Only if the wealth is redistributed to the masses though.
In some cases, the wealth might simple be gone because the stock crashes of which the bulk of the wealth is built.
Yeah exactly. Normal inheritance means their kids or spouse inherit, and the number of billionaires remains the same.
The Adjusters go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Fun fact, if I were to inherit the wealth of a billionaire family member who was shot in public I’d get philanthropic real fast!
I was thinking about this the other day. If I had half a trillion dollars (like the guy who just bought the presidency) I would spend it building a city from scratch. A walkable/bikeable city with free public transportation. I don’t have enough expertise to speak about affordable housing ideas, but with that amount of money I can pay someone to come up with some good regulations. Don’t know why but that’d be my passion project.
Hells yeah! !fuckcars@lemmy.world, !notjustbikes@feddit.nl.
Better use of the money is to strong arm cities into adjusting into better land uses. Building a city from scratch you’re probably taking farm land from making food to instead be a new city, and if you can attract enough businesses to attract enough residents you’ve only helped by creating walkability for a few hundred or thousand people while the rest of the country remains car dependant.
Honestly I was on a walk recently and had the thought cross my mind of “what if this road were ripped up, the newly reclaimed land was sold for housing and small quiet businesses and the sidewalks widened into first class bike/walking paths just wide enough for an emergency/utility vehicle to drive down?” and I got a little sad that such a utopian vision just isn’t politically palatable.
I agree with you, that would be a much more effective use of resources. It’s a fantasy though, and it’s way more fun for me to daydream about design than manipulating public policy.
All that said it’s not a fruitless endeavor to think about how you would build something from scratch even if you can’t. It is a good way to hash out ideas without getting bogged down by the resistance to change.
Many people say this. However of those who talk the talk, barely any ever walk the walk.
However I think if you are born an heir to a billionaire, you’d lack the perspective which might foster selfless philanthropy.
I’d like to think that if someone from the working class would randomly get such money they would. But it still seems unlikely.
self preservation isn’t a selfless motive, but if it results in philanthropy then that’s a win.
Exactly! If billionaires were put in a a position where they need to stop being billionaires and distribute their wealth or else people will kill them, they’d distribute their wealth real fucking fast
Not before trying to buy their way out of it.
“What if I uh, personally kill 1000 millionaires to offset each billion reducing my greedy hoarding footprint.”
I would assume most of Elon Musk’s kids are not a fan of Billionaires.
Really one only ever heard his one daughter speak out against him, since she’s been a frequent target for his anti-trans bullshit.
I haven’t heard any of the other kids speak up against him on any topic.
I feel like that depends too. There’s a ton of working class that dream of somehow becoming billionaires which is why they don’t want to tax them.
I’d like to think that if someone from the working class would randomly get such money they would. But it still seems unlikely.
Almost all big lottery winners are working class. Look at what they do with their winnings on average, you don’t need to guess.
This assumes a single person inherits everything. In reality, it’d be quickly distributed for every billy that dies.
By this algorithm, it would have to. Otherwise it’d just create a new billionaire who’d go to the back of the line
but if not, and they have two or more children ic tje amount gets split between them. Then you handlo those, and their children etc. It’s financial homeopathy
Yeah. Protip: Maybe instead of CEOs hit the global elites paying ‘em. Smaller job. Higher impact.
Killing CEOs nets you higher paid CEOs (they already effectively get hazard pay but that will increase if candidates see the role as existentially dangerous)
Killing the wealthiest underscores wealth as the true target.
Far more effective messaging, since many CEOs are nowhere near the 0.1 percent.
“Oh shit, the wealth itself makes me the target!”
Only short term solution for the wealthy individual/family is to pivot to philanthropy fast.
Only long term solution for the class itself is to stop the factory that creates them.
Narrator: it isn’t
So many heirs tho…
What do we do if their heirs just inherit it?
Anakin Skywalker time? 🤔
If we’re waving magic wands around, change the tax laws to limit how much you can inherit.
Changing the step up basis thing is actually pretty low hanging fruit.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
I mean, if we could easily change laws, we wouldn’t need to murder a bunch of rich people, just seize any assets that exceed a certain limit (a wealth cap essentially) and call it a day. No bloodshed. Frankly, I’m not a fan of violence if there is a peaceful path.
Unfortunately billionaires rarely try to educate themselves about the world at all, let alone gather together in a single cramped room to be educated. Still, it’s a nice idea.
Good point, even though the numbers don’t check out.
There were 69 children killed this year. 813 billionaires in the US. It would take almost 12 years.
Where did you get that number? John Hopkins is reporting 48,204 gun deaths for people aged 0-17
“There were 2,526 gun deaths in 2022 among 1- to 17-year-olds, averaging to nearly 7 per day.”
