The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
This is your reminder that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Take from that what you will.
He’s not the only one either. Oligarchs own nearly all of our news media. There are only a couple exceptions, and those are independent groups that are reliant on platforms like youtube.
Democracy Now! comes to mind. Great reporting.
As a fun thought experiment – to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.
No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.
That didn’t really hit me until I realized it’s £3600 per hour. That’s my monthly salary.
86400 per year… i mean PER DAY
To hit that 32 year time line you would be getting that 3600 an hour, but you would be working 24 hours a day every day.
If you did 8 hours a day mon-fri at that rate you would earn 576,000 a month.
To get your 1bn at that pace you would have to work for 144 years.
Who in this world has a billion in cash?
That… wasn’t exactly my point.
My point was more that people think £1bn is not that much more than £1m. That billionaires aren’t “all that rich”
I was trying to illustrate that one billion of anything is far more than you think it is.
If you met 100 people an hour, every hour, for every day it would take you one thousand, one hundred and forty one years to meet one billion people.
And yet people say “Eh – people shouldn’t persecute billionaires. They deserve that much”
My point is no.
Extemely relevant:
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Alright, no offense, but that has to be the least useful visualization of a billion I’ve ever come across. I already have to do the math every time I want to calculate how many minutes there are in a day and you want to use the number of seconds in 32 years as a reference?
“If you put it all in one dollar bills it would weigh ten tons”. There. Fixed. You immediately picture it now.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons, which is not quite as intuitive, but it’s a lot heavier, so it still has an impact, I suppose. That’s about as heavy as a small battleship, if that helps.I think the seconds analogy hits harder. Especially comparing 1 million to 1 billion (11.6 days vs. 32 years).
Your 10 tons doesn’t do much for me. A few F250s? A dump truck or two? Maybe do the comparison to a million idk.
But your comment came off pretty arrogant and condescending (“There. Fixed it. You immediately picture it now.” Not really man.)
Regardless the way people picture and grasp large numbers is certainly Subjective. The seconds analogy hits harder for me.
I always think the difference between a million and a billion the same as a decent vacation and a literal generation.
3 Cybertrucks
Well, that’s ten metric tons, so by way of removing three zeroes a million is ten kilos. The metric system wins again.
It also helps a lot in grasping why billions are a deceiving quantity, because increasing orders of magnitude gets weird. It’s just that the other units are a bit small so they paint a worse picture.
But still, how in the world does one not have an intuition for ten tons but goes to a specific pickup truck as a more relatable quantity? Is this why Americans keep measuring things in cups and football fields? I mean, if seconds work better for you that’s great, but… F250s? Seriously?
What’s your mental picture of 10 tons?
And how in the world does someone not have an intuition for time? How do you get to your apparently very heavy duty job on time?
It’s not an intuition for time, it’s an intuition for a cumulative quantity over time that’s the problem. I know 32 years is a lot. I don’t know if a thing a second for 32 years is a lot. If you gave me a thing a second for seven years or a bunch of stuff now I would need to whip out a calculator to figure out if it’s a good deal.
As for tons, well, you get that a ton is heavy, A car is a ton-ish, you probably know that. And one order of magnitude is still intuitive. Ten tons is ten of a heavy thing. You see ten ton things that say “ten tons” on them in real life. Trucks, cranes, that type of stuff. And it’s an absolute quantity, not a flow, so… you know, ten tons. If you use kilos like a normal person you also know how many of you ten tons is, because you know a 100 kilo person is a heavy person and you know how far from that you are. Again, the wonders of the metric system. I can tell you ten big people or twenty small people are a ton, so a hundred big people or two hundred small people are ten tons. I know what that looks like.
Anyway, at this point this conversation is fascinating mostly because it’s showing me that losing the scale intuition from the metric system makes you intuitively parse things in Ford pickups, and that’s more interesting than any of the possible ways to make people figure out the difference between a single digit multiplier and orders of magnitude.
“I don’t know if a thing a second is a lot”
So you’re just an idiot who has no grasp of how time works and your coping by saying “metric system”
There’s no metric time system. Everyone in the west uses the same clock. If I give you a brick every second of the day from sunrise until night, will you have a lot of bricks or just a few? That’s all you need to know for this analogy to work.
And regardless of if you use the metric or American system, most people don’t have a good grasp of the weight of big things. You don’t either. You say a car is about 1 ton, the average car is closer to 2 metric tons. Now your mental picture is only half accurate.
