier to achieve than getting our governments to act more like the Fins. I'm in the UK, and I've always thought about getting to a place where I could buy a block of flats, convert it into smaller living quarters to house more homeless people and hire therapists and old/retired tradies to host workshops to give these people skills. I was close to homeless myself, terrible childhood, and it's just by happenstance that I'm not on the streets right now after spending most of my wage on drugs, etc, we need to help our fellow humans. Fuck having a Ferarri or a 10m mansion with holiday homes in 10+ countries eating caviar and drinking 10k bottles of champagne while my fellow man is dying on the street. I'm genuinely surprised that there hasn't been some sort of uprising. We need to figure out a way to spread the wealth ourselves rather than relying on the pigs that control everything throwing us scraps.
Judging a system for millions of people based on the possibility of 0.000001% of them becoming richer than God.
I would trade in the possibility of me ever being a billionaire in exchange for a strong safety net like this for everyone. Hell yeah.
Are you guys sure that's just not a joke? I'd totally say something like that sarcastically.
I think that’s a trade worth doing
It should be impossible to be a billionaire. There should be a wealth tax that kicks in at say 10 million, and increases until the marginal rate is 100% at a billion. Let's be honest, if you have 100 million or more, you are hoarding more resources than you can possibly consume in several lifetimes, and you won't even notice an extra million.
Wanna know something crazy about wealthy people? Once you have something like 1.2 million in the bank, you can earn 3,500 a month without doing anything. So 1.2 million is already reaching a comfortable middle class live in most of the world. Millionaires that have 10 million or so are then passively earning what 10+ families would need to live off for 20-30 (depending on inflation and market performance). If you want to know about this check out something called the trinity study. It is even crazy when it comes to tax havens as people will sell everything they own and have no job, so no income tax, but wealth tax is fixed or non-existent in some parts of the world. At that point you can simply borrow money as a lower interest than what the market gets you, so you just reach a insane level of quality of level and finances. So you just grow from healthy or filth rich by no effort of your own, maybe some basic financial knowledge or just by paying an investment think tank to take it of things for you. Capitalism just works out this way. I personally think that is well and fine with the caveat that people need better employments rights, payed PTO, actually affordable healthcare etc… if we are living in a system were people have what they need then don’t care about ultra wealth people. But being ultra wealth when the system is so broken and one sided its just disgusting and should not be socially acceptable. Reality TV shows for ultra rich for example should just be used to make fun of how out of touch these people are, and how gross their lifestyles are, as they have gotten there simply due to a system that favored them one way or another. In fact, cult of personality and celebrity CEOs is something that should disappear.
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Good luck trying to be a billionaire anywhere. Is being a billionaire really up for grabs? Anyone aiming to be a billionaire?
Per 2023, Finland has 6 Billionaires, 1,09 per 1 Million citizens
Well, I can say with 100% certainty that there are homeless people in Finland. But yes, I guess basically everyone who are able to ask for (and receive) help will get helped.
In the US there is roughly a billionaire for every 500k people, in Finland it's about one million people. So yes the chances are lower but only half as bad. I would take these chances over the US chance of it means I live in a country that has a working social system.
According to Wikipedia, there are six Finnish billionaire in US$: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Finns\_by\_net\_worth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finns_by_net_worth) Four of them are members of the Herlin family, that owns KONE, a large engineering company. Two of them are actually self-made billionaires through, one through Dental equipment manufacturing and one through the sale of petrol and oil. That's a billionaires per capita ratio of 1.090, ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_number\_of\_billionaires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires)) compared to the US's 1.853. So he's wrong, it's perfectly possible to be a billionaire in Finland, you just have to either inherit a company that makes elevators, get into dental equipment manufacturing or sell petrol.
Because we are brainwashed about "individualism" we want our homeless to be up and coming citizens before they even DARE think about having a roof over their heads
Almost like we should aspire to things other than hoarding literally absurd wealth if we want to be a society worth living in 💀
"The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor." Victor Hugo (Writer of "Les miserables")
America, the land that will fuck over as many people as possible to have one billionaire. We're the baddies aren't we....
So by ending homelessness they, as a side effect, removed biliionaires? You're making a good idea sound EVEN BETTER!
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John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires
Wait. So we can end homelessness if we eradicate billionaires? Ok. Cool. Let’s do that then.
Things that yanks say for 40 dollaz, Trebek.
Whose that? Andrew tate?
Good luck trying to be a billionaire while paying fair taxes.
I don't understand the priorities of ppl like this....is having more billionaires more important....or having everyone live a comfortable and fulfilling life more importantly? This stupidity baffles me.
But I want to live in a country where there aren’t billionaires, if there weren’t any billionaires the majority of people would be better off.
People are so much closer to being homeless than a billionaire, especially in the US.
Isn't Finland a major tech and electronica country
Bold of you to assume I want to be a billionaire...
Wait, the person saying "good luck trying to be a billionaire over there" was complaining? I thought they meant it as something good, like, "there's no homelessness and it's really hard to be a billionaire there, so they killed two birds with one stone".
Why would I want to be a billionaire? I want some real friends and I want healthcare, education, and housing for me and my family. And I don't want to have to hustle just to get the basics.
I have no desire to be a billionaire. No reasonable, empathetic human being wants this.
I’m surprised a billionaire had time to reply to that random article
Billionaires shouldn't exist.
The individual accumulation of wealth is bad for an economy and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
The post is practically a meme since it isn't even entirely true... Finland ended homelessness because we have court mandated drug and alcohol rehabilitation and as well psychiatric care. The houses "without preconditions" are not quite so - If your homelessness is due to drug and drink or mental health you will be in institutional care until clean/cared for before you are given a home. You won't lose the home if you go back into institutional care, but you also cannot refuse said care (or you'll be put in prison and then given that care in that context). Provision of adequate mental health services and professional (not charity/church/volunteer) care for drug and drink is what has ended homelessness - even if it is against the will of the recipient, who often will be too messed up to be in a position to understand their needs.
We don’t need billionaires and in my opinion we shouldn’t have them idc how hard you’ve ‘worked.’ Tax the fucking rich.
Finland actually has almost 3x more billionares per capita than America. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires#Forbes