Comment on Bungie CEO faces backlash after announcing 220 employees, or 17% of its workforce, will be laid off | Pete Parsons has spent $2.4 million on classic cars since Sony acquired Destiny developer Bungie

• Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Maybe we would all do the same thing?

  That’s precisely my point. That kind of wealth should not be allowed, specifically because it seems to lead to this kind of behavior. Rare is the wealthy philanthropist; common is the wealthy psychopath.

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  • liam070@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The question is: can a wealthy philantropist do more good than a wealthy psychopath can do harm? Buying cars is not really bad per se, it just shows they don’t care for anything but themselves. Spending money on research to solve global warming on the other hand…

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    • Telorand@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I would argue that a collectively wealthy society with middle-class wealth can do far more good than a single philanthropist with god-levels of money. Buying cars isn’t bad, but you’re glossing over the fact that they’re classic cars, i.e. very expensive hobbyist toys; these are not daily drivers, and the point to the gross inequality of the CEO being able to have millions of dollars of play money while he treats real humans like numbers in an expense formula.

      Plutocracy is not the answer just because you have one good plutocrat for every nine monsters, because you still have nine monsters countering the efforts of the one.

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    • SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Individual philanthropy is never a solution. Most of the breakthroughs happen by public funding. Tax the rich, and fund the research. Don’t let the MFs claim they’re helping anyone out by donating 1% of their stolen wealth.

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• partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I believe it’s peer pressure once you have that kind of money. They are so far from reality they just don’t think about it. All their cocaine-buddies ramble about how they “deserve it” to throw money out of the window, they worked so hard yadda-yadda.

  There was a fantastic write up on Reddit 6 or 7 years ago where a person that rubbed shoulders with the rich explained the drastic differences in behavior between different strata of the rich. He cited there are absolutely those that spend excessively to try to appear more rich than they are. I think the net worth of this category was between $20 million and $200 million (those numbers are from memory). Above that those rich largely don’t do that anymore, and are surprisingly more practical. If someone has a link to that, I’d love a re-read of it. It was very eye opening.

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  • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I was awarded a patent that was going to make mine and the company it supported a lot of money. (Of course I didn’t get any of it, but whatever) I was invited to go have steaks with the customer company and to pack some comfortable clothes, spend a few days in Texas. What I didn’t realize was who was going to be there.

    We didn’t have steaks in the normal way of let’s sit down at the fancy building and eat. It was the board of directors, those guys who own the company. They wanted to take the engineers out for a few days. When the management and CEO tried to come along, they did a “why are you talking to us? Get back to work”. They wanted to hear about how we came up with this stuff.

    Took their Suburban convoy out to an oasis country club and we were given some pants and new shirts. Nothing special I thought, but they were some special member’s club gift they give out. We went shooting, and their shotguns cost more than my house. Told them I feel weird holding it. “Nah! If you drop it it’s fine! Can get another one”

    These guys had more money than I could fathom, but none of it seemed show-off, Gucci handbag level stuff. It was all made to look like nicer stuff you would buy from Macy’s. It was all custom tailored just for them. They didn’t need to show off to each other at that point. It was a fun couple of days. We stayed there, I had a room all to myself that was more like a master bedroom than a hotel.

    I tried to find out where breakfast was and the staff laughed. “It’s ok, what would you like? We will bring it to your room.”

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• Quill7513@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Keeping the wealthy is unethical. They’re not getting the right food for their dietary needs and their enrichment activities are unhealthy. We also can’t release them back into the wild because they haven’t learned the survival skills they need. We really need a rich people zoo where people can go visit them and learn about how capitalism has prevented them from being able to live the healthy normal lives their physiology was built for

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• aniki@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So we send them to the fucking gallows if they can’t live with the rest of us. ALL OF THEM!

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