Eat the rich.
Yeah, I think people are making some pretty naive assumptions about all the new datacenters popping up for AI.
What the fuck do you think the government is asking AI to do for them? Shitty cartoon artwork? Photoshopping vacation photos? Or, maaaaaaybe…I dunno…something like data collection and analysis on every byte of information sent across the tubes of the interwebs?
Seems like a bit of a “pickme” post. You do you, don’t worry about your 2 million updoots on reddit.
Yeah…you’re going to have to remind me again what point you’re trying to make?
That democracy and democratic socialism are outliers and fated to be a footnote in the history books.
The unfortunate truth is that hate and violence almost always prevails over peace and love.
Too many people asked “can we
dosell this thing?” when they should have been asking “should wedosell this thing?”
Right now in 2026: Russia. The Middle East. Most of Africa.
Geographically speaking, half of the world is currently at war in one form or another.
It’s not though?
1,000,000,000/50,000,000 = 1:20 ratio
It’s like $20 vs. $1
Except it’s still not that. Because whether you’ve got $1 or $20, it’s still a negligible amount of money.
$50 million is enough money to easily collect $1,000,000 in interest every year. Use that as income, keep the rest invested and it would still grow.
Generational wealth. The kind of wealth that creates people like Donald Trump. More money than any single person needs.
It cracks me up that people are like “Hoarding a billion dollars is just morally wrong, so I’ll hoard $50 million instead and be a good person.”
Pick a lane, people. Hoard the wealth or don’t hoard the wealth, but stop feeling guilty about an imaginary scenario.
I would invest it. Every year, I would withdraw the profits, so that my net worth stayed approximately the same.
I would throw an event in a different city each year.
I would get that money (“earned” from doing nothing more than investing it) IN CASH.
All the cash would be loaded up in a plane and dropped in a public place. It would be a spectacle. No advertising needed, word of mouth and social media would be more than enough.
At each event, I would remind people that the money dropping from the sky is merely the crumbs from a single billionaire. Money that I did not earn. Money that was taken from the fruits of their labor and added to my stock portfolio.
I would ask them to imagine how much more money billionaires are hoarding. I would then bid them a fond farewell until next year.
Oh, and also, maybe a nice condo in southeast Asia. Thailand, maybe. Somewhere chill and fairly inexpensive. Not because I deserve a nicer place, but because fuckyouallI’mrichbitchstillnotatotaldickheadthough.
Or you could just move to Sweden and save yourself some money?
With a billion dollars?! I’m crying sad tears and laughing at the same time.
2 billion dollars of PAC money was spent in the 2024 presidential election.
That’s a single year. One election cycle.
In order to overturn Citizen’s United, you would need at least a couple of Supreme Court justices, too. So you need enough money to elect uncorrupted politicians to Congress, so that they can approve judges who are also not corrupt.
I think people HUGELY underestimate how much money flows into politics now that PACs are legal. Why the fuck else would Trump suddenly get interested in politics at his late stage in life?
Men’s clothes sizes are just as likely to be ill-fitted, it’s just that men aren’t held to the same standard of fashion. A lot of men don’t mind wearing something a size too big or cinching their pants up with a belt. Nobody bats an eye.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode, where they design the “perfect” family vehicle - and it costs too much for a middle class family to afford.
Meanwhile, it’s impossible to find and affordable car with manual transmission, locks and windows.
You can watch some videos on YouTube, if you really want to learn. It’s interesting, sometimes in a full-dystopian nightmare fuel kind of way. Yes, we are at the point where some of these robots can climb and jump.
It’s a gimmick, though, for sure. Just like human-mimicking androids are a gimmick. The money for robotics is in manufacturing.
But I’ll bet there will always be an obscenely wealthy person who is willing to pay for a cool looking robot prototype.
I think he’s just trying to further normalize the outsourcing/underpaying/devaluing of programmers.
I love that you took the time to make this analogy. I’d like to share another example, and then explain why I think the above analogy maybe won’t appeal to working class folks. First, a bit of history:
Years ago, I was broke and jobless. My neighbor needed an odd job or two done. So, I tightened a few screws and painted her kitchen. She loved my work. I loved working for myself. I started painting houses. Interior only, because all I needed was a tarp and a paint brush. The customer was responsible for buying the paint up front.
Eventually, I worked my way into buying a really shitty truck and a ladder and it kept snowballing. My equipment got better. The jobs kept rolling in. I had more work than I could handle.
Now…what should I do? Should I hire someone? Try to find an equal partner? Or just turn down the work? I talked it through with several friends, and decided to hire a friend of a friend. I didn’t know the guy, so it didn’t make sense to immediately offer him a partnership. The guy didn’t know me, and wasn’t about to commit to a partnership.
So, at this point, I’m the same as “Fred”, right? I’m the owner, I’m looking for an hourly employee. Why am I the bad guy? I’m just working hard. If business is good and I can pay someone who wants the money, isn’t that a good thing?
Let’s skip ahead in your story. Fred retires. Fred Jr. inherits the business and continues to make money for doing nothing. And that’s a very valid objection to the way things work - inherited wealth is poison to a fair system. Nepotism is poison to a fair system.
On the other hand, Fred built a business. Yes, he had someone else running his backhoe. Fred was responsible for other aspects of the business, though. Admin tasks, sales, etc. He worked, there’s no shame that his was a desk job instead of a field job.
The wrap up your analogy is this:
“This is the way we decide who gets the rewards of all the work humanity collectively does (under capitalist systems) and it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have and everyone else scraping by.”
Let’s break down that statement, there’s a lot going on.
“This is the way we decide who gets the rewards…” Sorry, but the system we use is SO much worse than your analogy. I buy a share of stock in the company. I never meet an employee. I never meet a customer. I never even see the business. I just get paid when the company profits. The company itself is too big to fail. The government will loan them low or no interest money to ensure that it doesn’t go under. In 30 years, I can sell my stock, or I can pass it to my children. I can take loans against the unrealized value of that stock.
“it’s resulted in a hundred or so people so insanely wealthy we can’t even conceptualize how much money they have…” Again, it’s SO much worse than that. The poorest person on Forbes 400 list is worth almost $4 billion. (That list is USA citizens only, btw.) A billion dollars is inconceivable wealth to most people. At a 10% return rate, that’s $400 million per year accumulated by doing nothing but investing in the Dow. Imagine that. Enough money to give 50 of your family and friends $4 million per year AND still have $100 million income for yourself AND still have $100 million to reinvest every year. Imagine how much political influence that amount of money buys.
So, yeah. I think using a small business as an analogy for capitalism - especially a single proprietor working-class business - distracts from just how bad things really are. Thanks for reading, and hope that I didn’t offend you by jumping into the comments with this rant. :)
Here’s my breakdown, numbers from Wikipedia, for estimates and purposes of discussion:
Total population: 340 million Eligible voters: 245 million Turnout: 155 million
Children can’t vote, that’s 70 million. Convicted felons and other non-eligible citizens make up another 20 million.
Are you suggesting that children should vote? (I do believe that convicts should have the right to vote, but that’s only 20 million.)
despite the downsides which we should be doing a better job of mitigating.
This is the part where I lose faith. We have failed to mitigate the downsides. In fact, we have encouraged the monetization of the downsides.
The word is appreciated, but a link would be better…