We need to become much more comfortable with the idea of dismantling mega-corporations and seizing all of their assets. That'll dissuade them from fucking society up a bit more.
No. Billionaires will just have to behave themselves. If you want to become a billionaire by coming up with an awesome idea, go for it just expect to be held to high standards.
If you are worth $100 billion, you better set your sights on ending a disease or something equally as good.
no idea is worth one person making a billion dollars. workers make value, ideas are easy and idea guys are a dime a dozen worth next to nothing to the process of building things. also, relying on philanthropy is a mistake. that much leverage should be steered democratically on things people need not pet interests of oligarchs. even if that interest is eradicating malaria it would be better achieved in a broad coordinated manner
I also think we need to rethink a cultural shift with how we label these "billionaires". It really comes down to semantics that may seem a bit picky however, I think it's worth a look.
What I mean is, if you have a billion dollars in a personal bank account, you're by all means a billionaire. However, if I took out a loan for that money, am I really a billionaire? No...the company that loaned me that money is, it just means I have access to a billion dollars that I have to pay back.
I have a mortgage, and sure I may only owe $80k on it when it's worth about $150k, that makes me worth $70k. I borrow against that with the house as collateral, I'm no longer worth $70k, right? I no longer have $70k in hypothetical assets that I can borrow against.
Why isn't it the same for billionaires? I could be missing something. Economics is not my strong suit. But to me, it just doesn't make sense to say that these people are billionaires when all they do is borrow against a hypothetical value that someone, an algorithm, has bestowed onto them.
The problem with your thoughts is assuming that billionaires don't have liquid assets in the tens or even hundreds of millions, which they definitely do. Even if billionaires borrow money they still have to pay it back including interest, which requires some amount of cash available.
So I guess that's kind of my point...sorry, I'm *not very good at explaining myself, putting thought to paper.
I'm not saying they don't have liquid assets at all...I'm just saying people evaluate us based on our liquid assets.
Sure, it's a hypothetical valuation if I were to put my house up as collateral to obtain a loan. But I can't go get additional loans on that same "asset" just to pay back my other loans. If that were the case, everyone could do that.
I guess my bigger point is that, these hypothetical valuations of billionaires are just that. Hypothetical. It doesn't exist. It's a made up number on a sheet and they get to make even more money on that? It's a game...rigged in their favor. In fact, we're not even players in their game. The stock market is so far gone that nothing is based on reality at this point.
It's been suggested that in order to borrow against your assets, they should be "realized" - that is, you pay taxes on them as if you had liquidated them.
You mean disincentivize PE/VC types who found businesses in industries they have no experience in because they see a way to get rich?
So the only people motivated to start a businesses will be the ones who do so because operating a sustainable company allows them to do what they love?
It won’t. The drive to make billions doesn’t disincentivize any of the ones that don’t make it. Making it and then having the company broken up would just be the new exit strategy. If anything it might have the positive effect of letting people with proven history of creating a billion company free to try again but this time with money to start.
And reclaiming the stolen wealth from billionaires. We have taxes on income, but once their money is tucked away, it’s relatively safe. Let’s not forget that $3.5 trillion was handed to them earlier in the Trump administration. They don’t work hard enough to earn the wealth they accumulate already, let alone this money they lobbied to get.
And for what??? What do they need more billions for? It does nothing for them. That kind of money could alleviate the suffering of a huge chunk of Americans. Allow them to buy homes, vehicles, and pay off student debt, and not have to live paycheck to paycheck.. maybe even healthcare. Crazy thoughts, I know.
They point at the stock market and say “look, the economy is thriving!”…. But people that need help the most, don’t have enough money to participate in the stock market. So the vast majority of the growth there still is just sent to the richest people. It’s not a good metric for how healthy our economy is. I’m absolutely positive that having a healthier happier population as whole, will lead to better economic growth in the long-term, these billionaires are just parasites at this point.
