You have to be in a position to be heard. You could literally be the most popular account on lemmy, but you'd still be yelling down or laterally at people who already support you.
All these people shitting on you acting like there aren’t a bunch of easy-to-use alternatives. This is one of those cases where a boycott is actually feasible. So many people here with more opinion than knowledge.
I would like this but also have those phones have a no logs policy so they cannot be used to track you or figure out where you were previously, at least without your consent.
No, see, I made all my money by inheriting it, and because I'm rich and wealthy that means that god must love me, and therefore I must be a good person inherently. People are poor because god doesn't love them, therefore they must be bad people. Duh. /s
The real question is how do you define best system. I bet those billionaires think this is in fact a pretty good system. Though they are probably never satisfied, so they wouldn't say best until they could snap thier fingers and a million people would start working to make whatever idea popped into thier head happen.
Pretty much. Though from things I have read they are more likely to be competition addicts. Gambling would be one way to compete with others. But yeah, honestly, I wouldn't want to be them. I consider most of them mentally ill.
The plan is going well. Now all we gotta do is convince all those sonobabiches to get on a Tesla rocket to Mars. As soon as that shit is outta here, we cut off communication and problem solved.
I do somewhat disagree with this. Don't get me wrong, I'm very much on the eat the rich train. But, while not due to elons personal "brilliance" space x has cut the cost of going to space by a huge amount. And so many amazing things have come out of the space program
The fact is, one thing has pretty much nothing to do with the other. The wealth gap between the wealthiest individuals on Earth and the rest of us is not the cause of poverty; in fact, as you go back in time long term, the wealth gap shrinks, while overall poverty goes up.
And what you mention about Space X is one example of the 'rising ride lifts all ships' phenomena that makes things better for all of us overall long term.
The fact that fulfilling three extremely-doable conditions: graduating high school, not getting married before the age of 21, and not having children before getting married, make your chances of being impoverished as an adult next to nothing, makes it even more obvious that billionaires are not the cause of poverty.
Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of increases in net worth of billionaires is created wealth (as in, if it didn't happen, that wealth wouldn't belong to someone else, it just wouldn't exist at all).
The real issue is the eradication of poverty. It's impossible to prevent someone from being at the top, and that top being exponentially higher than the average, in a society where wealth is so 'create-able' (and the fact that it is is a good thing, imo!), that position is always going to exist. But as we've seen over the past 50-100 years, it is very possible for that wealth gap to not only exist, and grow, and have the percentage of human beings who are impoverished shrinking, at the same time.
Nine out of ten people with enough money and power to steer the system to massively favour them think that things are perfectly fine as they are. Now carry on, peon.
Some old book has a monologue where a character says “I am neon” and the context is that they see themselves as beautiful and transient.
The subtext is that the neon gas in a neon light is just a medium power is passed through to produce some useful outcome through its interaction with the coating in the lamp (light). The neon itself is thrown away when it outlived its usefulness and no one who receives the light of it cares where it went or what happened to it or why.
I hate to burst any utopian bubbles out there, but the problem with society ultimately isn't capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or fascism, or any other system of government or economics. The problem with society is people. We are the problem. While some systems of government are certainly better than others at protecting us from our ourselves, eventually they all crumble and succumb to our depravity.
The fact that progressives have decided to hate the space industry, probably because Elon is a prominent figure in it, really rubs me the wrong way. It's regressive bullshit under the guise of a moral assertion.
Honestly I've noticed a lot of anti intellectualism from progressives over the past few years. You guys hate STEM, hate emerging tech, and hate people who work in emerging tech. While they stress "being informed", all that really means is watching some 15 minute YouTube clip from a comedian pretending to be a journalist or reading an article from an obviously biased website, then adopting all the assertions as their own viewpoints.
If anyone disagrees with that worldview, they are ridiculed for being either morally or intellectually inferior. Usually there's some literal schoolyard level insult thrown in. I don't like the cyber truck, but calling anyone who drives it a "cybercuck" is the kind of shit I would expect from middle schoolers.
There's a way to do things, and then there's a way to do things well. It may be that many progressives are no longer interested in progressing for the sake of progression. Rather that they're trying to create not just a more "advanced" world but a better, more beautiful one.
Capitalism has led to more death than any other system we've come up with. It is a useful intermediary step between feudalism and socialism and instead of progressing we've stalled here and slowly but steadily turned it back into feudalism.
Billionaires and starving people tend to live in different countries though. What ever makes someone a billionaire in the US isn't probably the same thing that makes someone else starve in Africa. One could even say that thanks to the wealthy westerners there's less and less starving people in those places. There's been a huge decrease in world wide poverty over the last few decades.
He did say "one could say". And I imagine an argument could be made. I would love to see either side of it with some data. It would be interesting. Like one could talk about how bill gates has poured money into Africa that might not have gone there otherwise. And then the response could outline how the money was taken out of Africa to make the billionaires, though I am not sure if Microsoft makes a lot of money in Africa our not. And I would love to have an informed rebuttal for my own use.
Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services
Notice how they keep referencing “healthy food”.
Starvation is not a lack of access to “healthy food”. Starvation is a lack of access to “any food”. Insufficient calories.