Submitted 4 months ago by ivanafterall@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Am I just deceived? I think I might love him?
Honestly you shouldn’t judge anyone as a group, even billionaires. They are not all evil, probably mostly evil though even if just in the basic sense of destroying the world for profit, both physically and in terms of human happiness.
ABAB. All billionaires are bad.
Valve makes tonnes of money from loot boxes or whatever they’re called. Basically a form of gambling.
It just so happens that’s great way of making a shit load of money is making it super easy for people to buy from you. Valves big competitive advantage is just… not fucking that up.
And as someone else said, Gabe doesn’t have to be a billionaire. He could use his phenomenal wealth to build hospitals and help the poor, rather than building his own little private navy.
Valve is doing a lot that will make people like them, but they’re still a huge corporation, and Gabe is still a billionaire.
In ten years people will talking about the GabeCube killing PC modularity like they always saw it coming
I want to say that Gabe is a good guy, because he’s a gamer like many of us, and because Valve is so pro-consumer, and because supposedly the company is mostly rid of hierarchy, but he’s still a billionaire unfortunately.
We shouldn’t eat them. I don’t want prion disease.
See, the thing is, once you eat the one percent, the bottom eighty percent want to eat.The top twenty percent and the bottom seventy percent want to eat.The top thirty percent.And then we just become the human centipede
Gabe and Swift are not obligate billionaires. They both have the capacity to adjust their wealth to avoid the cutoff.
I’ll let the normies keep swift if we can keep gabe
They are both part of the problem.
Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of uninterrupted and rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was not just a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.
Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.
Now, the world’s children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.
heheh
Enjoy your grovelling, I hear there’s cake!
Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read Wretched of the Earth. Read The Revolution Betrayed. Read Kronstadt 1921.
Enjoy your Blanqism and Bonapartism, I hear there is no cake
since the game news shelf ui update he really does deserve to be eaten
I’m not eating Elon Musk. That’s like dumpster diving behind a cracker barrel.
The fattest pigs make the crispiest bacon.
Gabe is not the enemy
Sadly, he is. This is what the enemy looks like. It is simply not possible to ethically acquire even a tenth of the wealth that he hoards for himself. The damage he has caused in acquiring and retaining that wealth is far greater than his net worth.
The sooner he starts his redemption arc, the better.
A billionaire is a billionaire. 🤷♂️
Name some things that make Gabe a bad guy.
This is really simple. If you have more than a 1000 million dollars. Every day you decide to keep it instead of saving lives and helping people. It will never be moral
He can buy his freedom by using his wealth to finally release hl3
We can save him for desert.
He has 6 yachts from kiddie gambling…
A billionaire who gives away 99% of their wealth to the poorest, first and exclusively, isn’t a billionaire, and still has enough money (maybe more!) for the rest of time.
Not off you have a fleet of yachts
In my opinion if anyone has billions of dollars and hasn’t given a majority of it away to charity or those in need, that person is on some level at least somewhat an evil person.
Sure, much of it would be tied up in stocks and stuff that legally can’t be sold for specific purposes or timeframes, but if you have net worth in the billions and any stocks that could be sold for cash and then donated it should be. Or if you have an annual income that’s much more than you need to live an extremely comfortable life and then you just spend and invest the excess instead of donate.
Securities tax, payable in shares of the security. 1% of all stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments transferred to the IRS annually, to be auctioned slowly over time. The first $10 million held by a natural person may be exempted from this requirement. No exemptions for artificial “persons”.
Just universal wealth redistribution, there is no way a human may ever deserve to accumulate so many resources…
Give him the ability to divest his wealth first.
He has the ability right now.
Doesn’t really count if you’re only doing it once people threaten you with murder.
“Billionaire” is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be “millionaire”. The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It’s just inflation.
Plus, a lot of “billionaires” are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It’s a “theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that”.
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don’t expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
Valve in particular in a private company, so if Gabe own billions in shares, it’s not Valve shares
In order to be incorporated, a company has to have stock. Private companies still have shares even if they aren’t traded on public exchanges.
It’s possible that Gabe owns 100% of Valve’s stock, but it’s also possible that he’s sold some to other people or entities. Originally when Valve was founded, it was a split between Gabe and Mike Harrington, but Harrington reportedly sold his shares to Gabe when he left.
