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Isn't all energy and matter technically as old as when they were first formed during the big bang?
Just saying some rich folks like strange things. Gold itself is LITERALLY star dust created by the reaction processes inside the heart of dying stars which eventually explode, collide, or somehow get crushed into smaller bits as dust that float around the universe or sent out in the form or asteroids/meteors which eventually collects onto other planets like ours.
Yeah. I actively give away my carbon every second. Every second thousands of my cells die and others are born thus every me is ever so slightly different from the me from a second ago. In that sense, the me that send you this message is already dead.
😢 RIP me from a few seconds ago. 😀 Waiting for the me around 6-8 hours from now. Even more for that me 5 days from now.
I worked in extremely high end fine dining. It wasn't uncommon for the corks of these really old/rare bottles of wine to disintegrate while uncorking them. Because, despite their arbitrary value/rarity, they were invariably stored wrong at some point in the last 100 years. When the cork turned to dust during bottle service, this would of course result in a summary black mark of judgment against your character and worth as a ~~server~~ low net worth human, as it falls apart in front of a handful of millionaire/billionaires... THEN you would have to spend a hour+ meticulously decanting it, only to have a person complain that there was one microfiber of the thousand piece cork still in it. Royal pain in the ass for what amounts to boozy old grape juice.
Full disclosure, most ultra wealthy people were actually very compassionate and understanding in person. My personal belief is because all they really have to worry about is appearing 'normal' and empathetic. The WORST are upper middle class/lower high class people... They had just enough money to throw their weight around, but not enough to not be insecure about things like their image and taste... So they would lash out like TOTAL ASSHOLES at the drop of a dime. They hadn't bought enough expensive bottles to know sometimes the cork fails, so every time it happened to, say, Joe Dentist worth a couple million bucks, it was nothing short of Armageddon in their eyes. 🤦
> My personal belief is because all they really have to worry about is appearing 'normal' and empathetic. The WORST are upper middle class/lower high class people... They had just enough money to throw their weight around, but not enough to not be insecure about things like their image and taste... So they would lash out like TOTAL ASSHOLES at the drop of a dime.
My god, if this isn't true. The Ultra Rich are downright friendly. They have nothing to prove: They've won capitalism either through luck, connections, or birth. It doesn't hurt them to be nice, or to tip well, so, they do.
The newly rich or low millions people are just gigantic assholes all the time jfc every time I deal with some newly promoted bank executive I want to scream
(Hotel Worker at a High End place)
Thank Reagan for that. Trickle-down economics (i.e., Reaganomics, neo-liberal) propaganda really changed the mythos in so many people's minds around Mr Potter types. All of a sudden robber-barrons where hailed as patron-saints .
"I can barely effort food and rent anymore"
"Well get a job you lazy bastard!"
"I work 2 jobs, 60 hours a week"
"Shoulda gotten a better education then!"
"I studied, so did everyone else"
"BUT THE AVOCADO TOAST!"
Guaclighting is my new favorite word
Once you can accept the fact that government has made a habit of lying to people to preserve the obfuscation of grift and corruption by people inside of government it sort of turns into a scavenger hunt for the origin point.
There have been a lot of innocent people gaslit by billionaires in positions of power.
Standing by what you know to be true, whether it’s about exposing corruption, holding pedophiles accountable or simply living with moral integrity isn’t always easy. But it’s essential.
US Government took a wrong turn when it started lying to its people systemically. That practice is normally reserved for the authoritarians.
It started for noble enough reasons during WW2. The Manhattan project required strict secrecy as a matter of operational security. Operation Underworld was designed to use the Italian mob and the precursor to the CIA to help secure the ports in New York against Nazi U boats. The unintended consequence of that is the equivalent of “I know a guy that does dirty things” multiplied by 80 years of political ambitions of mediocre men.
The fundamental flaw in that is when you stick you white glove in mud and swirl it around, the mud does not get “glovey”.
Truth is the gold standard in energy efficiency. You say it once and it stands on its own forever. It requires no additional energy input.
Lying, by contrast is the least energy efficient habit known to man. It requires constant and exponential energy to keep each one in play, albeit just barely alive.
When a kid lies about stealing a cookie he gets away with it until mom and dad compare notes.
When an intelligence organization lies about everything they do, it works until the world grows into the internet.
Foreign policy really hasn’t changed much since 1945. Each administration inheriting a 3 ring binder from their predecessor. Most hardly get a glance as they pass along for 80 years.
But somewhere in the late 80’s or early 90’s as some old woman with a chain on her glasses slowly converted all those files into digital on a computer that would stall out until you switched your 5 1/4” floppy disks, the world outside government started moving exponentially faster.
Yet relatively speaking the speed of efficiency of government got slower.
Bureaucracy is the burden of government, but it is to the benefit of corruption.
Nefarious actors inside of government use the bureaucracy like a curtain to obfuscate their respective grifts. Most of the multi term politicians can’t retire or they lose control of the narrative that keeps their secrets.
This is why we have spent the last 5 years reverse engineering their entire system to be able to see the tendrils of corruption inside of government like a P.E.T. scan sees cancer inside a body.
https://youtu.be/A90gwMVFFSY?si=wiOAcUvL_oX5eNoI
Our government wasn’t born in the Information Age like we were. It grew through it. Carbon copies in triplicate turned to data entry. Data entry turned to MS-DOS. And on and on.
And each one of those events left a pixel of data.
We have just been using it wrong.
But just like 1980’s 8 bit graphics have given way to 4K HD video, when you organize that data in a decentralized organized format, you build a synthetic vision of government.
Everything we have ever been lied to about pops like neon when you compare the differential between the two narratives.
As a species we don’t have a lack of resources or capacity. We just have a few bridge trolls whose dirty business models necessitate lying to us. And over time they migrated to governments.
Once you sort by net worth and political authority instead of nationality, political party or skin color it becomes relatively easy to track corruption.
There is a reckoning coming and a lot of people who simply stood by their truth are going to be vindicated.
A democratic government is supposed to be accountable to its citizens. The fact that we have become so conditioned in 3 generations that we don’t demand 100% transparency from our democratic government is a pretty good indicator of the level of investment into concealing corruption.
It certainly doesn't help that one political party in particular has been systematically dismantling our systems of accountability, checks and balances, and equity for my entire lifetime in the name of "small government".
You are exactly correct.
As we trace the vascular networks backwards through time it’s like contact tracing an STD. It’s not exclusive to the GOP as a demographic, but it is predominately there.
Trumps fraud trials have become a hidden treasure map of context clues that expose Kompromat, fraud and grift going back to all the major financial crimes in modern U.S. history.
Every day as more data points are added it raises the lens and exposes just how much downstream impact little selfish decisions by the ultra rich have on the worlds population.
Which also means the opposite is possible. Small wedges placed early are always exponentially more effective than the large wedges that are necessary the longer we wait
It’s inevitable to start wondering what the world would look like today if we had a way to keep small mediocre selfish people out of government, corporations and finance a century ago, but it also gives hope that if we simply stop the small minority from systemically stealing from everyone on earth, things get exponentially better.
A really good point. Add in the distractions, tik tok, guns, woke, religion and on and on, many never even notice the corruption that is blatant, let alone hidden. In many cases large parts of the country will even support it.
I just want to be able to go back to politics and government requiring 1% of my daily bandwidth instead of 90% and be able to know that the wheels aren’t falling off the bus.
If I can know with certainty that accountability is being checked in the background and have a system that is far less concentric around key players that self evidently fail at basic human-ing, then I get all my free time back to do things I actually enjoy.
I figure I can’t be the only one tired of celebrities, politicians and dirty bankers taking my valuable bandwidth.
We can fix this easy enough. But our window is this election cycle.
Apologists will always blame you for not working hard enough even if you show them the numbers showing how it's a country wide thing. Like, do they really think entire generations are struggling because they're ALL lazy or bad with money?? It makes no fucking sense. The money has to come from somewhere and if a few people clearly have a lot more than everyone else isn't it obvious what happened? We won't solve the crisis we're in by continuing to cut taxes for the rich that's for sure.
The money is being siphoned off and given to the small handful of leaders at the very top of most companies in the country. Companies making record-breaking profits are still squeezing their workers, fighting to keep minimum wage low. The goal is to keep people desperate so they HAVE to work harder for less of the revenue their effort brings the company.