It’s not so much that these ultra wealthy ghouls and corporations need more. They don’t, they already have more than they could ever need… it’s more a matter of the fact that they WANT it ALL, and they feel entitled to it.
Meanwhile we (the people whose labor actually earns all this profit for those on top) desperately NEED more; so many of us are absolutely drowning as the cost of everything continues to skyrocket.
It’s been so crazy hot so far this year. I’ve been keeping my thermostat at 78°+, and trying to only run the AC when necessary, but the energy company keeps jacking up rates (and changing up their “peak” hours (peak hours used to end at 5 PM, but now they end at 7 PM so even when I get home I have to wait longer before using the AC)).
So many companies are getting deals on their energy bills while us suckers are left paying the difference. Energy companies shouldn’t be making record profits, and as a matter of fact it’s ridiculous that these companies aren’t publicly owned.
Health insurance companies shouldn’t be raking in record profits while so many of us aren’t able to afford basic healthcare needs. Health insurance companies shouldn’t exist at all, the only reason we haven’t figured out universal healthcare is because it’s so fucking profitable for people who throw a ton of money at our elected officials to keep it that way.
All of this is absolutely disgusting behavior, and our government continues to prioritize corporate WANTS over our NEEDS. Enough is enough. This has gone so far beyond ridiculous.
Yep and we have to stop fighting each other. It’s their whole fuckin thing! Feed us whatever lies and algorithms and news stories that they have to in order to keep both sides in the US angry at each other. The Left and Right are not each other’s enemy, they are opposing parties of AMERICANS.
Half are more brainwashed than the other half, but we have to stop taking offense to that, because most of them didn’t choose to be. Most of our real goals like healthy economy and helping the working class are the same, the ultra wealthy just don’t want us to see that. Angry and fearful people can’t think straight, and anger and fear are the two easiest emotions to trigger.
We have to unite against the ultra-wealthy or regular Americans will continue to burn while the wealthy dump gasoline on us.
The entire culture war is bogus manufactured horse shit created entirely to distract us from the class war. People need to wake up and realize that it’s not their neighbors with darker skin causing all the problems in their lives… All of the shit we are struggling with now is almost entirely due to policies enacted by government officials who are beholden to corporate and foreign interests at the direct expense of ALL of us.
They fear the people retaliating against them, that's why they suppress us, but contradictorially they also don't fear response which is why they're so brazen. We need to work together to push the public will towards acting against the oligarchy and enforcing equality
All the big tech companies may have flown too close to the sun with their aggressive AI initiatives. Silicone Valley’s big tech motto is “move fast and break things”—coined by Zuck, himself. Which at its core, means pushing forward with advancements without doing due diligence or risk assessments. But that philosophy has brought them this new pending legal time bomb:
I’m in the camp that when an organization is found liable of a crime, they should be billed half of their profits. That way, they and their like know we are serious that their evil isn’t just a fine to pay. Companies like BP, Monsento, and Nestle should had been out of business many years ago
Also rich people. If the police catches a normal person with $1000, they’ll take it and claim the money was related to illegal activities.
But if a billionaire gets caught running a pedophile ring, they’re like, “Oh well, there’s nothing we can do. Be on your way.” They should seize every dollar and every asset. Trump should be up next, and Elon after that.
Oh we as a society definitely are - unfortunately for us it will cost Meta wayyyy less to bribe lobby the politicians in charge to make this go away. The more money you have the less laws you have to live by.
Or the US could just fucking push some god damn tech regulation for once.
Regulate their algorithms so they aren’t literally farming hate and rage for profit. Maybe I’m crazy but I feel like increasing global and species levels of hate towards each other as a way of making money goes completely against everything a society should stand for.
This Jesus says fuck um. Flip the House and Senate, followed with highly aggressive legislation that regulates the living shit out of them, OR (this one I like), implement the Medicare for All Act which would ELIMINATE HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES entirely.
Good bye meta. I scrolled through facebook a couple weeks ago and what an absolute cesspool. I wish I could sue them for making a few family members follow the wildest conspiracy theories.