Your crane example is even more hilarious. Cranes are rated by how much they can lift, not how much they themselves weigh. A 10 ton crane , by necessity of how gravity works, weighs a lot more than 10 tons, but it can lift a stack of steel beams that weighs 10 tons. Also, how many cranes do you see every day that are rated for 10 tons? Do you work on large construction projects?
As for the groups of people, let’s play that out. I’ll just agree that I know what a group of roughly one hundred people looks like because this reply is already getting long. Now if I show you a group of pallets that are stacked with money that is the same mass as the group of people, how much money is that, how big are the stacks of cash? Do you know what 1 ton of cash looks like? Let alone 10?
You gonna sit here with a straight face and say you can visualize 10 tons of bills?
What, you don’t have so much money that weighing it makes more sense than counting it?
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This guy used rice to visualize the difference between one million and one billion and I thought it was pretty effective.
Volumetric comparisons end up grossly underrepresenting how much a billion really is. Human brain doesn’t really grasp the magnitude of a difference between a cubic centimeter and a cubic meter.
What we can immediately grasp is a difference between walking across a small parking lot and driving for a bloody hour.
The fun part about that one is that Bezos himself is now reported at about one third more than reported in that video, so… that pile is too small now.
But also, if you’re gonna use visual aids that’s cheating.
If anyone ever wanted evidence that humans are too stupid to survive 1000 more years, they should read your comments.
Yeah, I think I’m exposing your stupidy pretty effectively, right? I’m killing it with the visualizations today.
“hey I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid. This other completely subjective way of saying your point is infinitely better even though it’s incredibly easy to find issues with! I’m way better at communicating than you, despite the fact that it takes two seconds to find and point out the flaws in my communication”
“I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid” is the best thing anybody has ever said to me. I’m making that into a t-shirt. A bumper sticker. I’m screenshotting that and using it as a wallpaper on my phone.
I simply picture a typical ten-ton object that has a similar density to dollar bills (just pick one among the many that you likely have nearby) and then imagine that it is itself made of dollar bills, and voila: An intuitive understanding of the nature of wealth.
No individual should have a… um… typical ten ton object made up of dollar bills, I guess. That seems like too many dollar bills.
Wait, I wrote “one dollar bills”? Sorry, ten tons is in hundred dollar bills.
In one dollar bills it’s a thousand tons, which has the same problem as the coins. Harder to visualize. I could update it, but at this point the correction is more interesting anyway.
It’s telling that nobody immediately noticed. Brains are squishy and don’t like counting too high. Or too small. The giveaway here should have been “wait, a coin is 875 times heavier than a bank note?”
And yet, not even I noticed, and I looked it up in the first place. Dumb squishy brains
Squishy indeed. Big numbers are hard.
“I’m so smrt I can vishulize money, ur ‘long time’ metafur is so dum I’m unable to even think bout it”
Imagine being so bent out of shape by an easily-grasped metaphor you go out of your way to tell the person they’re an idiot and make up a less-easily visualized metaphor to prove how easy it is. It’s literally “this is a long time, you have experienced time and know 32 years is a lot” vs “you need to know the general weight of a bill/stack of bills in order to know how many would be required for a certain tonnage”
I am super bent out of shape here. In pretzels, I am. There was a shape, and now there’s none. I am shapeless.
You though? A beacon of composure. Keep at it, you’re doing great.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons
Everyone knows it would be 1 billion pounds or 500,000 tons. /s
one of the goated baits of all time
I personally like “Do you have that dream where you keep trying and trying to wash your hands but the blood never comes off”
They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they’ll never be happy
Bullshit like “the Forbes list” makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.
Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They’ll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do
This is a great thought. It would be nice if our society wasn’t so caught up in how much money someone makes and talk more about how much they donate. Or discuss the the good work they have done by giving it back to the industry they serve. Whether it be in bonuses to the employees or research and development. The Forbes list is BS!
Yep, or just listing companies by median salary.
This shit isn’t complicated, it’s just what happens when capitalists run everything instead of sociologists.
American culture is obsessed with making as much money as possible, and the last forty years of 40 years of go-go reaganites running the show haven’t exactly worked out well for the average American.
The coke market has been doing well tho…
Yeah, it’s very common - even among non billionaires. You’ll regularly hear people who are making 4-5x the national median talk about how they’re barely making ends meet. It’s lifestyle creep and comparison with peers.
Makes me think of that one odd trend the Romans did where nobles tried to impress other nobles by having an entourage of “Hired peasants” that would follow them so they could be given money.
For how backwards the Romans were, some parts of their culture were pretty forward
“It’s not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else.”
Meritocracy at its peak
You know meritocracy is now a myth right ?