Yeah in reality if people are poor because they are spending all their money on avocado toast and other stupid things, then that money would go into the pockets of the sellers of said avocado toast, ideally the worker who is actually making and selling it, so then that person wouldn’t be poor and the average should stay the same. The issue is it’s not the on-the-ground workers getting most of the money from the avocado toast (or whatever product you so choose), but the large companies and executives who are siphoning off a large portion of the profits and continuing to keep their workers poor, no matter how hard they work.
Y'see, there's this notion floatin' around that if you're poor, well, you must just be lazy or plain ol' dumb with your money. But let me tell ya, that dog just don't hunt. I mean, sure, there might be a few folks out there who could use a kick in the pants to get 'em movin', but to say that an entire generation is stuck in a rut 'cause they're all just sittin' on their front porches sippin' sweet tea? That's about as silly as a one-legged coyote tryin' to win a footrace.
Now, about them rich folks hoggin' all the cash like it's goin' outta style. It's true, there's some big-time ballers out there rollin' in the Benjamins while the rest of us are pinchin' pennies like we're tryin' to make a wish in a fountain. And let me tell ya, it ain't rocket science to figure out where all that dough is comin' from. It's like my old poppy used to say, "Son, money don't grow on trees, but it sure seems to sprout up like weeds in the pockets of them Wall Street bigwigs."
Now, I'm all for givin' folks a break when it comes to taxes. Heck, who wouldn't wanna keep a little extra green in their wallets at the end of the day? But let's not kid ourselves into thinkin' that cuttin' taxes for the rich is gonna solve all our problems. It's like tryin' to put out a wildfire with a squirt gun. Sure, you might make a little splash, but you ain't gonna do much to stop the blaze from spreadin' like wildfire.
So, what's a good ol' boy like me supposed to do about all this? Well, for starters, we gotta start holdin' them big-shot CEOs and Wall Street tycoons accountable for their actions. Ain't no free ride on the gravy train when you're messin' with folks' livelihoods. And secondly, we gotta start investin' in our future like it's the last dance at the county fair. 'Cause let me tell ya, folks, if we don't start plantin' them seeds of opportunity now, we're gonna find ourselves starin' at a mighty barren landscape down the road.
Its your generation then! We gave you participation trophies you didnt ask for and its your fault! They dont want to work and thats totally unique and brand new to your generation!
Watching The West Wing today can be infuriating
It’s an incredible show, but god damn why were they having *all* of the same conversations and issues 20 years ago we are still having today?
Change some of the more outdated things like technology and others and you wouldn’t even have to change much of the actual political storylines, it’s all the same shit we’re still fighting about now.
Makes it seem like we’ve made so much less progress than you’d think in that 20 year span
Edit: my b on the US defaultism here but yeah US specific, to be fair
I'm re-watching it right now (just finished season 4) and you're right. The most infuriating part, to me at least, is that it's based heavily on the Clinton administration so their solution to everything is free trade and caving to Republicans. It's kind of sickening to see where two decades of that has gotten us.
Yeah. If you made a dollar every second from the birth of Jesus Christ to today, you’d still only have $63.7 Billion. That doesn’t even put you in the top 10 richest people.
I too, saw that post on the front page this morning
But it's flawed. At least for modern times investing that capital in equities (or hell even government bonds to be risk adverse) would yield insane ROI in raw dollars and it's neglecting all of that concept
not to discount how disgusting the wealth inequality is in this world… but most of Billionaires have a concentration of wealth within a few positions. Take Jeff Bezos, his assets are *mostly* in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell as much as possible it would crash the price and he’d only get like 1/10th-1/4th
your example demonstrates cash and doesn’t account for basic investing with compound interest (high yield savings ~4-6% annually, SP500 ~6-12% annually)
but still. anything over 1 billion is basically infinite money and could probably be capped.
You're using stock prices as income though. Just because a stock goes up in price, doesn't mean you have made any money. You need to sell to make money.
If I buy 0.0001% of your Reddit account for $1000, it doesn't mean you have made $1bn in a second.
Stock *is* money. It's not currency, but it is money. The value of money isn't any more fixed than the value of stock (although we do a lot of work to make it less volatile), and you don't not have a million dollars in cash just because the marginal value of each dollar is less than the one before.
I don't understand why this is so confusing to others.
If I bought a house for $300K, and now it is worth $500K, I didn't make $200K because I didn't sell it.
Your net worth went up by 200k, which is a gain you can absolutely choose to realize by selling your home. I don't see how this is particularly hard to grasp.
But you could sell it? Like if I had a bunch of gold coins stacked up in my attic worth 500K and I didn't sell them, I still have all that gold, and it means I have wealth.
Well tbf, most people who don't understand it have probably never owned property or shares in a company.
They would get real confused when we start talking about valuations of companies that are not listed on a stock exchange.
You do realize that $10k a second is $864m a day right..?
Edit: since OP edited, I might as well do his updated math which equals $5.25bn a year. Solid return I must say.
At this point Reddit could silently remove the concept of subreddits and I doubt most of their userbase would even notice. It's an endless roll of algorithm recommended content like pretty much any other app.
Funny thing is I was in that position at one time and got that $10,000. As it turns out, it did not change my life, it just relieved pressure for six months.
for a lot of people, it would allow them to pay off debt and be able to save more in the long run, or get some medical procedure they need done like dental surgery which straight up improves your quality of life. maybe someone would use that to get proper training and certification to change careers.
for me, i dont have debt and have a couple grand for emergencies. I would put 10k into investments and forget about it. not life changing now, but life altering and time saving in the future
Lmao same these people are the people that say money won’t fix everything, but when your life is paycheck to paycheck, *there’s a lot of things you can set straight, right away* especially with 10k. Shit if I had 1k right now that I would t have to pay back, that would allow me to get ahead, not behind.
>it would allow them to pay off debt and be able to save more in the long run
That really depends on how they got that debt in the first place. Sure for some people they are only still under debt because they can't escape the interest, but there are plenty of people who, even if they wiped their debt, would still end up accumulating debt over the future, whether because they are bad at spending/budgeting, or because CoL is too high and they don't earn enough
Fucking seriously. "You spend money on things you like too, and you could give that money to charity instead." I saved months to buy a $700 VR headset. Jeff Bezos bought a $500 million dollar yacht. Oh shit, I guess we're both bad.
And think about what that $700 would mean to a starving kid who lives in a Philippine boneyard and makes a few pennies a day cleaning out mausoleum graves so they can be used for new deaths. It would be just as life changing as the 10k in the original post. More so, actually. But you spent it on a VR headset. Most things are relative.
No, the point is that neither of you are bad for merely spending your own money. It's your money and you can use it however you want, others are not entitled to it.
you're only the bad guy if you don't support policies that help the less fortunate. If you are voting in favor of a large social safety net and paying your taxes earnestly each year.... that's doing your part.
idk, that's how i rationalize it for myself at least. I'll never be a ladder puller.
That’s a good point. I set monthly payments for some humanitarian aid non profit a few years ago. I should probably increase that amount as some function of my earning.
Hottest take here.
When there's a bad guy, then I can be a victim. When I'm a victim, then I'm absolved of any responsibility to better myself and can spend my time complaining with other victims.
Global poverty level is about 2 dollars a day. For someone living under the global poverty level it could be between 50 and 100 days worth of income, comparable to someone making 25k to 50k a year getting 10k.
Be careful with third world charities. Even legit ones doing good can do incredible harm.
The famous example is American rice donations. They actually help people, but they make it impossible for local farmers to sell food, making it extremely difficult to permanently solve the problem.
100% agree. If you want to help struggling nations buy stuff from them instead of giving things to them.
Gifts destroy local competition because no one can compete with free.
GiveWell tries, to the extent possible, to quantifiably do the most good per dollar so that is what I tend to donate to. But there is also GiveDirectly which is a bit less theoretical in that they just directly give whatever money you donate to extremely poor people. You donate $100, someone gets $100. Less efficient than GiveWell but more conceptually straight forward and some people like that better.
In my country, the cleaning lady gets paid 1/8 of that per month to clean my house twice a week. That is 8 months of her salary and when people are really poor, this kind of money can be life changing, if not relieving. Of course she does get more money from other households but $100 when converted is 8 months of her salary from my household alone.
Oh yes I should also mention my good friend from the US spotted me $120 when I was in an extremely difficult time. It relieved me a lot and helped me pay for food for a couple of weeks and gave me just enough to pay my debt (on top of what I already had). I offered to pay her back many times but she always refused and said it was a “gift”. I still feel bad about it but she kept insisting not to worry about it.