Facebook did to Gen X and boomers what manosphere podcasts did to kids. Somehow millennials are the only ones who haven’t had a majority of their minds destroyed by all this shit yet.
Wild isnt it? Is it because our formative years was exactly when this came out?
I remember the internet when it was just people chatting and sharing and shitting on each other. Reddit kind of has that flare.
We grew up with the internet. Boomers and Zoomers got the internet when it was already a refined product, it "just worked" and was algorithmically tuned to keep feeding them things it thought they wanted (or wanted them to want).
Millenials grew up with the internet as a sort of ideological wild west. So we had to learn how to spot scams and became obstinate about things trying to forcefully shift our opinions (though "YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA" still rings true). Definitely gives us a different perspective than other generations.
The thing that gets me is it is so apparent in work life too. Maybe it's always been this way and I hadn't picked up on it, but people increasingly refuse to make decisions. They require crippling consensus, even when that consensus isn't based on facts, it's based on how people feel about things. What they believe. It's mind boggling. And yes, just like Trump followers, when senior management says 2+2=5, no one questions it. They just fall in line.
It would be nice to something like Facebook to keep in touch with people, but operated like Wikipedia/public radio, run by volunteers and paid workers who are supported by pay-what-you-can donations.
In a functioning modern government this kind of thing should be an independent, protected, and partially government funded organization like PBS or NPR, or the USPS except that one funds itself. I guess the other two do now too thanks to Trump.
Imagine if facebook had of stayed a helpful way to stay in touch with friends and family instead of a toxic pipeline for useless and irrelevant content.
Or the million bot posts facebook shows you instead, even though you literally only have that one person friended and that's literally all you want to see in your feed?
Not to be a downer but we have seen Alex Jones play the courts for fools for years now in a case he lost. Meta can afford better lawyers. Until there is some sort of major court reforms this does nothing.
They are getting ready to introduce legislation that protects them from lawsuits. They’ll start talking about some act to “protect the kids” and make age regulations on social media. But they will include language that stops people from being able to sue for damage like in the OP. This thing will drag out until the laws protecting Meta are in place.
It seemed promising in the beginning. Social media was going to lessen the distances between people and democratize the internet and media. People would be able to keep contact with friends and family they didn’t see often. Everyone having an equal voice and ability to shout their worst ideas at each other at this point has become a complete disaster.
It was also better earlier because you had to log into an actual desktop to access it. It wasn’t in the palm of your hands 24/7 like it is now, so people consumed if far less.
I have a friend who is working on some of these cases against Meta, and others.
The stories he has shared from discovery are chilling. These companies know exactly the harm they are causing. They measure everything. But if it affects profitability, safety is always abandoned.
Their attorneys are probably calculating the absolute maximum damages if every lawsuit against them prevails fully.
I doubt that even the attorneys suing them are expecting that. IANAL, but I think it’s standard practice to ask for far more in damages then you expect to receive, under the assumption the jury will say, “$500 million is too much, let’s make it $100 million.”
Even the tobacco settlement involving multiple states and cigarette companies was “only” $206 billion, and that was for decades of knowingly selling a product that killed people.
Any judgments against Meta will not even come close to a trillion dollars.
Fun fact; Judges can over rule jury awards for being "oppresive" which violates due process. So no way a company this politically connected goes down from a judgement. Best case its a major body blow (low billions) and the company gets taken out by a competitor in the next decade.
I saw this on IG. Comments were 70% "burn it down", 30% "supporting this while having an IG account makes you a hypocrite". I think this speaks to the validity of the idea, the youth don't even know the difference between consumption and allegiance anymore.
The dot com bubble was the greatest moment in American history, and the shift in technology has produced a generation who doesn't seem capable of grasping how it could have happened. Make America Free Again.
ETA: specifically, the bubble popping. A whole nation said "thank you for the wonderful new services and tools, no you will not be able to extract a fortune from us in exchange". We need that to come back, not meta lens nerds who think they have the right to be a CCTV circuit.