Always was.
Honestly, the question I’d like answered is at what age did they realize that they wanted to be a dragon.
“a dragon”?
A dragon is known for hoarding treasure, which it of course doesn’t need.
Also for randomly eating villagers, and for destroying the local villages and trashing the nearby environment.
What about the communist dragons?
“When the revolution comes, where will you hide?” will always be the classic.
Sadly, the answer is “in my well-stocked nuclear bunker where I can survive for years and defend myself against the hoards with armed drones” now.
Or rather the answer just as easily could be “Tied up in a closet while my security detail decided to beat my ass and take all of my shit. Since money is now worthless and I have nothing to pay them with”
Hence the drones.
Money is, by design, worthless. Especially since America got taken off the gold standard & money printer go brrrrr. It’s all held up by our faith in the dollar, and the system.
A wise rich man would have plenty of stuff on reserve to pay essential people, just not in money. Maybe they could work in exchange for a year’s worth of freeze-dried food. A chunk of land & a house. Quality goods. Idk I just don’t think it’s as bleak as you say; we could revert back to a barter system, and people exchanging labor for [stuff] or a cut of the product [sharecropper].
Weirdly, given the discussion there is in another part of this thread, I think you meant “hordes” :)
I did. Thank you.
The question doesn’t make sense to them. To get that rich, they had to throw away their morals. They can’t answer the question because they can’t process it.
Upper middle class? I think most if not 90% of billionaires are born in firmly upper class?
“Upper middle class” is just an abstraction from actual class dynamics anyways. It only exists as a believable goal for the working class to achieve and believe they’ve succeeded, even if they remain workers or at most petite bourgeoisie.
Fundamentally, there is no tying factor bringing this “upper middle class” together, no aligning of mutual interests, outside of tax brackets. As such, it isn’t a real class, as the relation to the mode of production is wildly diverse from within this category.
A millionaire and a billionaire? That’s a huge difference. At this point, if someone is 55 and wants to retire at 68 and not be 70 and working at Walmart, they’re going to need to be a "multi-"millionaire.
Idk, I’m much younger, and my retirement plan is the same as everyone else my age: walk into the woods when I’m ready or die in the water wars later when I’m not.
But I still feel bad for the elderly forced to work because a retirement home with medical support, i.e. assisted living, is too expensive and your kids can’t help you because they’re barely surviving too, and that’s while working, and you can barely work, but assisted living is 4-12k/month, so you work and hope you die before you become a burden on your children and grandchildren.
Anyway. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is vast. One million seconds ago was last week.
One billion seconds ago was fucking 1991.
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion.
The people you hang out with.
It says “multi-millionaire”. I guess they don’t mean the successful craftsman or engineer with his own crew who has a total wealth of 1 or 2 millions, but people in the 100+ million dollar range. That’s at least how I understood it.
It’s like comparing an 8.0 earthquake to a 9.0 earthquake. Millionaire, billionaire, that’s the difference between
1945 8.1 British India, Makran Coast 15.0 X Between 300 and 4,000 people were killed. 1945 Balochistan earthquake November 28
and
2004 9.1 Indonesia, Sumatra offshore 30.0 IX This is the third largest earthquake in the world since 1900 and is the largest since the 1964 Alaska earthquake. In total, at least 227,898 people were killed, many more injured and 1,126,900 were displaced by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 14 countries in South Asia and East Africa. 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake December 26
and that’s log 20, a lower order of magnitude than from a million to a billion
this makes sense right? Someone tell me this makes sense
I think they mean it’s a 8.0 earthquake and a 80.0 earthquake.
No the richter scale is logarithmic. Adding one point actually multiplies the intensity by 10. (Well, roughly in this case, but it’s a lot closer to 9 than to 80)
But 1 million times 10 is… 10 million. You have to multiply it by 1000 to get 1 billion. It’s the difference between an 8 and an 11 on the Richter scale then, no?
Yes… yes, you are right. Woops
It makes it way more insane doesn’t it? An 11 point earthquake is INSANELY strong.
so imagine adding 72 points
THAT’S SO MUCH WORSE!
Tbf when people say “multi-millionaire” they are often referring to people with over 100 million, not 2 or 3 or 5
Imho, a good visualisation for the difference between a million and a billion is in this Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg
I really do wonder why people like Warren Buffet are still working to make more money, for himself and others. What’s the benefit for himself? Some numbers get bigger, ok. But in terms of things and services he can buy for himself and his loved ones, nothing changes, he already can buy anything he could ever want. If he stopped working this seconds and would start spending money like there is no tomorrow, he couldn’t spend it all.