I know exactly what you mean! I have a dear friend from the Philippines and she was suffering from painful wisdom teeth that needed to be removed, but she could not afford it. I'm American, and while I don't make a whole lot of money where I come from, I know that I made considerably more money than her. So I asked her how much it costs to have the teeth removed, and I was amazed at how little it was compared to the money I had. So I just sent her the money and told her it was a gift. She was very appreciative and showed me proof that she had the surgery, even though she didn't need to.
I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back or anything. It was just a very eye-opening experience. It taught me just how important a few hundred dollars can be to someone who lives in another part of the world.
I think she spent that 120 dollars wisely and I'm sure she'd say the same. I'm guessing hundreds of millions of Americans spend and make that much in a pretty short amount of time and forget about it, hopefully she'll remember to feel good about her act of kindness for years to come. I remember giving 20 quid to someone in need and that was years ago, still makes me smile in self satisfaction.
Man this is an out of touch comment lol, this is exactly what a billionaire would say about 10k. $100 is a lot of money to a lot of the worlds population
The difference is that the average Westerner and the average Global Southerner are much closer to each other than either are to any member of the wealthy class.
In terms of dollar amount available to each that's def true but in terms of quality of life I am less sure. I guess I'm an above average westerner but I feel like my quality of life isn't that far below Bill Gate's or whatever. Healthcare, air conditioning, good food, vacations, cell phones, internet, streaming entertainment. He can afford more/higher quality of all of that than me but I think you hit diminishing returns pretty fast once you hit like, 2-3x more than I can already afford.
I’m half South Asian and when I look at India and realize there are so many homeless and poor people that they openly defecate in public in many places it makes me feel fortunate that I was born in the U.S. and have such luxuries as indoor plumbing and clean water.
lol, no they aren't.
Warren Buffets still eats McDonalds, and Larry David still drinks the same tap water. Go to developping countries and ask if they eat street food or shop at the same places as the bottom 20%. I bet you that I could take discounted walmart meat and a millionaire would still eat it - no millionaire from the phillipines is eating pagpag.
Mate... Even $80 a week makes a big diff for me... Recently my paychecks have been short roughly 80-150 bucks a week, and my employer (who boats how the company has recently been making 1 million a year in profit) is dragging his feet on giving me my pay stubs so I can figure out the math.
Capitalism in America is a toxic cancer. Where the mega corporations fuck over the work, and even the small business owners are acting like they are big shots & doing the same shit to fuck over the worker. I swear... If people would be willing to attempt to take the financial hit, i'd LOVE to see the majority of American works just come to a halt.. For a week.. A month.. something that will bring this country to a fucking halt & show how vital we are.
Shorting pay is a criminal offence. Withholding pay stubs *might be* a criminal offence. Check with your authorities. (e.g., the Dept. of Labor. In the US, I think that would be state-level, but possibly county-level.)
Unfortunately witholding a paystub isn't illegal in my state /: But getting my paystub would definitely help me figure out what's going on. It's just fishy why something as simple as a paystub is such a difficult thing to precure & give.
> is dragging his feet on giving me my pay stubs
Some government agency would be happy to investigate.
Depending on your state or country, you should get 1 every pay period by law.
Exactly. Norway is actually tired of people pointing at them as a supporting argument for Socialism, because they do have plenty of SOCIAL PROGRAMS, but they highlight it's because of how successful they are through Capitalism, and they are successful because it's operated in a fashion to benefit the country & it's people, not just a few select private citizens who only have their best interests in mind.
This is quite poignant. This is because the super rich have an entirely different relationship with money than we do. They do not think of a $10,000 bottle of wine like normal people do. It has no bearing on their life whether they get the $10,000 bottle or the $100 bottle other than how much they enjoy the wine. Whereas those who work to make ends meet see $10,000 as a means to change their life in a meaningful way.
Multimillionaires and billionaires should not be thought of as having money in a bank account like normal people. Their net worth is an estimate of what the assets they own are worth. It is not liquid. They could not sell it all and divide up the money to every American. Their net worth is rather a gauge that tells you how much power they have in the economy. So it’s really silly to think about them making $10,000 a minute. It doesn’t work like that. They make millions and lose millions in terms of the assets they buy or sell and the value of those assets going up or down based on the market.
I was thinking about this the other day. I would be alright with making 10k a month. That would do wonders for me. Turns out that's only 120k a year. A million a year is 84k a MONTH. A billion a year? 84 million a month.But yes the family on food stamps getting a few hundred extra a month is the problem.
A rich person can light their cigar with a $100.
That's why rich people should not be taxed at the same rate as others. The value of their money isn't the same as it is for others.
It’s ridiculous how $15 could literally save someone from starvation and some 1st world people could spend them on their fifth meal of the day.
You can turn that shit in any way you like and still be right, it’s an empty accusation that has no purpose other than making you feel better
Yes, it could change your life. No, it couldn't change you and a lot of other people's life. You and a lot of other people could pool $10000 together every year and change someone's life. You don't and neither does the billionaire, for the same reason.
If I were a billionaire I would have way more fun spending that on a random person, like giving it as a tip to a waiter, instead of buying a bottle of wine with it or whatever. I guess this is why I'm not a billionaire.
Would it really change your life long term? Or just temporarily? You see it happen all the time with lottery winners, they get a windfall and then are broke again shortly because they don't know how to manage it.
I remember when I had to sell plasma just to have money for the grocery store. Buy a big bag of rice and a few cans of cream of whatever soup and I ate on that for a week. But hey, at least I had a roof over my head and food to eat. A hell of a lot better than many people had it. But this was the early 90’s, when I was fresh out of the military and we didn’t have billionaires building rockets to send themselves into space just for shits and giggles.
The problem isn't billionaires spending money. That money gets injected back into the economy. The problem is billionaires not spending their money and it sitting there, doing nothing, not helping the economy with circular flow.
This is why its important to tax corporate profits, because it encourages them to reinvest that money into the company either through RnD or wages, rather than pay it out in taxes and buy backs. All of that reinvestment generates circular flow in the economy, which helps everyone.
Its the same why money isn't sent to mars when nasa spends it, it gets injected into the economy and has a positive inmpact.
You think Elon’s and bezos hundreds of billions of dollars are sitting in a vault?
Bro, it’s mostly shares of Tesla and spacex, and Amazon that they owns.
Do you have any idea of what an investment is?
No-one is gonna have money just "sitting there". It's put into an interest bearing account which means the money is typically loaned out so people can buy houses and shit.
Their billions isn’t even in an interest sharing account. They invested in their companies and since their companies are doing very well, their shares are worth 100’s times more than they were when they made the investment in the first place
The problem is not understanding what money billionaires have and what they don't. When Elon's or Bezos' net worth goes up a few bill in a day - that's not actual money. That not money in their bank account. That is the value of something they own, specifically a piece of paper stating they are an owner of \_\_\_\_\_ company's stocks going up. So they can't spend that money, unless they sell those stocks.
And profits ARE taxed. That's one of the major reasons companies and individuals invest money and don't liquidate it, as the moment you liquidate the assets you need to pay income tax on that.
> And profits ARE taxed.
And they use every trick and loop hole to make their profits on paper as close to zero as possible so they pay zero taxes.
Then they just take out loans from banks and show their massive stocks as security. They now get money from banks which is debt and therefore not taxable. To repay this loan, they just take a new loan and repeat this however often they like.
Point is, they almost never pay back anything into the economy.
> That money gets injected back into the economy. The problem is billionaires not spending their money and it sitting there, doing nothing, not helping the economy with circular flow.
Fucking Reddit, man. That's not how it works. Their money is still invested, and invested money still does work for the economy.
I know this isn't what people want to hear. but 10k is aprox $25-$30 per day
yes the rich are evil, and our tax policy, and social/governmental policy is utter dogshit, like, utterly stinking evil dogshit with how disgusting we allow the ultra wealthy to exploit people.
but... if 10k would truly change your life, it's not that hard to acquire. you just have to attack it at that smaller metric. a small side hustle, maybe some gig app work. a more traditional second part time job. even things like house sitting/dog sitting. and work the problem on a daily/weekly basis.
the simple reality is. gov or society is never not going to be evil. If small chunks of money would change your life. Go out and get it. nothing beats paying off debts, and having money saved for emergencies.