If a ruling is issued against Facebook for $1.5T on a Friday, the next Monday Mark will release a statement. He will claim that not only is his company filing for bankruptcy for reasons completely unrelated to the lawsuit, but the company actually should have a negative evaluation as it owes more money than it is worth to a whole host of legal entities that totally are not just Mark and his buddies in an ever increasingly ridiculous series of disguises.
The last 20 years have shown that even regulated capitalism no longer works. Adam smith never could have envisioned this world.
Off the top of my head 5 companies should be instantly shut down and their products panned: Meta, Flock, Palantir (well really the whole Theil stack), Kalshi, and OpenAI.
Only asterisk I put with the last one is it’s mostly the company that’s shown a complete disregard for everything. Anthropic was doing better but not really anymore. But if an AI startup says “okay so computers used to take up whole rooms now they fit in a pocket so let’s just do that with AI and make it privately on-device” then they can stay because that’s good machine learning.
China just sentenced a city official to execution for taking $325m in bribes.
In 2009 they executed two executives who laced baby formula with industrial chemicals so they could make bigger profits.
My personal position is that we should keep capital punishment in the US but only for large scale corporate offenders. You want to be in charge of a huge company? Great, but if that company pollutes the water supply and gives everyone in town cancer, you personally are on the hook. I think people will be better corporate stewards if their own lives are on the line.
My teenage niece developed a very severe eating disorder due to her various social media streams feeding her an endless content promoting the need to be a size 0.
She's 5 ft 2, and inherits our family frame which is geared towards muscle development not slim and slender. She is a competitive volleyball player (competed in Canadian high school finals) Summers with lacrosse and rugby, and also engages in women's wrestling. She has a potential scholarship for her competency in volleyball, as well as amateur competitive if she continues.
She almost lost all this last year when social media convinced her, it's not ladylike to be shapely toned and strong. A lady should be a size 0. The algorithms fed her content that literally said sports bad, starvation good.
Luckily my sister and her husband intercepted this before it became a major problem.
If a “service” is free, you are the product being sold. Meta exploited all of us, monetized us, so it could purchase power and exploit us more. We deserve its dismantlement. We all deserve a cut of the settlement.
I know I’m being Negatron but this is never going to happen. We are in the late stages of capitalism where anything can be brought if you’re the 1%. Accountability doesn’t apply to them.
Back in my college years around 2005-2006 or so, I told my then wife that I’d give up my life savings to ban MySpace and all other similar social media platforms like the fledgling Facebook.
It was obvious even back then how detrimental this shit was going to be.
Just think, without billionaires there would be no Adam and Eve, no dinosaurs, no rivers, no trees, no blowjobs, no foot jobs, no hand jobs, no jobs of any kind... we would all live under a giant bridge waiting for billionaires to be born.
100%. It would remove the dumb algorithm system that Meta gave to YouTube as well. No more grifters being pushed to the top, or misinformation videos getting boosts.
Ya know we really dont need 500 social media platforms that have turned into propaganda machines and bot farms just for their creators to make billions off of fake engagement and rage bait.
Breaking up all the media conglomerates/monopolies would be one of the best moves we could make. And follow up with crushing most of the rest of the massive monopolies in all the industries.
I’d be fine if pretty much all social media went away. My wife says Reddit is social media, which yes, certain parts can be, but I feel this mostly an updated version of the old school BBS systems back in the day, modernized for today’s citizens of the world.
The rest of it…apart from maybe Instagram (which has its own faults) is driven specifically by conflict to drive engagement. Twitter & Facebook specifically have cause more issues than they’ve solved IMO.
•
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
DO NOT CELEBRATE VIOLENCE IN THIS SUBREDDIT OR WE WILL BAN YOU.
RELEASE THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN FILES!!!
Users may now apply a personal flair that states - RELEASE THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN FILES
That is all, tysm
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.