It’s also very likely that Gabe owns shares in other corporations, even just as personal retirement investments. But that’s not what I was talking about.
If it were to be a revolution he would be given the chance. Just be a director of valve for a normal director salary. If he take it then he would be just another worker.
Offer him the option to transition Valve to a workers cooperative. Boom, he would no longer be a billionaire.
He has that option every day.
There is a finite amount of money in this world. For one person to have more means others have less. There is no going around that simple fact.
There is a finite amount of money in this world.
Not really… that’s kind of the whole point of fiat currencies, you can always mint more.
Most billionaires don’t even have any money. At that level they don’t need it. They don’t pay for things. They just get loans they’ll never pay back, with older loans as collateral.
The problem with billionaires isn’t money (though billionaires are one of the main problems with money). The problem with billionaires is that their fiat, virtual, wealth gives them an unfair amount of influence over everyone else’s lives, and that they alone get to enjoy a living standard (being able to get all your necessities and live a fulfilling life essentially for free) that should (and could, with an adequate distribution of resources) be available to everyone.
Let’s say there are 100 tables in the world. If one person has 50 tables then it means everyone else has less. If mister tables aquires an additional table, can we agree it is coming from someone else ? Someone poorer. Even if the governement can make a new table to replace it, the fact that mr table is sucking up all tables on the market is still a problem for every one else.
You say they don’t have money, but if they live well, buy everything they want and influence the world as they see fit, I feel it’s disingenuous to say they don’t actually have money. They’re certainly sucking up your tables.
I’m going on a tangeant here, but it’s exactly why you don’t want your government to be cash positive. A government in the green is taking that money from someplace. A government in the red is actually helping everyone else not drown. It’s all a matter of where that money is going. That explains why the vast majority of countries run in the red. A government paying it’s own debt is the same as deleting money from the economy.
I do agree with your general sentiment though.
8 people now have more than 53% of the world combined.
These is. I such thing as a good billionaire. There are billionaires who might be temporarily aligned with you but make no mistake none of them will love you back…
Looking at you, Mark Cuban
Love your wallet though
I personally don’t like the idea of murder, I’d if we-the-people get into power, just pass laws that taxes them, then enforce the law as such. If they resist, jailtime for tax evasion.
For those that are exceedingly cruel with their time as a billionaire, they get tried, judged by a jury of average people, 2/3 is a conviction (as opposed to the unanimity required now), life imprisonment.
Billionaires and their heirs are deprived of political rights.
Easy peaceful transition. Zero bloodshed
I don’t like bloodshed, because once that starts, once we “okay” mob killings, people are gonna attack anyone they don’t like, including small bussiness owners they had a grudge against in the past.
I have empathy, I don’t wanna see the streets filled with blood.
Yeah I don’t think we can force billionaires to do anything without some violence. Have you seen the world and how long the rich have been in power?
I have no problem with people who contribute a lot of value to society being proportionally rewarded. However, having a net worth in the billions is just plain ludicrous, especially since the billionaires aren’t the ones creating all the value, they’re just controlling it. For example, did Gabe invent everything that makes Valve as successful as it is, or was most of it designed and developed by engineers who are paid a fraction of what he is paid? Even if most of Valve’s IP started with Gabe and other engineers were doing the grunt work to “make it so”, that still shouldn’t mean that society allows this one man to control billions worth of our societal resources.
If I am not mistaken, Steam is one of the highest paid companies in the world, if not the. Perhaps still not fair relative to contribution, yet exemplary compared to the rest.
I do believe that Gabe is one of the better/more benevolent winners of an inherently unfair and now definitely broken system.
That means that gamers have been ripped off for decades.
Valve encourages and keeps the system broken just as much as Microsoft or Nintendo does. They all try really hard not to compete.
They do have high salaries, but it’s also a ridiculously small company for the money they make. Gaben is still making money hand over fist, and the employees making big money are all on the admin team.
Steam could charge a 5% fee and give the rest to developers. The services and salaries would still stay the same. It would give Gaben enough money to cover his billion dollar boats fleets maintenance cost, just not enough to buy himself a new yacht every two years.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why eat them? You better turn them to compost, so they can actually help something grow.