Comment on A reminder
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Because of that whole exponential thing, millionaires and ten-millionaires are actually closer to the rest of us working class folk than they are their billionaire owner-class brethren.
And this is going to be important when the ultra-wealthy decide to reveal their less-rich near-peers aren’t actually in the oligarchs club, and don’t get to live in Thiel’s Rapture-style hypercities with the real people.
That’s true, but if you have $10m, you can live off the “work” your money does for the rest of your life. If you have decent, conservative financial planning, you are in no danger of homelessness no matter how bad 3 months are.
Billionaires are today’s emperors, but someone with $10m is at least a member of the aristocracy and is living off the labour of others, rather than having to live off their own work.
The problem with being at the bottom of the second estate is that the ones at the top are entirely cutthroat and exclusionist. As Corey Doctorow notes, the owner class thinks there’s just too many people, hence the AI fantasy of automating all the peasant and middle-class work. (Both the first and third estates.) But they also think the owner class itself is too populous.
It may be a while before the goon squads get down the purge list to come for the Thromby level plutocrats, but they are on the list.
The ultra-wealthy are also greedy AF. There’s a story about when Carnegie figured out that J.P. Morgan would totally knife him if it meant getting his assets. He stopped associating with Morgan soon after. People like Thiel, Bezos and Musk have revealed themselves to the public to show they are exactly that level of ruthless.
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About one billion dollars.
But yeah, like the other commenter said: $10m puts you WELL outside of working class. That’s enough to retire on anywhere on the world, and with a high degree of luxury outside of a handful of the most expensive cities. That money, invested by anybody with half a brain, will make enough money per year than many extremely skilled professions make. We’re talking doctor salary without doing any actual work. They’re not buying senators wholesale like billionaires, but their house rep probably knows them by name.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
Larry Lessig made this point, that the people who get representation are the ones who donate the maximum allowable direct donation to their campaign. (Even that is peanuts compared to super-PAC money and dark money, but it’s worthy of an annual Christmas card, and even a fruit basket.)
The difference is that you still need half a brain. This is the 1970s George Lucas level, where he still has to listen to experts or (in the case of ESB hire experts to direct his movie for him). In fact, a note to boards of directors everywhere, this is where you want your C-Suite to be and stay, so that they use data-driven science to determine their management policies, which will maximize profits. Contrast our vindictive tech billionaires whose hiring and firing practice is brain-draining their own companies, and wrecking the entry-level job market which is where they would glean their future expertise. (Sorry. This is a specific rant of mine.)
Once you get sufficiently rich (a billion will more than qualify) then you make money whether or not you do anything, and, as Zuckerberg and George W. Bush have demonstrated, you can do an awful lot of stupid and still fail upwards.