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I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with tha

• rayiner 5mo ago
  How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.
  • DavidPiper 5mo ago
    I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole". I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
    • rayiner 5mo ago
      Then who pays for it?
      • raydev 5mo ago
        That is a great question for those in power to figure out before the masses get upset enough to harm them.
      • DavidPiper 5mo ago
        That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one. Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
        • RajT88 5mo ago
          We get a view of this taken to its logical extreme in the final Resident Evil film featuring Milla Jovovich. The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
      • estimator7292 5mo ago
        Everyone. That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.
        • lotsofpulp 5mo ago
          Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).
          • UltraSane 5mo ago
            Comparing those people to the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe is very disingenuous.
            • lotsofpulp 5mo ago
              My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe. Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause. DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause. Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality. estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality. To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is). That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
      • scotty79 5mo ago
        At societal level money is not a resource. Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent. With AI all is subject to change.
        • classified 5mo ago
          > With AI all is subject to change. Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.
      • jplusequalt 5mo ago
        Raising taxes is the only possible way a UBI would be feasible, and even then it wouldn't be a large enough amount for most people to live off of. Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
        • azinman2 5mo ago
          I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.
          • deleted 5mo ago
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          • ori_b 5mo ago
            If the promises of AGI pan out, there will be nothing a human will be able to do better than an AI. If humans can't contribute economically, what else could things look like?
          • jfengel 5mo ago
            UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose. As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now. It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished). That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work. And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
            • 5mo ago
      • UltraSane 5mo ago
        A national dividend from the combined profits of all companies.
      • fn-mote 5mo ago
        Frankly, the entire world is now paying for what is happening in the US. Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
      • alsetmusic 5mo ago
        We all do. With our taxes. It’s just that the people allocate our taxes refuse to spend it responsibly. We could fix education. We could take care of the unhoused. We could treat addiction. We could pay for healthcare for everyone. They’d much rather blow money on military spending and stupid unnecessary wars and funding genocide. The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.
        • rsoto2 5mo ago
          We gotta end citizens united, corporations and weapons manufacturers are incentivized to lobby congress and enable wars and starvation abroad. Billionaires need to be taxed out of existence so we can stop spending our collective wealth on dumb shit contracts for palantir and elon musks dogshit companies.
    • rsoto2 5mo ago
      They should absolutely pay for it through higher corporate taxation which is how businesses are incentivized to grow their business instead of stashing away wealth. Get rid of citizens united corporations are not people and they have stolen our democracy.
  • wat10000 5mo ago
    The question is not how much they have, but how much they will have once all the replaceable jobs are replaced.
  • Teever 5mo ago
    If I understand what you're saying it's that as rich as they are, the amount of money the ultra-wealthy own just doesn't add up to nearly enough to give everyone a quality of life that they deserve / once had? Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process? It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks... The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world. Isn’t it strange That princes and kings, And clowns that caper In sawdust rings, And common people Like you and me Are builders for eternity? Each is given a bag of tools, A shapeless mass, A book of rules; And each must make- Ere life is flown- A stumbling block Or a stepping stone.
    • card_zero 5mo ago
      What is a stumbling block? Who are they made for? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".
  • jacquesm 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • ryandrake 5mo ago
      I really don't understand this "simping online for billionaires" hobby. Is there a signup I missed somewhere, where they pay $100 for every post one makes glazing and defending them as a class?
      • jacquesm 5mo ago
        There was this silly 'weird nerd' meme about someone jumping in front of him every time someone fired a bullet at Elon Musk. This feels similar. Billionaires are apparently what we should all aspire to, even though it is extremely hard to find any that got to where they are without getting their at the expense of others.
        • ryandrake 5mo ago
          We need to Make Billionaires Millionaires Again, as far as I'm concerned. EDIT: Oh, no, you said HIS name. The Elon Justice League has been activated and downvoting this whole tree....
          • jacquesm 5mo ago
            Yes, absolutely. But the billionaires will spend a fraction of their billions to stop that from happening so that's a lopsided fight already. The problem is the ratchet effect. Money is like gravity: have a little bit of it and you are attracted to the larger piles and become part of them. Have a lot of it and you start attracting more of it, even if you're not working. So once the balance is disturbed that ratchet effect makes it hard to lose money faster than you are making it. Breaking that cycle will take some extraordinary effort and I suspect that the article gets at least that portion of it correctly. This isn't going to go away without a fight of some sort, whether a physical or a legal one is not all that important but since the billionaires have stacked the deck against the rest of us using their money in all ways except for the physical one that seems to be one of the few avenues still open. And for how long it remains open is a question, there is a fair chance that AI will not only enable stable dictatorships but will also enable wealth extraction at a level that we have not seen before. For instance: we are allowed to have this conversation by some billionaires. If they should decide you and I can no longer converse then that will be that and it is going to take a lot of effort to circumvent any blocks. There are some 10 or so billionaires that can ruin my existence overnight, take away my means of living and that of those around me. And there wouldn't be much that I could do about it. People have been radicalized over much less than this.
  • Ray20 5mo ago
    Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully. "Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use." Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
    • only-one1701 5mo ago
      Yes, a billionaire and substitute teacher have the same political power in America. Couldn’t have put it better myself. /s
      • Ray20 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • jmye 5mo ago
          GP said “a substitute teacher” vs “a billionaire” - why have you decided to pretend they said something else? You’re also flatly wrong, given you’ve utterly ignored the trivial things wealth buys (for starters), but hard to expect accuracy when basic honesty is so lacking.