So why spend the last few years of your finite life increasing some numbers that don’t affect you? I really don’t get it.
Warren Buffett is not a good example. Dude just likes investing. Lives in the same house for 70 years. Eats McDonald’s and drinks Coke every day. There’s no way he can spend it all. That’s why he’s donating everything to charity.
Only really spends money on private travel and security. Maybe $20 to $40 million per year. That’s nothing for a billionaire.
These type of people make money as their hobby. The same way other people enjoy a good vine or a T-bone steak. They enjoy waking up and making money. I know someone that’s super Ritch in my country and that was his answer.
Bro was out of scale
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Hey man, give me all your money, I’m donating 99% of it to charity.
How much of this ‘charity’ is something like ‘The Warren Buffet Foundation’ which exists to enrich his descendants and fulfill political goals?
I literally cannot believe this post. These rich folks ACTUALLY need that money. How else will their great grandson hire a fleet of lawyers after he rapes someone at a frat party at the college where he’s a legacy admission? He doesn’t have the grades to get into that school, or the personality to pull that girl. He needs that money to fuel his rapey life of decadence.
20yrs ago, I made about a fifth of what I make today. I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but we were safe and paid our bills without a lot of stress. Today, I have a little more flexibility, but it doesn’t feel all that different.
I will assume that “lifestyle inflation” scales up, maybe it scales up a lot. But beyond some point, wealth becomes meaningless and the marginal dollar means nothing. Why keep hustling past that point? What drives people like that? Inertia? Lust for power? Competition with peers? Hard to say I guess but, something is driving them.
I also realize I suffer from lifestyle inflation, but …… the reason I don’t feel well off compared to my previous self is I’m still just a few paychecks from losing it all. If I lost my job, I lose it. I’ll have to cut way back, struggle to keep house and car, and will be anxious until I get another job.
I’ve read that feeling well off is having enough savings so you don’t need to worry about keeping your lifestyle in case anything happens. I don’t
Warren Buffet is a great example for this question because he does live modestly for one of the richest people in the world. If he lost his job/company, he could still support his lifestyle and obligations well beyond his life expectancy. So yeah, what is his motivation?
Watch Wolf of Wall Street - extremely NSFW btw - or if you cannot handle watching it, read the book.
For some, the money isn’t even the point, it’s the thrill of the con game.
For billionaires though, it’s something on a whole other level. Like, look at pictures of them - Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc. - there’s something not right there at all. They are playing an entirely different kind of game when, e.g., they don’t even allow their workers to take breaks to pee, even if they are pregnant. Ofc YOU would not do that, nor likely would anyone that you know, nor would even meet in your entire lifetime. Who would do such a thing!? (unless their boss mandates it ofc, so like they would get fired if they don’t, I mean like if nobody was forcing you to do so and yet… you did it anyway, and then you also forced thousands of other
humanspeople to do it too)That’s why they are a billionaire and you and I are not - b/c they are on a whole other level. It’s true, money cannot buy happiness, but they are damn sure going to
watchcause the world to burn while they try.There was a twilight zone episode called “a nice place to visit” where this petty crook died and ended up in a place where he could have anything he wanted any time. Every time he’d gamble, he’d win. Every woman he talked to wanted him. Etc. But he couldn’t lose.
A billionaire can have anything, but without challenge nothing really means anything. It’s all fake, and they’re surrounded by people who just agree with them in order to get to their money. They have no friends. They can’t even go outside. They’re trapped in the mansions and sports cars and yachts, unable to live in or even experience the world they have so much influence over. They are trapped by their wealth, so they come up with impossible plans to escape… To Mars, to space… But there is no escape. They are trapped on a world they are killing, surrounded by people who they need who also hate them.
The crook in the twilight zone episode asked to lose or get turned down, wanted some kind of challenge. He didn’t want to be in heaven anymore… And he was informed that he was not in heaven. That was hell.
Of course they’re broken. They’re in a living hell that everyone imagines is heaven.
Both Bezos and Musk were also abused or neglected by their parents. They feel like they have to prove something, but there’s nothing to prove and the people they want to prove themselves to are dead.
I love sci-fi, and fantasy too, in large part bc that is a way of seeing clearly into the real world, when you can isolate things and put them into a different context that makes it easier to digest.