48,204 is total gun deaths.
These are both horrific figures and in no way am I intending to diminish either.
I noticed that finding a statistical breakdown is really difficult, so I went with a source I knew was reliable and still gave a number. Thank you for finding something more specific.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2024-in-numbers/104734714
My mistake, I was only looking at the school shootings.
So actually less than a week.
That would involve people actually doing something rather than waiting for someone else.
And even then you guys would fall into conspiracy theories because you can’t believe someone actually did something.
Everyone is doing something. Working, going to school, living their lives. Even people who have no job, who walk the streets, are doing something: surviving.
Most people’s survival instincts prevent them from taking drastic measures like this, even when things are really bad. Think of how many people who had every incentive to take a shot at Hitler but did not, despite all the horrors of the Nazi regime.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. Of fucking course we should revolt and save the world. Organizing that is not easy, especially when it makes you a target.
And this is the heart of our predicament - the ones in control understand this. If they keep our misery at a low simmer they get to extract everything from us, slowly, we won’t revolt. I worry that our only hope may be that they miscalculate and the pot boils over. I really don’t want that, but I’m having a harder and harder time imagining real improvements anymore.
It’s the people who think making money is good and moral, even when you have to screw others over to get it, who are the problem.
Completely agree.
Homelessness is up 20% over the last 2 years. The pot is already boiling over, I’m not sure what more you think most people have left to lose.
I guess we’ll see won’t we? I predict we’ve got a bit further to go before enough people are miserable enough. It’s a numbers game and I don’t think we’re there yet.
President musk might push it over I reckon. This whole visa debacle is a big fuck you. I don’t think it will be his last overreach
We’d have have to use drugs or something first to get them to sign over their wealth. Probably film it, make sure no one thinks it was under duress. The whole process could take months to make sure it looks legit. CIA level brainwashing maybe? I donno, just spitballing. Then just make sure they can’t backtrack on everything by finishing the job.
Let him cook
Not necessary. After the first round of billionaires has been dispatched, their nepo babies will see the writing on the wall and sign it over quite willingly without any kind of coercion.
This, make them afraid of having too much at once. It’s what people recieving disability payments are already used to. (You actually get cut off and removed from healthcare providers if you’re disabled and have 2000 in savings, and your spouse’s income counts so you basically can’t get married.
This is ignoring inheritance!
There are 1050 estimated billionaires in the US. In 2024 we’ve had 38 school shooting related deaths.
So a bit more than 2 months…
Who said anything about the US? Why not use world numbers?
29 years, assuming we maintain 2024 school shooting levels. I propose that we just skip the schoolchildren shootings altogether, and just skip straight to French Revolution rates of aristocrat deaths. They unalived over 14,000 aristocrats over just a two year period.
Given demographics in the US today, those are rookie numbers. I think we could really show history how it ought to be done and bump that up to some really fast math.
The real unfortunate downside though was that 70% of the casualties during the reign of terror was worker/peasant class. Getting at those rich people meant they had to go through 700,000 human shields that the wealthy put in front of themselves. I figure our current wealthy elite wouldn’t be reached until a far higher number of Americans perished.
There’s a lot of fucking bootlicker assholes out there still.
Modern aristocrats are also much more mobile than their ancien regime counterparts.
On a completely unrelated note, I wonder how far the FOSSCAD community has come with developing surface to air missiles.
They killed them. Unalived sounds stupid.
Ah ah, this is Lemmy.world
Killed triggers the moderation and censorship tools more quickly. This way some idiot bootlicker has to “get offended” and manually report it, making it take longer for the admins to notice and take it down.
If your lemmy instance cares about that sort of language, please join a new one. The only instances I’m aware of that care about harsh language are .ml (censors bitch and some other curses) and .world (regularly deletes stuff celebrating the UHC CEO’s murder).
Otherwise, this is lemmy, you aren’t on some site that cares about looking friendly and soft for advertisers. Please don’t bring that self censorship shit here.
Agreed, fuck this Newspeak nonsense. People kill, die, fuck, shit, piss, go off half-cocked making asses of themselves, etc.
I’m all for censoring pejoratives that are inherently derogatory on the basis of sex, gender, nationality or racial characteristics, but I am deeply critical of shit like ‘unaliving’. I am open to someone correcting this view, but it’s something that started with large corporations afraid of their bottom line. IMO it has no place in the Fediverse.
steps off of soapbox, curious if the ban hammer cometh
How many people got shot at school shootings, though?
He is not talking about school related deaths but about deaths of school children, so everyone who is still a school age.
It specifically says shot. So sure let’s expand to include all children shot at school or otherwise.