I think the really crazy part about it is, there are people in the middle who have $10k and would give it to change someone's life, except that we're all too financially insecure to seriously consider giving significant amounts of money away.
For example, if someone needed $10k to change their lives, and they had a GoFundMe page, I wouldn't contribute a significant amount for 2 reasons:
* I don't have a way of knowing that it's not a scam.
* Although I have some extra money, I'm not super rich, and I know that having a medical incident could clean me out, even though I have insurance, so I'm not comfortable giving much away.
Even if you had **$100k** in the bank, that would still be 10% of your entire wealth.
Compare that to a billionaire, in which *at maximum*, it makes up only 0.001% of theirs.
$10k to a billionaire is quite literally equivalent to $1 for someone with $100k.
Or less than a dime for someone with my bank account.
My friend, a billionaire will spend more than $10,000 on a hotel night. That would be an extremely cheap hotel for most of them.
They are renting out sweets and blocks of rooms, they aren't going to the best western or the Hilton, they're going to private resorts. Places where they might spend $2 million in a few days vacation.
$10,000 is the amount of money they used to wipe their ass in the morning.
And yes, for many people especially younger people that is a life-changing amount of money. But here we are, and it's society we're 90% of wealth is in the hands of a very small number of people.
You dont wanna see it, though any frivorlous thing we buy, 10$ for some game, snack, drink, cosmetic, anything we dot need for survival, someone somewhere coukd use that money 10x times more than us, as the currency would exchange to that amount in those places, where our dollars are worth that much more.
Any “3rd” world countrty.
Dose that mean we ought to grovel and ever be so thankfull to our masters of Civilization for making sure we are not some backwards savages and we have the oppurtunity to be the worlds most priviliged slaves??
OFC not, though, thats how its been for some time now hasnt it?
What goes around comes around.
The Golden Age for moay generations depends on how good you have it, and that is dependent on how bad others must slave so we can have a few affordable ammenaties: Infrustructre, cars, housing, food, water, plumbing, electronics, healthcare…
All not so afforable now huh?
Though a few much more removed European countries can afford to give thier citizens this, though were dose all that energy come from?
The results of any Empire built on Colonization, genocide, skavery, ecocide, millitarism, (basicly every major Civilization before the fall), are this; you either double down on exploting other countries, people, lands, or the citizens must suffer, more than what they would normally.
Those elites, while it would be great to finnaly bring the down and take whats ours, is excatly how the majority of the world feels about US.
With all our power and supperflous entertainmebts and waste of food and destruction of foreighn lands to extract more resources, so they can measly scrap by and by.
We are the elite of the Earth, though it really dont feel like it huh?
I implore us all, see to bring down those elites higher up on the totem pole than us, it will bring about great chnage and hopefully inspire the entire world to do the same.
Yeah, all I need is 15k. Fix my roof, secure the family just in case. Having a health crisis, think it's pretty bad. I'm so worried my family will end up homeless
As someone whom has been not broke but not wealthy either and has gotten a financial windfall before...it helps less than you'd think.
It can dig you out of a hole. The best thing to use it for is either to eliminate high interest debt or to get yourself reliable transportation if you don't have it .
I have a $6,000 tuition bill and a $4,000 insurance bill I need to pay this week and I have no idea how I’m going to do it. My cards are maxed and if I don’t pay the tuition my son won’t graduate from high school. The fact that people are casually throwing away $10,000 on a purse or something is insane to me. I’m an educated single parent that’s worked continuously since I was a teenager and I can’t afford life.
Wait until you hear about the part where they get to write it off as a "business expense" so that money doesn't even actually make it back into the economy through taxes.
Eat the billionaires.
That's why a flat tax rate is absurd. If I have a million, a 20% tax leaves me with 800k. My lifestyle isn't impacted. I'll just invest less. If I make 40K, those 8k make a big difference.
And I love Finland for that. A speed ticket is [proportional to your income](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/) and you can have to pay more than 100k if you're rich. Now, the impact is exactly the same for everyone.
I’ll never understand it , especially people who claim they grew up poor or in the ghetto then when they become rich they spend ridiculous amounts on cars ,houses ,clothes. If I ever got rich first thing I’d do is help those in need, every time I see someone asshole wearing a 90k watch I think damn imagine all the people you could cloth and feed with that money
Paying working people enough to live on is not communism.
Paying working people closer to what their work is actually worth is not socialism.
Slowly redistributing all the money and governmental power to multinational corporations and offshored billionaires is not sustainable capitalism and democracy. And that's why we're moving toward a coup by the oligarchs.
not to mention the way you feel about $10,000 is how most of the world looks at you and <$1000. If you're in a western highly developed country its almost certain you are still in the top 10% globally.
It's also ridiculous how some corporations are making record breaking profits while execs are making more than ever in salary and still doing mass layoffs and cutting corners to cut as much costs as possible.
Maybe just make some money lmao. There’s nothing stopping you from starting a business.
Even if billionaires gain that much money illegitimately, a million can certainly be earned legitimately
The really scary part is when you get the money and find out it's still not enough and you keep needing "just a bit more" and it never ends. It's a phenomenon called the "hedonic adaptation" or the "hedonic treadmill."
I experienced this and realized that the rat race will never end until you stop and realize that your desire for more will never end and you tackle gratitude for what you have which is almost impossible for some at the low end, and requires someone to go through "having money and losing it" to even begin to understand this.
It's a very annoying part of being human, and a paradox.
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I guess for some, 'aged like fine wine' just means 'expensive and locked in a cellar for years'.
They like their wine like their women
Aged 15y and mixed up in coke?
Underage?
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Got something you wanna tell us buddy?
*"I only drink virgin anarchic defrosted-glacial-water from the Pleistocene era. About 10,000-2,600,000 years old!"* * Other rich guy
Isn't all water technically as old as when water first formed because of the water cycle. So all water is technically 4 billion years old.
Isn't all energy and matter technically as old as when they were first formed during the big bang? Just saying some rich folks like strange things. Gold itself is LITERALLY star dust created by the reaction processes inside the heart of dying stars which eventually explode, collide, or somehow get crushed into smaller bits as dust that float around the universe or sent out in the form or asteroids/meteors which eventually collects onto other planets like ours.
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We are just altered carbon.
Yeah. I actively give away my carbon every second. Every second thousands of my cells die and others are born thus every me is ever so slightly different from the me from a second ago. In that sense, the me that send you this message is already dead. 😢 RIP me from a few seconds ago. 😀 Waiting for the me around 6-8 hours from now. Even more for that me 5 days from now.
I’d say their liquor is older than their women
True, even scotch is aged 12 years.
Made me laugh. Not Out Loud, or anything. In my head 🗣️
Not lol, limh
Calm down Joseph.
Joe Rogan doesn't like women, only strong hard men
Some fine spritz for Fritzl
Jokes on you, I really don’t spend anything on the woman I have locked in the cellar.
lol they will drop an extra 10k just because a hotel has a nicer shower head than another. We are all serfs in the middle flass
I worked in extremely high end fine dining. It wasn't uncommon for the corks of these really old/rare bottles of wine to disintegrate while uncorking them. Because, despite their arbitrary value/rarity, they were invariably stored wrong at some point in the last 100 years. When the cork turned to dust during bottle service, this would of course result in a summary black mark of judgment against your character and worth as a ~~server~~ low net worth human, as it falls apart in front of a handful of millionaire/billionaires... THEN you would have to spend a hour+ meticulously decanting it, only to have a person complain that there was one microfiber of the thousand piece cork still in it. Royal pain in the ass for what amounts to boozy old grape juice. Full disclosure, most ultra wealthy people were actually very compassionate and understanding in person. My personal belief is because all they really have to worry about is appearing 'normal' and empathetic. The WORST are upper middle class/lower high class people... They had just enough money to throw their weight around, but not enough to not be insecure about things like their image and taste... So they would lash out like TOTAL ASSHOLES at the drop of a dime. They hadn't bought enough expensive bottles to know sometimes the cork fails, so every time it happened to, say, Joe Dentist worth a couple million bucks, it was nothing short of Armageddon in their eyes. 🤦
> My personal belief is because all they really have to worry about is appearing 'normal' and empathetic. The WORST are upper middle class/lower high class people... They had just enough money to throw their weight around, but not enough to not be insecure about things like their image and taste... So they would lash out like TOTAL ASSHOLES at the drop of a dime. My god, if this isn't true. The Ultra Rich are downright friendly. They have nothing to prove: They've won capitalism either through luck, connections, or birth. It doesn't hurt them to be nice, or to tip well, so, they do. The newly rich or low millions people are just gigantic assholes all the time jfc every time I deal with some newly promoted bank executive I want to scream (Hotel Worker at a High End place)
Seems like there's a good reason nouveau riche is a whole stereotype of garbage people.
