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Penny Arcade - Comic - Rocket Measuring
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Rocket Measuring
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Furthermore, there's totally some actual explainable moral principle involved here that makes playing Ratchet & Clank worth more than even one human life, and it's absolutely not that nobody really gives a shit except when they want to slag on someone they don't like.
I'm down with that rule. It really infuriates me how these billionaires will always pay out the nose for extravagant shit for themselves but won't make a dent in their fortunes for things that could benefit society as a whole. You'd think they'd solve big problems like world hunger just for the publicity or to make themselves look good, or to make some profit out of it, but nope.
And to the Beeftruck guy, while I agree In general with the principle of "some people only remember actual problems when they want to complain about others not solving them", it's still very much true that any of us can personally only hope to either volunteer/give to their immediate community (which is also a more effective expectation than overseas charity), or hope that some intermediary NGO is spending their money wisely to help someone an ocean away. Any one of these megarich could, if they so wished, greatly and (with some wise counseling involved, which they can also afford) more or less permanently improve the living conditions of a small country all by themselves. And all of that without really sacrificing many of the potential joys they can extract from life, unlike the guy who gives up playing Ratchet and Clank, as banal as that may be.
Still, $10 billion to launch the Bezos Earth Fund and $100 million to Feeding America must surely have some positive impact. Even if it is only around 5% of his net worth. Is everyone here donating 5% of their net worth?
-Tycho Brahe
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/11/how-jeff-bezos-spending-his-10-billion-earth-fund/616977/
Seems like that 10 billion somehow became 700 million at some point, because Bezos sensed blood in the water during a global pandemic
Lower income households do indeed tend to donate a higher percentage of their income/networth than most billionaires, yes.
And color me unimpressed about donating 5% when 90% wouldn't have a single effect on his lifestyle but he chooses not to do so.
While I'm not entirely on board with the "they shouldn't be allowed to go into space until they've solved world hunger" rhetoric, there is a crucial difference here. Looking at charitable donations as a percentage of net worth is just useless. Someone like Bezos could donate 95% of their net worth and still live in luxury for the rest of their lives. If any of us donated 50% of our net worth, we'd have to make real, incredibly tough sacrifices that would lower our standard of living significantly.
Percentages are really only a meaningful comparison between people with approximately the same level of resources, or when showing that someone with less is actually donating a higher percentage than someone with more.
Personally, I'm leery of depending on billionaires to solve world problems. It provides a non-sustainable, non-repeatable way of tackling problems, often more aligned with the opinions of the donor than the reality of the problem. It also is PR for the billionaire who got that way by underpaying all the people working for them. I don't want to celebrate someone squeezing their workforce for 30 years, then giving away billions and being lauded as an amazing person. I want to see a stronger tax code that prevents them from redistributing that wealth to themselves in the first place.
I also want a pony.
To be clear, I absolutely do not trust billionaires to solve any actual problems. I'd prefer if they were taxed until they were no longer billionaires. But I also want to deny them their space trips.
But following that logic, wouldn't you deny them just about anything? Is a space trip worse than a giant yacht that cruises around the ocean, burning fossil fuels, disrupting wildlife, etc.? Especially when the former is in a fairly small capsule that's probably the smallest space they've shared with another person in the last several decades? At least in the space trip case, there's a lot of ancillary benefit to all the work that's been done in building the rocket technology and such. I think we're already advanced enough when it comes to yacht tech.
I'm just trying to fully grasp how this is fundamentally different than all the other opulence you get when you're a crazy rich person. What do you do, ban them from living like they had more than a couple of million dollars? Then what happens to their money? If you don't just take it all from them, are they just supposed to keep it locked up in the bank, piling up higher and higher?
I know that a society run by women would still have come up with the same general ideal shape for getting into space, but did it really need the vein down the side?
John Stewart, unsurprisingly, has a great take on this (very NSFW):
https://twitter.com/jonstewart/status/1417557259886940162
Buying everyone on the entire earth a sandwich might solve a momentary world hunger problem, but it wouldn't be a long term solution. I'm all in favor of these mega-billionaires doing good with their money. But it also needs to be smart good. They need to invest in infrastructure. They need to invest in medicine and science. They need to invest in education. They need to invest in civil engineering. They need to invest in things that will have a lasting impact.
On the other hand, to play the devil's advocate here, it is their money and they did earn it, and if they want to do something dumb like fly into space on a penis shaped rocketship, that's kinda their prerogative since it's their money.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Hard disagree on the bolded.
Otherwise we as a society routinely redistribute wealth. It's their money until we as a society decide a large portion of it isn't.
Elon Musk is an undeniable jerkwank asshole, but if all billionaires were like him with regard to research and industrial projects, the class would have a far better reputation than it does.
And yes, I realise that's damning with faint praise. I just think it would be nice if they could flex with stuff like "Fuck you, Elon, I cleared the great Pacific garbage patch in 3 years flat" or "nice garbage patch job there Bezos, but my genome project just resurrected 11 mammal species" or "Grats on your 11 whole male white rhinos, Ellison, but I've bought 11 million acres of Brazilian wasteland and restored it to rainforest" and so on
The only reason Forbes says they "have money" is because other people have bid up the value of stock they own because they're founders of companies that became successful. It's not income. It can't be 'turned down' like a salary can be. And if founders divest themselves of a large portion of their stock, it will tank the stock for everyone else, screw up the companies' ability to continue operating, and possibly break several laws regarding the fiduciary responsibility of executives to not screw things up for investors in their (public) companies.