So what you are saying is we have plenty supply of school children and not enough billionaires? Let’s see how we can get more billionaires then. Or do you want to reduce the number of school children? Because that is being worked on constantly…America, you have the freedom to get killed by someone with mental issues anytime.
Also, only about 28,000 hundred-million-plus-inaires on Earth.
For perspective, significantly more Palestians have already been casually genocided by our bestie trade partner in that current conflict.
The blight upon our civilization of billions is not that large.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/10/number-of-people-with-100-million-has-doubled-since-2003.html
I’m not even suggesting they be adjusted, because I’m not a sociopath like they are. Use an economic guillotine, confiscate their exploitation gotten hoards for the commons(yes nationalize essential industries like utilities and Healthcare so they’re owned by society), reshape the economy to stop rewarding speculative gambling with exploitation gotten chips over honest labor and vocations like teachers that keep civilization running, obviously institute a maximum wealth cap as other people live in this society, bring their ego score to zero for their murderous greed, let them keep $20 and give each of them a set of literal, cheap bootstraps, and let them get a real job.
Bar them from forming any kind of corporate entities or investing in anything other than a standard savings account for life, just as people convicted of computer crimes are sometimes barred from operating computers as they’ve proven they’re a danger to others with them.
I’d be shocked if half of them didn’t take themselves out of the equation suddenly being subject to the same reality as their current livestock.
So… You want socialism?
I do, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.
I never didn’t when I reached the age of reason and saw the social
tolerancecelebrationworship of unchecked avarice as the core rot in our civilization for what it is.Im glad so many are finally overcoming their capitalist “greed is rational and your lessers have to lose for you to win” programming, even at this late hour as the capitalists burn the very world under our feet… and your grandmother who needs a hip replacement or chemotherapy alive… for another nickel on their hoards.
If I had less morals or more energy, I’d give you a hundred upvotes.
social worship of unchecked avarice
I love this phrase. It covers a lot in so few words.
Unfortunate that it describes the actual world rather than some dystopian YA novel.
Thank you sincerely!
When one of your hobbies becomes finding new and interesting ways to make the same points at clouds and brick walls on the internet, as mine has, you come to find efficiency in eloquence.
It helps me to at least feel like I’m holding onto my sanity in insane times.
You are sincerely welcome! I thought that whole comment of yours distilled a lot of our/my frustrations down to a few hard-hitting sentences.
I mean, I could have just as easily used this one:
capitalist “greed is rational and your lessers have to lose for you to win” programming
I think every other sentence you write could be used as an answer on Jeopardy and the question would always be “How is so much so wrong with the world? It doesn’t have to be this way!”
Starting a psyop on 4chan for making edgy school shooter wannabes start aiming at billionaires instead.
“You see anon, it’s not that girls don’t like you or that your class has 1 non-white person in cornbread America, it’s that billionaires are leeches in society, and the cops they own would stop you. Don’t fire at classmates, fire at the upper class.”
For good measure point out that people migrating into the country are often because the 1% are offering them otherwise high paying jobs at below minimum wage, but thanks to the exchange rate that’s like a million dollars an hour back in their home country.
Don’t make it obvious that you’re on the Left or they’ll ignore you on principle. Make it sound like you’re “one of them”
Dey tuk er jobs
This guy gets it
I tried to teach socialism for terminally 4chan people, it’s hard, and can be immediately undone by /pol/, some other nazi shit, etc.
I did it once, in person, and all it took was food every day for a few months. We all shared our food at lunch instead of keeping it to ourselves, and we all went away more full than we had before. (the reason is that we all got a larger variety of flavors than before, but that’s not the point. The point is communism) Never out had to talk about leftism or politics either, people just sort of came around via eating.
These people believe they are just one crypto rug pull away from being part of the 1%
This argument won’t work on them.
Another fun fact, billionaires and their lifestyles emmit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person in their lifetimes.
And I want my scalps!
So were these sausages I bought today.
I haven’t actually done the math, but by percentages I think they are probably fairly close.
Its not hard to look up school shooting fatalities, but it would be depressing
Welp that sucked.
69 deaths in 2024 (323 school shootings in 1 year. More school shootings than school days. What are you doing there?)*
And
400+ billionaires the poorest is 3.3B
So 2024 had 1 Billionare death, at this rate, we need 399 more years…
*I forgot to add. Both this source and me are not american. Feel free to correct me with a more local source
In total, you’d only need four numbers:
- The total number of school aged children
- The number of school aged children who died due to violent crime
- The total number of billionaires
- The total number of billionaires who died due to violent crime
Rate could mean over time or percentage of. I think OP was thinking of time, in which case your wouldn’t need the total number of schoolchildren. Just divide the population of billionaires by the number of schoolchildren that die by violent crime per year.