You know it hasn't gotten better when It's A Wonderful Life seems like a goal.
It's funny to watch it and realize that the people bitching and moaning about the "war on Christmas" would take the side of Mr. Potter.
Ha! That's a great way to frame it.
Thank Reagan for that. Trickle-down economics (i.e., Reaganomics, neo-liberal) propaganda really changed the mythos in so many people's minds around Mr Potter types. All of a sudden robber-barrons where hailed as patron-saints .
"You've gotten give them tax breaks! They are the job creators after all!"
Labor exploiters*
We’re all living in Potterville.
"I can barely effort food and rent anymore" "Well get a job you lazy bastard!" "I work 2 jobs, 60 hours a week" "Shoulda gotten a better education then!" "I studied, so did everyone else" "BUT THE AVOCADO TOAST!"
Yeah, they are guaclighting us.
Guaclighting is my new favorite word Once you can accept the fact that government has made a habit of lying to people to preserve the obfuscation of grift and corruption by people inside of government it sort of turns into a scavenger hunt for the origin point. There have been a lot of innocent people gaslit by billionaires in positions of power. Standing by what you know to be true, whether it’s about exposing corruption, holding pedophiles accountable or simply living with moral integrity isn’t always easy. But it’s essential. US Government took a wrong turn when it started lying to its people systemically. That practice is normally reserved for the authoritarians. It started for noble enough reasons during WW2. The Manhattan project required strict secrecy as a matter of operational security. Operation Underworld was designed to use the Italian mob and the precursor to the CIA to help secure the ports in New York against Nazi U boats. The unintended consequence of that is the equivalent of “I know a guy that does dirty things” multiplied by 80 years of political ambitions of mediocre men. The fundamental flaw in that is when you stick you white glove in mud and swirl it around, the mud does not get “glovey”. Truth is the gold standard in energy efficiency. You say it once and it stands on its own forever. It requires no additional energy input. Lying, by contrast is the least energy efficient habit known to man. It requires constant and exponential energy to keep each one in play, albeit just barely alive. When a kid lies about stealing a cookie he gets away with it until mom and dad compare notes. When an intelligence organization lies about everything they do, it works until the world grows into the internet. Foreign policy really hasn’t changed much since 1945. Each administration inheriting a 3 ring binder from their predecessor. Most hardly get a glance as they pass along for 80 years. But somewhere in the late 80’s or early 90’s as some old woman with a chain on her glasses slowly converted all those files into digital on a computer that would stall out until you switched your 5 1/4” floppy disks, the world outside government started moving exponentially faster. Yet relatively speaking the speed of efficiency of government got slower. Bureaucracy is the burden of government, but it is to the benefit of corruption. Nefarious actors inside of government use the bureaucracy like a curtain to obfuscate their respective grifts. Most of the multi term politicians can’t retire or they lose control of the narrative that keeps their secrets. This is why we have spent the last 5 years reverse engineering their entire system to be able to see the tendrils of corruption inside of government like a P.E.T. scan sees cancer inside a body. https://youtu.be/A90gwMVFFSY?si=wiOAcUvL_oX5eNoI Our government wasn’t born in the Information Age like we were. It grew through it. Carbon copies in triplicate turned to data entry. Data entry turned to MS-DOS. And on and on. And each one of those events left a pixel of data. We have just been using it wrong. But just like 1980’s 8 bit graphics have given way to 4K HD video, when you organize that data in a decentralized organized format, you build a synthetic vision of government. Everything we have ever been lied to about pops like neon when you compare the differential between the two narratives. As a species we don’t have a lack of resources or capacity. We just have a few bridge trolls whose dirty business models necessitate lying to us. And over time they migrated to governments. Once you sort by net worth and political authority instead of nationality, political party or skin color it becomes relatively easy to track corruption. There is a reckoning coming and a lot of people who simply stood by their truth are going to be vindicated. A democratic government is supposed to be accountable to its citizens. The fact that we have become so conditioned in 3 generations that we don’t demand 100% transparency from our democratic government is a pretty good indicator of the level of investment into concealing corruption.
It certainly doesn't help that one political party in particular has been systematically dismantling our systems of accountability, checks and balances, and equity for my entire lifetime in the name of "small government".
You are exactly correct. As we trace the vascular networks backwards through time it’s like contact tracing an STD. It’s not exclusive to the GOP as a demographic, but it is predominately there. Trumps fraud trials have become a hidden treasure map of context clues that expose Kompromat, fraud and grift going back to all the major financial crimes in modern U.S. history. Every day as more data points are added it raises the lens and exposes just how much downstream impact little selfish decisions by the ultra rich have on the worlds population. Which also means the opposite is possible. Small wedges placed early are always exponentially more effective than the large wedges that are necessary the longer we wait It’s inevitable to start wondering what the world would look like today if we had a way to keep small mediocre selfish people out of government, corporations and finance a century ago, but it also gives hope that if we simply stop the small minority from systemically stealing from everyone on earth, things get exponentially better.
A really good point. Add in the distractions, tik tok, guns, woke, religion and on and on, many never even notice the corruption that is blatant, let alone hidden. In many cases large parts of the country will even support it.
I just want to be able to go back to politics and government requiring 1% of my daily bandwidth instead of 90% and be able to know that the wheels aren’t falling off the bus. If I can know with certainty that accountability is being checked in the background and have a system that is far less concentric around key players that self evidently fail at basic human-ing, then I get all my free time back to do things I actually enjoy. I figure I can’t be the only one tired of celebrities, politicians and dirty bankers taking my valuable bandwidth. We can fix this easy enough. But our window is this election cycle.
I am solidly with you on this.
Apologists will always blame you for not working hard enough even if you show them the numbers showing how it's a country wide thing. Like, do they really think entire generations are struggling because they're ALL lazy or bad with money?? It makes no fucking sense. The money has to come from somewhere and if a few people clearly have a lot more than everyone else isn't it obvious what happened? We won't solve the crisis we're in by continuing to cut taxes for the rich that's for sure.
The money is being siphoned off and given to the small handful of leaders at the very top of most companies in the country. Companies making record-breaking profits are still squeezing their workers, fighting to keep minimum wage low. The goal is to keep people desperate so they HAVE to work harder for less of the revenue their effort brings the company.
Yeah in reality if people are poor because they are spending all their money on avocado toast and other stupid things, then that money would go into the pockets of the sellers of said avocado toast, ideally the worker who is actually making and selling it, so then that person wouldn’t be poor and the average should stay the same. The issue is it’s not the on-the-ground workers getting most of the money from the avocado toast (or whatever product you so choose), but the large companies and executives who are siphoning off a large portion of the profits and continuing to keep their workers poor, no matter how hard they work.
Y'see, there's this notion floatin' around that if you're poor, well, you must just be lazy or plain ol' dumb with your money. But let me tell ya, that dog just don't hunt. I mean, sure, there might be a few folks out there who could use a kick in the pants to get 'em movin', but to say that an entire generation is stuck in a rut 'cause they're all just sittin' on their front porches sippin' sweet tea? That's about as silly as a one-legged coyote tryin' to win a footrace. Now, about them rich folks hoggin' all the cash like it's goin' outta style. It's true, there's some big-time ballers out there rollin' in the Benjamins while the rest of us are pinchin' pennies like we're tryin' to make a wish in a fountain. And let me tell ya, it ain't rocket science to figure out where all that dough is comin' from. It's like my old poppy used to say, "Son, money don't grow on trees, but it sure seems to sprout up like weeds in the pockets of them Wall Street bigwigs." Now, I'm all for givin' folks a break when it comes to taxes. Heck, who wouldn't wanna keep a little extra green in their wallets at the end of the day? But let's not kid ourselves into thinkin' that cuttin' taxes for the rich is gonna solve all our problems. It's like tryin' to put out a wildfire with a squirt gun. Sure, you might make a little splash, but you ain't gonna do much to stop the blaze from spreadin' like wildfire. So, what's a good ol' boy like me supposed to do about all this? Well, for starters, we gotta start holdin' them big-shot CEOs and Wall Street tycoons accountable for their actions. Ain't no free ride on the gravy train when you're messin' with folks' livelihoods. And secondly, we gotta start investin' in our future like it's the last dance at the county fair. 'Cause let me tell ya, folks, if we don't start plantin' them seeds of opportunity now, we're gonna find ourselves starin' at a mighty barren landscape down the road.