People are all up in arms about how Bezos or whoever else "earns too much money" or whatever, but they're not earning money in any real sense. They can access some percentage of that value by selling a tiny bit of their stock, or borrowing (at some risk!) against its likely future value, but they *cannot access X billion in cash*. They don't *have* that much money, any more than if you bought a house in 2002 for $100k and now it's worth $1m you "earned $900,000". You *might* be able to realize those gains, or you might not!
Do Bezos and Musk and Gates have access to an ungodly amount of financial resources compared to normal people? Absolutely. Is it anything remotely similar to you or I having a checking account with $50 billion in it? No, not in a million years. And I really wish people would stop deliberately misconstruing happenstance stock valuation changes as "income", and wealth as "income", just to make cheap political points. It doesn't do anyone any good, and if your argument is strong you don't need spin to support it.
Thanks for attending my TED talk.
They do have billions in assets and resources they can't spend or use in their own lifetime even if they tried.
Millions of other people absolutely could. The right thing to do would be to give those resources to them, ideally starting with the most impoverished.
As I've said before. You can earn a million dollars. Even ten million. With work and good ideas and/or some good old dumb luck, you can absolutely earn yourself a good pile of money.
You cannot earn billions of dollars. At the point you're talking in billions, the literal only way to get that much money is to cheat. It's like having five aces in your hand while playing cards. You can't get there without shenanigans.
That's not really how stocks work. Or economies.
Though it's probably supposed to be a joke somehow. Hah hah.
My point, more broadly, is that in order to address inequality, you need to think about the nature of monetary resources accurately, and most people aren't thinking about it accurately. Lots and lots of people *do* say things like, "There shouldn't be billionaires", but in context, that can't mean "tax income more" because billionaires don't become billionaires via regular income. The only way to stop someone from being a billionaire is to prevent them from owning more than X% of a corporation that's worth more than $Y - except that happens gradually. Do you force founders to divest as companies become successful? Maybe, but in many cases that would be pretty disastrous for individual organizations, since lots of high-profile startups' value is predicated on their being operated by their founders. And then you have other potentially-distorting effects: Maybe founders just split their businesses into lots of multiple units, which could have some positive knock-on effects but would result in their net worths being mostly unchanged and likely in introducing random inefficiencies for no particular benefit.
In the end, there are really few of these guys, and there are lots and lots of people who do have large regular incomes, and more than enough room in the world to do lots of good and set up a better safety net for lots of people without specifically baying for the blood of half a dozen dudes who particularly piss everyone off. And that was part of the reason for my rant: If we focused, collectively, more on that rather than on being angry at a dozen super-lucky (but, in a national economic sense, relatively inconsequential) dudes, then a lot more net positives could come out of the situation. The 'OMG billionaires' trope is a red herring built on a misunderstanding of value, and IMO it's a distraction from sh*t that actually matters.
I think that analogy falls down when the fortune comes from the value of a company driven by the business tactics it has undertaken at the direction of the person who has a huge net worth from the stock in said company.
But yeah, saying Bezos shouldn't be worth $200 billion because he should be taxed like crazy is a little misguided, since most of that $200 billion is unrealized gain because he holds stock.
On the other hand, the company itself should have been taxed much more (or, probably at all) and they should have made a lot less because they should have been compensating their workers much more.
And that's without even touching the anticompetitive part.
Let me guess, this pithy non-response to a thoughtful post is meant to make us think of the usual handful of Scandinavian "capitalism but with more public welfare spending" countries, and not Venezuelans roasting zoo animals over a tire fire, etc.
I will now continue ignoring any argument you have to defend billionaires and their space race, for they are necessarily bad.
Even though Bezos paid $1.4 billion in taxes over the last 12 years, percentage-wise that's much lower than his employees. It's pretty clear no one on this thread thinks that's a fair percentage.
You'd have to warp people's posts pretty heavily to claim they're "defending" anyone, so I'm not really sure what you're ignoring. Some people are basically just saying going into space isn't somehow special, compared to all the other opulence they spend their money on. Yet it draws people's emotions out more heavily.
I remember 20 years ago when a bunch of millionaires and billionaires were throwing their money at around-the-world balloon records. People were interested, but they didn't get so outraged. They just rolled their eyes and got on with their life. It's not that they didn't think it was ridiculous, it was just hard to be especially outraged about this one particular thing. Rich people have been doing rich people shit a long time, from eating flamingo tongues to flying first class to Australia. Nobody here is defending it, just saying it's weird to be especially outraged about this one thing.
Maybe it's just that people are paying more attention now. Maybe it's just that the internet is a thing now (for the masses).
Well... sorta. As long as conservatives and moderate dems control budgets, more tax revenue probably doesn't move the needle on a lot of the problems being discussed here like poverty and hunger. The money's never gonna turn into UBI or MFA unless there are political changes.
Although I guess if we're suddenly able to tax capital gains we're already presupposing a pretty big sea change politically anyway, so maybe I'm just chicken-and-egging
No, it really doesn't. Capital gains is based on actually selling the stock. Most of Bezos' wealth is in held stock. (And is therefore based on speculation and somewhat of a fantasy that liquidating such a huge holding wouldn't also drop the price as it was being sold. In reality, for every seller there must be a buyer, and they are going to want to pay as little as possible.)
This is the same as the stock investments I have. The gains on those won't be taxed until I sell them, which is a good thing because what's the alternative? That I pay taxes on something now only to have it drop later before I sell it and now I've paid all these taxes on money I never made?
Maybe it's that the world is on fucking fire and the actual biosphere might die back to woodlice and red algae
What a mystery why people hate the rich more now than 20 years ago