        • giaour 5mo ago
          Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.
    • keernan 5mo ago
      >>Until people with salaries Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival. I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth. Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.
  • WarmWash 5mo ago
    The wealthiest group in the US is the 70-95%, they have over double the wealth of "the billionaires". But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce. This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%. The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth. (for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).
    • kylecazar 5mo ago
      The top 5% of the country have around 60% of its wealth. It is logical to bring that number down.
      • WarmWash 5mo ago
        It's only logical when you view that wealth as a Scrooge Mcduck style vault of gold to raid, and are ignorant to the fact that it's almost entirely mark-to-market assets that have zero ability to buy food or pay for housing. The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen. If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr. You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!" But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.
    • losteric 5mo ago
      The top 1% own 31% and the top 10% own 68% of household wealth. The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.
      • CalRobert 5mo ago
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • daveguy 5mo ago
    Well, the top 10% richest people control 67% of the wealth, and top 1% richest have 30% of the wealth in the US. The top half has > 97% of the wealth. It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr) Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.
    • WarmWash 5mo ago
      I'm more curious who with a NW >$100M is hoarding it? Everyone I have come across is hoarding approximately 0% of it. Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.
  • UltraSane 5mo ago
    Bloomberg Billionaires Index publishes daily net worth for the top 500 globally. As of end of 2025, the top 500 totaled $11.9 trillion, with $2.2 trillion added in 2025. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.
  • forgetfreeman 5mo ago
    Really? Because GDP vs household income graphed over the last 40 years paints a rather clear picture.
  • DemocracyFTW2 5mo ago
    Billionaires have no right to exist, at all.
  • rsoto2 5mo ago
    Well it's not just the money they've also stolen our democracy and have complete control on society, media and now the public lands as a whole. They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output. We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/oligarchy-open-what-happens-now-us-forced-confront-its-plutocracy https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...
• integralid 5mo ago
  >consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.
  • grafmax 5mo ago
    Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself. Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.
    • runarberg 5mo ago
      Legislators elected for that policy, I suppose.
      • grafmax 5mo ago
        Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.
        • runarberg 5mo ago
          You say this literally minutes after Hungarians elected them selves out of a dictatorship. I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.
  • dboreham 5mo ago
    The US was founded upon corruption and continued that tradition throughout history. It's so normalized that almost nobody recognizes it.
  • twelve40 5mo ago
• username223 5mo ago
  > Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money… Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.
  • bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
    Concrete examples please
    • realo 5mo ago
      To paraphrase The Donald: Just wait ... in two weeks ...
    • prmoustache 5mo ago
      The french invented the guillotine. Works wonder.
  • speff 5mo ago
    I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone. Here are some points of consideration: 1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery. 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device. 3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth. [0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-america-world-have-ubs/ https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...
    • runarberg 5mo ago
      The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine. Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.
• pxc 5mo ago
  We often look back on earlier stages in world history like we're somehow more advanced, or inherently smarter, than past societies. But one of the things made clear by the way this problem lines up perfectly with conflict during the industrial revolution (including the innovators flagrantly violating the law in order to win their advantage) is that for all our technological sophistication, we haven't really gotten better at the hard, human things: social coordination, planning, democracy. (Perhaps that's because we're still living under the same system that the industrial revolution finally birthed.)
• armchairhacker 5mo ago
  The distinction matters. For example, the people fighting inequality can use AI to their advantage, and focus criticism on billionaires (and general bad AI usage, like slop PRs) instead of ordinary AI users.
  • drzaiusx11 5mo ago
    Yes a slop arms race between the disenfranchised and the inordinatly wealthy will solve things /s. If this was actually a threat to entrenched inequity, we simply would lose access to the necessary memory, GPUs and matching fields of server fleets. Oh wait
• juleiie 5mo ago
  America isn’t the only country on earth, it’s just one of hundreds of others. That alone makes me confident about future not being even 1/10 as gloomy as some people think. We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
    America routinely ranks fairly low on the "happiest countries" rankings. Currently #24 behind most of Europe, with the Scandinavian countries typically at the top. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-... Clearly other countries are doing something to keep their citizens happy that the US is not copying. Given that US politics and policy is driven by lobbyists and tribal infighting, would you really expect anything different?
• giaour 5mo ago
  > consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andreessen-s-silicon-valley-allies-in-the-trump-administration https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...
  • jackmott42 5mo ago
    Yes, our tech leaders would rather send america into fascism that have any impediments put in the way of their business plans. It is disgusting, and sad.
• 0xpiguy 5mo ago
  I do think there is a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, universal basic income will become the norm. In previous industrial revolutions, large numbers of jobs were created to offset those that were lost. But there are very few things AI cannot perform faster and cheaper. Best case scenario, we will be in a world with both high productivity and high unemployment. Governments may have no choice but to provide universal income to everyone.
  • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
    We can’t even deliver on universal healthcare. UBI is an even bigger pipe dream for american politics.
  • repelsteeltje 5mo ago
    UBI, at best, will only fix one aspect of disruption. Income is not the only reason why people want to be employed.
  • SequoiaHope 5mo ago
    UBI requires a wealthy elite class to tax from that also does not capture the government and reduce or eliminate the UBI. The status quo shows us that if a wealthy class exists they will capture the government and eliminate benefits for the masses. Thats why minimum wage does not rise and as another commenter said we do not have universal healthcare.
• chewz 5mo ago
  Keeping lid on boiling peasants rage have always been chief qualification of aristocracy. Plus I don't believe in violence from tech bros and white collar workers - they have been raised too docile...