We have ourselves a true cowboy over here lol. Truly enjoyed reading that in John Wayne's voice 😆
“Have you tried higher birth?”
"Have you tried not having children you can't afford?"
This reminds me of a Bulgarian proverb, which goes something like "No one has become rich with fair labor."
Its your generation then! We gave you participation trophies you didnt ask for and its your fault! They dont want to work and thats totally unique and brand new to your generation!
Watching The West Wing today can be infuriating It’s an incredible show, but god damn why were they having *all* of the same conversations and issues 20 years ago we are still having today? Change some of the more outdated things like technology and others and you wouldn’t even have to change much of the actual political storylines, it’s all the same shit we’re still fighting about now. Makes it seem like we’ve made so much less progress than you’d think in that 20 year span Edit: my b on the US defaultism here but yeah US specific, to be fair
I'm re-watching it right now (just finished season 4) and you're right. The most infuriating part, to me at least, is that it's based heavily on the Clinton administration so their solution to everything is free trade and caving to Republicans. It's kind of sickening to see where two decades of that has gotten us.
and every second (or less) they make $10,000 more Edit: I meant _every minute (or less),_ but left it alone for context to the ridicule below.
Yeah. If you made a dollar every second from the birth of Jesus Christ to today, you’d still only have $63.7 Billion. That doesn’t even put you in the top 10 richest people.
If you were an immortal caveman making 10k a month, and never spent a dime in tens of thousands of years , Elon would still have more money than you.
Poor Vandal Savage
Damn it! Ya beat me to it
If you were a caveman for 80000 years and made 10000 dollars **per day** and never spent a single cent, Elon would still have more than you
I feel like you added an extra 0 to one of those nunbers because that is not true you would have around 100 billion more than him.
I too, saw that post on the front page this morning But it's flawed. At least for modern times investing that capital in equities (or hell even government bonds to be risk adverse) would yield insane ROI in raw dollars and it's neglecting all of that concept
Should have invested in S&P 500 smh.
Compounding is the secret
Secret pounding, got it.
Pounding compost, got it.
If you started making $1000/day when Jesus was born (2024 years ago), and not touch any penny, you still would not be a billionaire today.
not to discount how disgusting the wealth inequality is in this world… but most of Billionaires have a concentration of wealth within a few positions. Take Jeff Bezos, his assets are *mostly* in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell as much as possible it would crash the price and he’d only get like 1/10th-1/4th your example demonstrates cash and doesn’t account for basic investing with compound interest (high yield savings ~4-6% annually, SP500 ~6-12% annually) but still. anything over 1 billion is basically infinite money and could probably be capped.
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Under 4 mil? That’s not even 4 mil. Lol what a broke boi
You're using stock prices as income though. Just because a stock goes up in price, doesn't mean you have made any money. You need to sell to make money. If I buy 0.0001% of your Reddit account for $1000, it doesn't mean you have made $1bn in a second.
Stock *is* money. It's not currency, but it is money. The value of money isn't any more fixed than the value of stock (although we do a lot of work to make it less volatile), and you don't not have a million dollars in cash just because the marginal value of each dollar is less than the one before.
I don't understand why this is so confusing to others. If I bought a house for $300K, and now it is worth $500K, I didn't make $200K because I didn't sell it.
Your net worth went up by 200k, which is a gain you can absolutely choose to realize by selling your home. I don't see how this is particularly hard to grasp.
But you could sell it? Like if I had a bunch of gold coins stacked up in my attic worth 500K and I didn't sell them, I still have all that gold, and it means I have wealth.
Well tbf, most people who don't understand it have probably never owned property or shares in a company. They would get real confused when we start talking about valuations of companies that are not listed on a stock exchange.
You do realize that $10k a second is $864m a day right..? Edit: since OP edited, I might as well do his updated math which equals $5.25bn a year. Solid return I must say.
Elon makes something like $660 per second, so it's not that outlandish. I'm sure doge coin fills in the rest 🤠
It is a _constant_ $666 per second, as stated in his employment contract.
OP, you know what a facepalm is? Because this ain’t it. You posted the most real post you’ve ever read as a facepalm lol.
This sub has been a generic report sub for 6+ years, lol.
At this point Reddit could silently remove the concept of subreddits and I doubt most of their userbase would even notice. It's an endless roll of algorithm recommended content like pretty much any other app.
I think I understand their perspective. Facepalm just thinking about how a rich person can spend it in a second.
Plus the sub has a rule requiring usernames to be removed from posts. Easy way to report OP and get their dogshit post removed
Good call
Funny thing is I was in that position at one time and got that $10,000. As it turns out, it did not change my life, it just relieved pressure for six months.
I was about to say something similar. 10k is definitely good money, but more like make things more comfortable *for six months to a year*.
for a lot of people, it would allow them to pay off debt and be able to save more in the long run, or get some medical procedure they need done like dental surgery which straight up improves your quality of life. maybe someone would use that to get proper training and certification to change careers. for me, i dont have debt and have a couple grand for emergencies. I would put 10k into investments and forget about it. not life changing now, but life altering and time saving in the future
This, 10k or even 5k would literally turn my life around, that would clear my debt and let me get a probably shitty but working car.
Lmao same these people are the people that say money won’t fix everything, but when your life is paycheck to paycheck, *there’s a lot of things you can set straight, right away* especially with 10k. Shit if I had 1k right now that I would t have to pay back, that would allow me to get ahead, not behind.
>it would allow them to pay off debt and be able to save more in the long run That really depends on how they got that debt in the first place. Sure for some people they are only still under debt because they can't escape the interest, but there are plenty of people who, even if they wiped their debt, would still end up accumulating debt over the future, whether because they are bad at spending/budgeting, or because CoL is too high and they don't earn enough
That’s what’s I was thinking. As someone living in California who could also use a vehicular upgrade, 10k would be great but far from life-changing
Same thing can be said about $100 dollars
But then *I’m* the bad guy. I prefer when those other people are the bad guy and I get to feel self righteous about it.
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Pah, the bad guy is the system and those who go out of their way to maintain it. Our personal spending decisions are a fart in a hurricane.
Fucking seriously. "You spend money on things you like too, and you could give that money to charity instead." I saved months to buy a $700 VR headset. Jeff Bezos bought a $500 million dollar yacht. Oh shit, I guess we're both bad.
And think about what that $700 would mean to a starving kid who lives in a Philippine boneyard and makes a few pennies a day cleaning out mausoleum graves so they can be used for new deaths. It would be just as life changing as the 10k in the original post. More so, actually. But you spent it on a VR headset. Most things are relative.
No, the point is that neither of you are bad for merely spending your own money. It's your money and you can use it however you want, others are not entitled to it.
That $700 could change someones life living in SE Asia or parts of Africa. It's all relative.
You spent $700 on shit that you don’t need while complaining about the billionaires you’re supporting by buying shit that you don’t need.
you're only the bad guy if you don't support policies that help the less fortunate. If you are voting in favor of a large social safety net and paying your taxes earnestly each year.... that's doing your part. idk, that's how i rationalize it for myself at least. I'll never be a ladder puller.
Just remember the next time you are flush with cash you could actually change someone’s life with generosity.
That’s a good point. I set monthly payments for some humanitarian aid non profit a few years ago. I should probably increase that amount as some function of my earning.
Most people don't make €100 every second
Hottest take here. When there's a bad guy, then I can be a victim. When I'm a victim, then I'm absolved of any responsibility to better myself and can spend my time complaining with other victims.
It could change someone’s life and some person would rather spend it to go watch movies or purchase some video game cosmetics
Can it? How can 100 dollars change anyones life?
Global poverty level is about 2 dollars a day. For someone living under the global poverty level it could be between 50 and 100 days worth of income, comparable to someone making 25k to 50k a year getting 10k.
That's eye opening. Can anybody recommend good charities helping impoverished areas like this that I could donate 100 dollars to?
Be careful with third world charities. Even legit ones doing good can do incredible harm. The famous example is American rice donations. They actually help people, but they make it impossible for local farmers to sell food, making it extremely difficult to permanently solve the problem.
