Everyone. That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.
I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
AI, automation, and globalization would all be uncontroversially brilliant if the benefits weren't distributed like "150% of net benefit to capital, -50% net benefit to labor, better hope some of it trickles down brokie!"
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “
small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
Most of the younger people don't care about most of those things. That preference just isn't reflected in markets because older generations control a disproportionate (unfair) portion of wealth.
There is a wild difference between asking people not to eat apples in December in the northern hemisphere and asking people not to move wealth around to avoid paying taxes when they have more resources available to them than multiple countries.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
> Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion
My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe.
Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.
DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.
Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.
estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.
To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).
That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
I can't believe how quickly they went from riding high on anti-OpenAI sentiment post-DOD fiasco, to shooting themselves and all their users new and old in the foot.
The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at the same point that all of your competitor's customers are looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here.
And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the teeth.
The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the new demand. So they’ve quantized the model.
"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
This is an incredibly privileged take. Also incredibly wrong.
We've been trying peaceful and democratic means for the better part of a century. It hasn't worked and is met with increasing levels of violence from the government. Right now, today the US government is abducting and murdering innocent citizens in broad daylight. No amount of lobbying is going to stop that.
The explicit and overt goal of this administration is to seize power and do away with democracy. No conceivable democratic process can stop that. Peaceful protest doesn't work, the government kills people when they try.
Every means of peaceful protest is met with extreme violence and suppression. And the violence keeps escalating.
People are resorting to violence because violence against the people is escalating. If you can't see that, then you're the problem. If you think violence is inexcusable, then you must also think that peaceful protesters deserve to get executed in the street.
We are already in anarchy. Laws don't matter, only the whims of our dear leader. Private citizens can be plucked off the street or outright murdered with zero consequence or accountability. Dear leader can declare nuclear war without congressional oversight.
If you think violence is inexcusable, you should really read the goddamn declaration of independence. It is a fundamental human right to remove tyranny by whatever means possible. Just because you, personally don't feel threatened by the us government does not mean that innocent people aren't dying. How many citizens do you think a government should be allowed to execute for no reason? How many nukes should one be allowed to launch without cause?
Democracy has been eschewed by our government. Democratic means don't work and haven't for quite some time. Laws no longer apply to the government. If you want to argue that violence is still inexcusable, you're actually arguing for complete and unquestioned obedience to a fascist government. That's not an exaggeration of any kind, this is what's actually happening in the US right now. Democracy is over, we've been an anarchist state for a few years now.
Because there's no practical way to do it on the scale of an entire factory. It works for surgery because you only do a single surgery in a single room on a single person with a countable number of supplies.
Carbon credits are a scam. We quite simply don't have the technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The technology we do have is so incredibly inefficient and energy intensive that you end up burning more carbon generating the power to remove the carbon you're paid for.
If this were a feasible route, everyone would be pouring billions into the venture and they'd have more than one customer.
Carbon credits are and have always been pure grift and nothing more.
Technically yes the demonym is "French", but "I'm a French" just doesn't work in English. The word 'French' is almost exclusively used in English as an adjective or the name of the language. It is never used as a noun for anything else. So in context, it reads as an adjective without a paired noun.
In English, you have to disambiguate be adding a noun: French person, French citizen, or Frenchman if you're old and inconsiderate.
Similarly, we don't call people "a Chinese". That construction is considered derogatory, if not outright racist. Demonyms typically cannot be used as nouns alone without a suffix. "A Brazilian" or "a Spaniard" are acceptable.
As usual for English, the rules are vague and inconsistent.
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