amazing is not the word I would have used
The billionaires are also collectively worth more than ever, with combined assets estimated at $14.2tn – a $2tn increase on 2023 and more than the GDP of every country except the US and China.
Their collective wealth has risen by 120% in the past decade, at the same time as billions of people across the world have seen their living standards decrease in the face of inflation and the cost of living crisis.
At least they got to the point pretty quickly.
How many poor people do you think it would take to relieve the top 1% of their wealth? Surely it's just a numbers game.
I don't remember if this is one of the pearl clutching boot licking communities that removes comments about violence targeted at people who harm all of us, so this might get removed, but:
A lot of billionaires are just people that can fall down a flight of stairs like anyone else. I'm honestly surprised during the Twitter shakeup no one just shot Musk in the gut.
There's probably rules against porn too so I won't describe him bleeding out.
Describing musk bleeding out is like porn to you? I mean whatever floats your boat, i guess. I personally might call it an early christmas gift if it were to happen though.
Justice system, electoral system, media, technology, military, police, food, etc. etc. All owned by them. It's going to have to get very very bad before anything changes.
When was the last good year for poor people? Anyone? Bueller?
July 14th, 1789
Probably 2020 and 2021 when we were excused from paying rent for awhile, and $1,000 magically appeared in our bank accounts a few times.
A lot of the world was jobless, rent became debt and lost a lot of family members. For me all of those along with getting depressed and still unable to recover to my normal appetite.
The last time was probably the Neolithic Revolution
Before it.
Agriculture actually made people's lives much worse in many regards. Worse diet, women turned into commodities, shorter life spans due to increased infectious diseases, much less free time due to having to put more effort into getting food (somewhat surprisingly hunter-gatherers have way more free time) etc. It's been great for rulers and population growth though. If anything, poor people were invented in the Neolithic Revolution
edit: see eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253633/, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm
post-depression new deal stuff was pretty good? right? the wealth made more sense from there until it was gutted in the 80s
An amazing year for rich people.
Nice to see them get something, just 225 years in a row.
Way longer than that. Really they had lost ground and wanted their slaves back but they're trying to turn us all into slaves.
For sure. WW2 really shows the system for what it is now.
An utterly insane number of men were fighting or part of the logistics in WW2. It really was a crazy percentage of them. China was in full civil war and India sent huge numbers to fight also.
The rest, including vast numbers of women, were producing the tank, ships, ammunition etc. Needed for the war. Its estimated that around 4 tonnes of ammunition was expensed for every soldier killed. It really can't be understated just how much production, from so many people, went into maintaining that global war.
Yet, despite this, there was more than enough food for everyone. The only outliers were due to incompetence and callousness by the UK in India and Germany trying to starve the UK. However, of course, these were preventable one way or another.
The only thing we lost was the ultra wealthy.
The period just after WW2 saw a historic level of equality that we will likely never see again. This, to me, clearly shows that we don't all work as much as we do for the benefit of our community or anything like that. Its solely for the enrichment of the ultra wealthy, who then use their wealth to extract yet more wealth at ever greater rates.
The answer has and always will be the strategic refusal of work, outside of what is needed to maintain society. Its why we live in an employment based, market fundamentalist society. Its so the idea of doing anything like that seems like dangerous fundamentalism. But we have to ask ourselves, in what kind of a world is not spending 80% of your adult awake time working, mostly for other peoples benefit, producing the very power used to force this on us, thats killing our planets ability to sustain life, that works us all into an early grave, viewed as extremism?
It can't be a very good or rational one and certainly not one worth defending.
There was a reason I picked that number. I see we have a 🤑 emoji but not one for guillotines.
🇫🇷 will have to do.
You know what would be great? A good year for everyone who is not filthy rich.
Well yea your tax system is broken, congratulations 🎊
I promise I'm not a swifter or whatever they're called, but "at least" Taylor has to "work" for it, if a major part of it comes from selling and performing songs? right?
Like I agree "billionaires shouldnt exist" - but she's not high on my list of cruel offenders.
There's no ethical way to become or stay a billionaire. Swift is among the best of the worst, and typically uses her spotlight to spread a positive message, but that doesn't undue the unfathomably selfish lifestyle she lives.
So, while significantly less evil than other billionaires, she's still a billionaire, and thus evil.
Surely that is not ALL she does to get that amount of money. I'd assume she has it invested like any other rich person, stock market, real estate, tax evasion, all the trimmings. Just because she maybe does "less" of it, does not make her a good person.
She could donate a life-changing amount of money to every Fediverse user and still have more left over than she knows to do with.
Yes, but have you considered the major phycological impact for poor Tay Tay if she only had enough money and resources for several thousand years instead of hundreds of thousands?
Tay Tay would probably be so devastated she'd write a breakup song about her bank account.
So could the other 140 people who became billionaires this year, and that's not even mentioning all the existing billionaires. I really don't understand what this focus on Taylor Swift is about.
I really don’t understand what this focus on Taylor Swift is about.
I'm pretty sure I know what it's about.
Female, powerful, encourages folks to vote.
All this ramped up after the "Taylor Swift tells her fans to vote" brouhaha a couple months back.
I can't swing a stick without hearing another story about how generous she is with her $$ and her fans, so while she may not be perfect, and maybe could be doing more, she seems like a decent person, and I'm gonna bet she's doing a lot more for everyday folks she helps than most of the other folks on that list.
I’m pretty sure I know what it’s about.
Female, powerful, encourages folks to vote.
It's The Guardian so I don't think it's rooted in misogyny or her trying to change the power structure. It's likely just because she's one of the most famous people on the planet, and probably the most recognisable person on this list.
You know how the right hates Taylor Swift? Perhaps this is the news that we can use to finally get them to agree to tax the rich.
No, because they don't think along class lines but along identity lines.
That "eat the rich" thing is taking permenent residence in my thoughts. Thought virus's, eh.
And not a single one doing anything that would benefit society with that wealth.
Of course not, because if they were their wealth would be declining not increasing.
Congrats for the amazing year, you leeches. Let's get the BBQ ready to smoke you.
Memo: when people say “it’s not a zero sum game” they’re not talking about finite resource situations, which actually are that.
Good for them, but I'm here having an awful time
Nah f them
My good for them probably needed /s after it
That money will just become an arbitrary number. They'll look back on this in about 20 years thinking what a funny thing, people thought a number on a computer screen meant something. If you can't turn your money into something with fundamental value then what is it anyway?
They can, that number gives them power. They can use it to buy things...
20 years is extremely optimistic.
With hard work and hungry stomachs we can decrease that number!
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