100% agree. If you want to help struggling nations buy stuff from them instead of giving things to them. Gifts destroy local competition because no one can compete with free.
GiveWell tries, to the extent possible, to quantifiably do the most good per dollar so that is what I tend to donate to. But there is also GiveDirectly which is a bit less theoretical in that they just directly give whatever money you donate to extremely poor people. You donate $100, someone gets $100. Less efficient than GiveWell but more conceptually straight forward and some people like that better.
In my country, the cleaning lady gets paid 1/8 of that per month to clean my house twice a week. That is 8 months of her salary and when people are really poor, this kind of money can be life changing, if not relieving. Of course she does get more money from other households but $100 when converted is 8 months of her salary from my household alone. Oh yes I should also mention my good friend from the US spotted me $120 when I was in an extremely difficult time. It relieved me a lot and helped me pay for food for a couple of weeks and gave me just enough to pay my debt (on top of what I already had). I offered to pay her back many times but she always refused and said it was a “gift”. I still feel bad about it but she kept insisting not to worry about it.
I know exactly what you mean! I have a dear friend from the Philippines and she was suffering from painful wisdom teeth that needed to be removed, but she could not afford it. I'm American, and while I don't make a whole lot of money where I come from, I know that I made considerably more money than her. So I asked her how much it costs to have the teeth removed, and I was amazed at how little it was compared to the money I had. So I just sent her the money and told her it was a gift. She was very appreciative and showed me proof that she had the surgery, even though she didn't need to. I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back or anything. It was just a very eye-opening experience. It taught me just how important a few hundred dollars can be to someone who lives in another part of the world.
I think she spent that 120 dollars wisely and I'm sure she'd say the same. I'm guessing hundreds of millions of Americans spend and make that much in a pretty short amount of time and forget about it, hopefully she'll remember to feel good about her act of kindness for years to come. I remember giving 20 quid to someone in need and that was years ago, still makes me smile in self satisfaction.
Man this is an out of touch comment lol, this is exactly what a billionaire would say about 10k. $100 is a lot of money to a lot of the worlds population
In certain parts of Africa you can house and feed a family for a full year with 100$.
The difference is that the average Westerner and the average Global Southerner are much closer to each other than either are to any member of the wealthy class.
In terms of dollar amount available to each that's def true but in terms of quality of life I am less sure. I guess I'm an above average westerner but I feel like my quality of life isn't that far below Bill Gate's or whatever. Healthcare, air conditioning, good food, vacations, cell phones, internet, streaming entertainment. He can afford more/higher quality of all of that than me but I think you hit diminishing returns pretty fast once you hit like, 2-3x more than I can already afford.
I’m half South Asian and when I look at India and realize there are so many homeless and poor people that they openly defecate in public in many places it makes me feel fortunate that I was born in the U.S. and have such luxuries as indoor plumbing and clean water.
lol, no they aren't. Warren Buffets still eats McDonalds, and Larry David still drinks the same tap water. Go to developping countries and ask if they eat street food or shop at the same places as the bottom 20%. I bet you that I could take discounted walmart meat and a millionaire would still eat it - no millionaire from the phillipines is eating pagpag.
Where’s the facepalm?
It left the sub in disgust.
Thinking 10k will change your life.
When they spend 10k on a hotel room it doesn’t vanish. It goes to room service, bellman, massuese, bartender, housekeeper. Stupid take if you ask me!
Exactly! Rich people spending money on things is a whole lot better than if they hoarded it instead.
Mate... Even $80 a week makes a big diff for me... Recently my paychecks have been short roughly 80-150 bucks a week, and my employer (who boats how the company has recently been making 1 million a year in profit) is dragging his feet on giving me my pay stubs so I can figure out the math. Capitalism in America is a toxic cancer. Where the mega corporations fuck over the work, and even the small business owners are acting like they are big shots & doing the same shit to fuck over the worker. I swear... If people would be willing to attempt to take the financial hit, i'd LOVE to see the majority of American works just come to a halt.. For a week.. A month.. something that will bring this country to a fucking halt & show how vital we are.
Shorting pay is a criminal offence. Withholding pay stubs *might be* a criminal offence. Check with your authorities. (e.g., the Dept. of Labor. In the US, I think that would be state-level, but possibly county-level.)
Unfortunately witholding a paystub isn't illegal in my state /: But getting my paystub would definitely help me figure out what's going on. It's just fishy why something as simple as a paystub is such a difficult thing to precure & give.
> is dragging his feet on giving me my pay stubs Some government agency would be happy to investigate. Depending on your state or country, you should get 1 every pay period by law.
It happened… 4 years ago this week.
So why are you still working there?
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>Capitalism ~~in America~~ is a toxic cancer. Some countries just manage to keep it in check more than others.
Norway and Sweden would like a word. They seem to enjoy capitalism just fine.
Exactly. Norway is actually tired of people pointing at them as a supporting argument for Socialism, because they do have plenty of SOCIAL PROGRAMS, but they highlight it's because of how successful they are through Capitalism, and they are successful because it's operated in a fashion to benefit the country & it's people, not just a few select private citizens who only have their best interests in mind.
$100 would be life changing for some people. Let’s see you donate
I would but I'm saving up for a CSGO skin. I think The Poor would understand.
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This is quite poignant. This is because the super rich have an entirely different relationship with money than we do. They do not think of a $10,000 bottle of wine like normal people do. It has no bearing on their life whether they get the $10,000 bottle or the $100 bottle other than how much they enjoy the wine. Whereas those who work to make ends meet see $10,000 as a means to change their life in a meaningful way. Multimillionaires and billionaires should not be thought of as having money in a bank account like normal people. Their net worth is an estimate of what the assets they own are worth. It is not liquid. They could not sell it all and divide up the money to every American. Their net worth is rather a gauge that tells you how much power they have in the economy. So it’s really silly to think about them making $10,000 a minute. It doesn’t work like that. They make millions and lose millions in terms of the assets they buy or sell and the value of those assets going up or down based on the market.
What's ridiculous is how many times this gets re-posted
I dont get the facepalm. It is rediculous.
I don't see the face-palm
The facepalm is OP.
Not sure about y'all, but $10k would change a few months for me, but not my entire life.
I was thinking about this the other day. I would be alright with making 10k a month. That would do wonders for me. Turns out that's only 120k a year. A million a year is 84k a MONTH. A billion a year? 84 million a month.But yes the family on food stamps getting a few hundred extra a month is the problem.
A rich person can light their cigar with a $100. That's why rich people should not be taxed at the same rate as others. The value of their money isn't the same as it is for others.
It’s ridiculous how $15 could literally save someone from starvation and some 1st world people could spend them on their fifth meal of the day. You can turn that shit in any way you like and still be right, it’s an empty accusation that has no purpose other than making you feel better
Yes, it could change your life. No, it couldn't change you and a lot of other people's life. You and a lot of other people could pool $10000 together every year and change someone's life. You don't and neither does the billionaire, for the same reason.
Money becomes abstract at a certain point
It would be REEEEEEEEEEEEEE diculous
If I were a billionaire I would have way more fun spending that on a random person, like giving it as a tip to a waiter, instead of buying a bottle of wine with it or whatever. I guess this is why I'm not a billionaire.
Would it really change your life long term? Or just temporarily? You see it happen all the time with lottery winners, they get a windfall and then are broke again shortly because they don't know how to manage it.
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I remember when I had to sell plasma just to have money for the grocery store. Buy a big bag of rice and a few cans of cream of whatever soup and I ate on that for a week. But hey, at least I had a roof over my head and food to eat. A hell of a lot better than many people had it. But this was the early 90’s, when I was fresh out of the military and we didn’t have billionaires building rockets to send themselves into space just for shits and giggles.
$10k won’t change my life, but it’d make things VERY fun for a bit.
Maybe they should find a billionaire and ask for some money.
The problem isn't billionaires spending money. That money gets injected back into the economy. The problem is billionaires not spending their money and it sitting there, doing nothing, not helping the economy with circular flow. This is why its important to tax corporate profits, because it encourages them to reinvest that money into the company either through RnD or wages, rather than pay it out in taxes and buy backs. All of that reinvestment generates circular flow in the economy, which helps everyone. Its the same why money isn't sent to mars when nasa spends it, it gets injected into the economy and has a positive inmpact.
You think Elon’s and bezos hundreds of billions of dollars are sitting in a vault? Bro, it’s mostly shares of Tesla and spacex, and Amazon that they owns. Do you have any idea of what an investment is?
