• blitzen
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    1 day ago

    I cannot take seriously any claim of the ultra wealthy “making” x number of dollars per minute/hour/day. That’s just not how wealth works.

      • jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works
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        24 hours ago

        if I had a pile of gold, it would increase in value without taking from anyone. Generalized statements don’t help your agenda when it’s generalizing hatred towards others.

        • oo1@lemmings.world
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          21 hours ago

          I don’t get it. If you have a pile of gold and there are no other people involved, how does its value change?

        • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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          21 hours ago

          Not true at all. The increase in the value of gold happens because of the decrease in the value of money. You are taking from people who don’t have extra wealth to keep lying around, and have to earn and spend cash to survive.

    • moriquende@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      it’s a good approximate. the reason their wealth score increases is because there is more wealth in the world being generated to go around. Disproportionately, it’s landing on their already obscene pile, instead of being fairly distributed. And fairly doesn’t necessarily mean everyone gets the same, but everyone actually profits from it.

    • PenguinMage@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This is whats called a breakdown… if their yearly income is X, then you can find out what their hourly and daily incomes are through rather basic math.

      • blitzen
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        24 hours ago

        Most of these memes simply take a net worth a divide it by 365 or whatever.

        The ultra wealthy don’t have a set yearly income in the same way we all do.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      I’m sure explaining the shell game the rich play is really comforting and helpful for the starving masses. /s

    • AtariDump@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Why not? If contractors can earn a “per hour” wage why can’t the uber wealthy?

    • jago
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      1 day ago

      That’s just not how wealth works.

      Would you expand on that, in the context of previous replies that point out that this is meant as a simplified analogy of the value of one’s own time?

      How does wealth work? This is not a loaded question.

      • blitzen
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        24 hours ago

        I think my point isn’t being well taken, or perhaps I phrased it incorrectly. I certainly agree with the sentiment that wealth disparity is maybe the biggest problem we face.

        The vast vast vast majority of the wealth of the uber wealthy come from the assets they own. If they can be said to “make” money over the course of the year, it’s as a result of those assets increasing in value and not directly tied to the “work” they put in.

        My problem with these comparisons are two-fold. One, they usually conflate an individuals net worth with income. If Elon has 365 billion dollars, he doesn’t “make” 1 billion per day. Two, phrasing it as “making” “per hour” implies their income is tied to the hours they work, and that’s just not true. It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          It puts value on their labor I think isn’t justified.

          I think it’s more just to make it seem even remotely understandable for our brains, as most of our class has a notion of hourly work and knows the value of their hourly work. And we don’t even do it 247, unlike the rich bastards who “never clock out” so to speak. So it’s just there to make our brains grasp just how massive the disparity is.

          This is always a good reminder; “Wealth, shown to scale”. Give it a scroll. Or a hundred. And you still won’t make it even halfway.

    • forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      Umm, what? That’s exactly how it works.

      That’s not what you were told, sure. Maybe time to shed some of that naivete, though.

      • blitzen
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        1 day ago

        I don’t mean it as acceptance of the massive wealth disparity, about which I agree fully.

        I meant that “per hour” implies a wage paid by somebody/ some company, and the uber wealthy don’t really collect a wage.

        It’s fair enough to say that a person’s wealth went up *x *last year, or y the year before that. But whatever the increase (or decrease) in net worth was, it’s not dependent on the number of hours they worked in the same way it does with a wage.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      If I said: “Same

      They must be lying by a factor of 10, no! A factor of 100! Orders of magnitude!”

      Ah now in this case it don’t matter much, number is still beyond our ability to intensely grok it

      Epic profits should get taxpayers off the hook every time. That’s a wildly leftist and a wildly MAGA take!