image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
I mean when wealth reaches levels beyond material comfort, needs, and wants, when it becomes easy to warp society. Billionaire’s lifestyles doesn’t change AT ALL between 1 billion and 2, its about expanding power. That is what capital becomes at those levels.
Politicians swoon over you for “donations” (bribes), you begin to see regulations over the industry you exploit your profit from as amendable through lobbyists you can hire to represent your interests over society. Meanwhile that billionaire’s factory workers, customers concerned with product safety, our shared commons, and our communal environment have no advocates with such massive influence to counter them, when the needs of the many shouldn’t just balance the needs of the interests of the wealthy few at the top, they should far outweigh them. As it is, its the other way around. The billionaires have the resources to take care of themselves and protect themselves, most of society does not.
No one should have enough wealth to have more influence over society than your single vote allows. If you want more power, that should come by selling your ideas to society that votes on them by putting you into a political office, with ALL of the rules and accountability that comes with that office.
The White House and Senate often invites the billionaires of industries to be the authority on how those industries should be regulated, and it’s perverse. The Foxes advising on hen house security.
thanks for explaining
That’s an implausible metric. As long as there is not communistic equality, there will always be discrepancies in influence.
Which is why the absurdity of letting someone accumulate a billion dollar plus discrepancy is so glaring.
There won’t be because the game is already rigged, over, captured, and hoplesss, but there needs to be a maximum net worth at which point the winners of the economy’s excess wealth is siphoned away to benefit the society that provided the conditions for that success in the first place. YOU WON! Now go enjoy having enough wealth to live 100 embarrassingly gluttonous lifetimes while we use the excess millions and billions to build Schools you can send your kids to and roads you can drive your collection of multimillion dollar supercars on. I know, I know, that would be eviiil and crueeel. A real victimization amirite? /s
Why is it a tragedy if the maximum wealth one person can hold is half a billion? Or better 100 million? They won’t want to keep “excelling” and working? Awesome, makes room for people without that kind of money to succeed.
There’s a damn good reason in game design why you NEED to have drains and hard limits and maximums in any multiplayer economy. The game would fucking break or leave players miserable. But not here irl where there are actual stakes. Nope.