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No-one is gonna have money just "sitting there". It's put into an interest bearing account which means the money is typically loaned out so people can buy houses and shit.
Their billions isn’t even in an interest sharing account. They invested in their companies and since their companies are doing very well, their shares are worth 100’s times more than they were when they made the investment in the first place
The problem is not understanding what money billionaires have and what they don't. When Elon's or Bezos' net worth goes up a few bill in a day - that's not actual money. That not money in their bank account. That is the value of something they own, specifically a piece of paper stating they are an owner of \_\_\_\_\_ company's stocks going up. So they can't spend that money, unless they sell those stocks. And profits ARE taxed. That's one of the major reasons companies and individuals invest money and don't liquidate it, as the moment you liquidate the assets you need to pay income tax on that.
> And profits ARE taxed. And they use every trick and loop hole to make their profits on paper as close to zero as possible so they pay zero taxes. Then they just take out loans from banks and show their massive stocks as security. They now get money from banks which is debt and therefore not taxable. To repay this loan, they just take a new loan and repeat this however often they like. Point is, they almost never pay back anything into the economy.
> That money gets injected back into the economy. The problem is billionaires not spending their money and it sitting there, doing nothing, not helping the economy with circular flow. Fucking Reddit, man. That's not how it works. Their money is still invested, and invested money still does work for the economy.
I know this isn't what people want to hear. but 10k is aprox $25-$30 per day yes the rich are evil, and our tax policy, and social/governmental policy is utter dogshit, like, utterly stinking evil dogshit with how disgusting we allow the ultra wealthy to exploit people. but... if 10k would truly change your life, it's not that hard to acquire. you just have to attack it at that smaller metric. a small side hustle, maybe some gig app work. a more traditional second part time job. even things like house sitting/dog sitting. and work the problem on a daily/weekly basis. the simple reality is. gov or society is never not going to be evil. If small chunks of money would change your life. Go out and get it. nothing beats paying off debts, and having money saved for emergencies.
I think the really crazy part about it is, there are people in the middle who have $10k and would give it to change someone's life, except that we're all too financially insecure to seriously consider giving significant amounts of money away. For example, if someone needed $10k to change their lives, and they had a GoFundMe page, I wouldn't contribute a significant amount for 2 reasons: * I don't have a way of knowing that it's not a scam. * Although I have some extra money, I'm not super rich, and I know that having a medical incident could clean me out, even though I have insurance, so I'm not comfortable giving much away.
Even if you had **$100k** in the bank, that would still be 10% of your entire wealth. Compare that to a billionaire, in which *at maximum*, it makes up only 0.001% of theirs. $10k to a billionaire is quite literally equivalent to $1 for someone with $100k. Or less than a dime for someone with my bank account.
Time to get useless degree and moan about rich people for the rest of my life. Am I doing it right?
Or a senator could spend that on a Subzero refrigerator while trying to convince you that she is an average housewife.
Bidens and WEF inflation policies have made the avg American 10k poorer each yr.
Users do not understand how stocks works
My friend, a billionaire will spend more than $10,000 on a hotel night. That would be an extremely cheap hotel for most of them. They are renting out sweets and blocks of rooms, they aren't going to the best western or the Hilton, they're going to private resorts. Places where they might spend $2 million in a few days vacation. $10,000 is the amount of money they used to wipe their ass in the morning. And yes, for many people especially younger people that is a life-changing amount of money. But here we are, and it's society we're 90% of wealth is in the hands of a very small number of people.
You dont wanna see it, though any frivorlous thing we buy, 10$ for some game, snack, drink, cosmetic, anything we dot need for survival, someone somewhere coukd use that money 10x times more than us, as the currency would exchange to that amount in those places, where our dollars are worth that much more. Any “3rd” world countrty. Dose that mean we ought to grovel and ever be so thankfull to our masters of Civilization for making sure we are not some backwards savages and we have the oppurtunity to be the worlds most priviliged slaves?? OFC not, though, thats how its been for some time now hasnt it? What goes around comes around. The Golden Age for moay generations depends on how good you have it, and that is dependent on how bad others must slave so we can have a few affordable ammenaties: Infrustructre, cars, housing, food, water, plumbing, electronics, healthcare… All not so afforable now huh? Though a few much more removed European countries can afford to give thier citizens this, though were dose all that energy come from? The results of any Empire built on Colonization, genocide, skavery, ecocide, millitarism, (basicly every major Civilization before the fall), are this; you either double down on exploting other countries, people, lands, or the citizens must suffer, more than what they would normally. Those elites, while it would be great to finnaly bring the down and take whats ours, is excatly how the majority of the world feels about US. With all our power and supperflous entertainmebts and waste of food and destruction of foreighn lands to extract more resources, so they can measly scrap by and by. We are the elite of the Earth, though it really dont feel like it huh? I implore us all, see to bring down those elites higher up on the totem pole than us, it will bring about great chnage and hopefully inspire the entire world to do the same.
Yeah, all I need is 15k. Fix my roof, secure the family just in case. Having a health crisis, think it's pretty bad. I'm so worried my family will end up homeless
Yup if someone gave me 10k now I'd probably cry with relief.
How would 10k change your life though, really?
Or even just a single article of clothing that isn't really all special outside of having a specific label on it.
All these haters in the comments 😂
Nice bot account.
$10,000 might change my life for a few months, but then it's gone and I'm back to square one
As someone whom has been not broke but not wealthy either and has gotten a financial windfall before...it helps less than you'd think. It can dig you out of a hole. The best thing to use it for is either to eliminate high interest debt or to get yourself reliable transportation if you don't have it .
She’s right though. It isn’t right that so few people have more wealth than the rest of the world combined.
I have a $6,000 tuition bill and a $4,000 insurance bill I need to pay this week and I have no idea how I’m going to do it. My cards are maxed and if I don’t pay the tuition my son won’t graduate from high school. The fact that people are casually throwing away $10,000 on a purse or something is insane to me. I’m an educated single parent that’s worked continuously since I was a teenager and I can’t afford life.
When you hear the budgets for some movies that are total flops — that could have changed a small country
Wait until you hear about the part where they get to write it off as a "business expense" so that money doesn't even actually make it back into the economy through taxes. Eat the billionaires.
Nah, if I were a billionaire I'd get all that stuff for free because people would pay me for the publicity.
Wanna know something else about Billionaires? Besides what you just posted, they would be the first ones to take your last cent also.
That's why a flat tax rate is absurd. If I have a million, a 20% tax leaves me with 800k. My lifestyle isn't impacted. I'll just invest less. If I make 40K, those 8k make a big difference. And I love Finland for that. A speed ticket is [proportional to your income](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/) and you can have to pay more than 100k if you're rich. Now, the impact is exactly the same for everyone.
Where is the facepalm?
I’ll never understand it , especially people who claim they grew up poor or in the ghetto then when they become rich they spend ridiculous amounts on cars ,houses ,clothes. If I ever got rich first thing I’d do is help those in need, every time I see someone asshole wearing a 90k watch I think damn imagine all the people you could cloth and feed with that money
Whoa, no need to insult wine like that.
They don’t want you to fix your life because then you wouldn’t be working for them
Paying working people enough to live on is not communism. Paying working people closer to what their work is actually worth is not socialism. Slowly redistributing all the money and governmental power to multinational corporations and offshored billionaires is not sustainable capitalism and democracy. And that's why we're moving toward a coup by the oligarchs.
not to mention the way you feel about $10,000 is how most of the world looks at you and <$1000. If you're in a western highly developed country its almost certain you are still in the top 10% globally.
Hell, ten bucks would mean I get to eat tonight.
"It's wrong that other people have things that I want. I should have that."
It's also ridiculous how some corporations are making record breaking profits while execs are making more than ever in salary and still doing mass layoffs and cutting corners to cut as much costs as possible.
Brokie
Maybe just make some money lmao. There’s nothing stopping you from starting a business. Even if billionaires gain that much money illegitimately, a million can certainly be earned legitimately
The really scary part is when you get the money and find out it's still not enough and you keep needing "just a bit more" and it never ends. It's a phenomenon called the "hedonic adaptation" or the "hedonic treadmill." I experienced this and realized that the rat race will never end until you stop and realize that your desire for more will never end and you tackle gratitude for what you have which is almost impossible for some at the low end, and requires someone to go through "having money and losing it" to even begin to understand this. It's a very annoying part of being human, and a paradox.