Maybe a single person shouldn’t have enough wealth to rival a country? It’s almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.
I also can’t think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.
At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.
This is true, and very many self-proclaimed leftists already argue against it as such. “How dare you fund NASA when poverty has not yet been eradicated by a utopian society!!”
We’d still be living in mudhuts with outhouses if it were up to these people.
There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.
The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.
Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.
To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.
Once you get rich enough you pretty much don’t have a choice. Your investment portfolio is based on companies making the line go up. That line goes up because they get tax breaks from trump, they cut or suppress employee wages and benefits, they enshittify, they get AI and fire people, etc. In her case there’s also the absurd ticket prices and fees people have to pay to see her concerts. You cannot be a billionaire with clean hands, you’re skipping out on taxes, nobody “earns” a billion dollars.
I work for a small city that’s an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don’t live there, of course).
When we butt heads with a resident, it’s a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.
Maybe a single person shouldn’t have enough wealth to rival a country? It’s almost like that gives them more power than the government that is supposed to keep them in check.
Individuals having the ability to operate private space programs is insane.
I have a secret hope that they use it to fly the fuck away from earth forever
I also can’t think of a more insane pick than to let that individual be Elon Musk. Really shows how billionaires fail their way to the top.
At the end of the day I think billionaires owning space companies undermines the pursuit of humans going into space and studying space in general as it is difficult enough to justify to the average person normally that space exploration is important but when you have the people leading the pursuit of it hoarding enough wealth to lift an astounding amount of people out of poverty, then the association of those people with space exploration threatens to make space exploration a target of populist austerity sentiment unfairly because by its very nature it is a loud thing that draws lots of attention.
This is true, and very many self-proclaimed leftists already argue against it as such. “How dare you fund NASA when poverty has not yet been eradicated by a utopian society!!”
We’d still be living in mudhuts with outhouses if it were up to these people.
There aren’t any good billionaires. They get rich leeching off everyone else’s work, suppressing wages and compensation, and avoiding taxes on their insane wealth. On top of that, a seemingly normal person is likely to become a complete PoS when they no longer have to face any consequences for being a PoS because of their wealth.
The way I see it, billionaires are best understood as an autonomous cancerous process of money hoarding money, the human being who is the billionaire at the center of it hardly has any agency, just raw and pure complicity in the growth of the cancer enveloping them in a replacement of their human identity with an approximation of one constructed from financial abstractions.
Billionaires think they are making more and more important choices as they get richer but what really is occurring is they are becoming less and less a relevant part of the money they hoard in terms of what actions that entity of money takes and why it does so.
To be a proud billionaire is to be a proud insect host for the paratisoid wasp that is wealth hoarding. It is a strange and disturbing ideology from the perspective of an insect to take pride in being the vessel for a process that will most certainly annihilate you from within.
I like the way you write, good style 💜
They become very much like that kid in Twilight Zone’s It’s a Good Life
not saying shes a good one and i am not a fan, but i dont think taylor swift did that did she?
Once you get rich enough you pretty much don’t have a choice. Your investment portfolio is based on companies making the line go up. That line goes up because they get tax breaks from trump, they cut or suppress employee wages and benefits, they enshittify, they get AI and fire people, etc. In her case there’s also the absurd ticket prices and fees people have to pay to see her concerts. You cannot be a billionaire with clean hands, you’re skipping out on taxes, nobody “earns” a billion dollars.
Okay so she didnt do wage theft
So we can ignore the rest…?
I work for a small city that’s an enclave for the super-rich. Literally every household is multi-millionaires (I don’t live there, of course).
When we butt heads with a resident, it’s a challenge because most of our residents have a larger budget and pool of resources than the city. My favorite example was when a resident tried to build a retaining wall in a drainage easement for a new home that would result in a street behind them flooding any time it rained. When we told them no, they tried to buy the Engineering firm we hired to review their development.