I think you hit the nail on the head and also, I think that it’s arguably not even their fault. Hear me out! If you were a person with IQ of 300 let’s say and you are talking to a literal toddler who says “let’s go eat at Arby’s”, and you do and get food poisoning… then how do you avoid that again in the future? Kill the toddler? Or perhaps learn not to let toddlers control all of our actions? After all, the toddler was not fully aware of the consequences of their own actions, nor were you at the time, but of the two, one is capable of learning more readily than the other. It is partly the result of the toddler’s actions that you got sick, but not solely, and perhaps not even mostly.
Billionaires got rich via the system, and aside from those particular individuals there are many more that would follow them. Being merely “rich” isn’t (only) the problem, it’s the entire system that produces that. However, it is too late for that now, bc the toddler has been elected King and it is no longer an option to change the system. At some point technology will allow billionaires to become effectively immortal, and they may gain super powers besides that as well - already they have access to “medical care” and “a place to live that they actually own” and other things that are fast disappearing for the rest of us. e.g. when it becomes common again for the average person to die of easily preventable diseases, even a lifespan of 1-200 may be a close approximation of that in comparison. Soon we mortals may also lose “access to information”, since it will become diluted so much by the flood of misinformation that basically “what we know” will devolve into what we are allowed to know, by those who with the touch of a button could cause the media outlets, which they own, to put out an authoritative story telling us whatever truth they wish us to hear.
In any case, that is why I support being subversive - e.g. they are unkind to their workers, so we can oppose the trend by being kind to our fellow human;-). Whether it works or not, it’s also a lot more fun.
Musk’s father is actually a pretty big asshole, so he probably was abused and neglected. Not sure about Bezos.
Not that it excuses anything about either of them.
https://pagesix.com/2019/01/10/the-sad-story-behind-jeff-bezos-and-his-biological-father/
There’s some profound resentment there. Maybe the first question we should ask billionaires is, “who hurt you?”
Why is it that everyone thinks they’re not using their money as power? That’s kind of obviously what’s been happening to me, it’s just that mostly, they end up using their power to try and centralize more power. disney buying out marvel, buying out the muppets, microsoft now having openAI, EA buying every game studio just to end up fucking them all up severely, yadda yadda. Use the money to invest in companies and run those companies which are also seeking their own self-interest and power centralization, run all those companies with whatever goals you just kind of vaguely feel like at the time, even if it kills cool stuff in the crib, even if it ends up fucking over the end user. We are subject to the highly coordinated and elaborate whims of an idiotic set of dictators who are, as dictated by their position at the top of the hierarchy, they are incapable of making good decisions.
Why is it that nobody sees that it’s just gambling addiction? Also, remember at those levels, you are most certainly not calling the shots by yourself. You’re surrounded with a full entourage, like a royal court if you will, of people doing your bidding, and people doing their bidding, and bidding bidding other bidding. Being that rich is like being a statesman of old. Not the only similarity to feudality, truth be told.
I agree with your take, though I’d never considered it that way. I’m actually more scared thinking about their destruction being whimsical, rather than part of a coherent plan
I am afraid you have reason to be afraid then. The system encourages the behavior, and once you’re trapped in it, there’s only one road ahead. You’re rewarded for playing the game, you are punished for not doing it. Do you know of “Conway’s Game of Life”? It is an old program or mathematical concept with evolutionary algorithms, it has a starting condition and an ending condition, it’s highly worth checking out if not for the historical value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Game_of_Life
You plop down a cell, with some starting conditions, let’s say procreate, make money, expand. If your environment allows for it, the cell expands. If it doesn’t, then that cell dies. When all cells are dead, the game ends.
Capitalism is a starting condition whose inevitable conclusion is that it dies. If fulfilled, it breaks. By the nature of its internal rules, it can never keep going, there is no stable instance. The aspiration of capitalism is in itself self destructive. Under no circumstance can capitalism ever work in perpetuity. It is inherently unstable, and will collapse. <- we are more or less here
It’s like giving an android the command “eat your own face”. If it does, it dies. If it don’t it fails. We are slaves under this structure, with no way of getting off the wild ride.
It’s neither. People act in their own interests, the bourgeoisie are not intentionally conspiring nor is it chaotic. It’s out of the general “improve my material conditions” drive that each class abides by.
I think you’re giving people too much credit for making rational decisions, but I get where you’re coming from.
I’m partially convinced that the conspiratorially minded just kind of do so because it’s easier to imagine that everything is part of a highly coordinated level of fuckery, rather than a combination of multiple captains that are all fighting over the rudder, squirreling us in random directions, and then the kind of motion of the ocean pushing us around, until it all kind of evens out to a baseline rate of snap, or jounce, or whatever it is.
EA buying every game studio just to end up fucking them all up severely
That’s Microsoft not EA
