Submitted 2 weeks ago by DandomRude@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
“The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
Utah Phillips
The deaths from climate change related Ice storms, floods, fires, heat waves and droughts are not due to “catastrophes”, or “disasters” they are calculated, premeditated murders for profit.
“These people have physical bodies” - Jreg
They are the symptoms, not the disease. Capitalism will always create them on a long enough timeline. It is streamlined feudalism.
If you have any type of head start under capitalism, for any reason, regardless if everyone profits, those who initially profited a little more will profit exponentially more at an exponential rate as time goes by.
The claim is that under capitalism, everybody is better off. But if they earn 1.1 times as much as you do, as the years turn into decades into centuries, you will have earned a fraction of what they did. That difference matters a lot, especially at scale.
If I get $1 and you get $100, that’s a big difference between us, but not life changing for either.
If I get $1000 and you get $100000, that is a massive difference between us, trivial for me, definitely significant for you.
If I have $100000 and you have $10000000, we might as well live on different planets.
Capitalism doesn’t take this into consideration. Sorry for the somewhat juvenile example, I’m very tired, and am going to have another drink now.
Your example isn’t bad. You could go further. 1,000,000 vs 1,000,000,000. Massive difference.
The problem is when we live in a world when we have millions of people with less than $1,000, and others have more than $300,000,000,000.
Here’s another problematic aspect of the same-
In 1913 there were 435 representatives in Congress. The population of the United States was ~97 million. In 2026 there are still 435 representatives. The population is about ~335 million. In 1913 each representative spoke for roughly 223,000 people. In 2026 each representative speaks for roughly 770,000 people.
In 1789 there were 65 representatives, and about 4 million people, speaking for ~60,500 people each.
Why would a wealth tax not fix this?
Because if wealth is power, then wealth will not want to pay taxes, so it would wield its wealth as a weapon so as to assure that it wouldn’t. See? Taxes are laws. Capital is above the law. Can the law be enforced? If so, then yes, it would fix this. Unfortunately, a legal and democratic system cannot withstand the force of capital- which, incidentally, is also an agreement. It’s only as long as we play the game and let us be duped by it that this goes on, that’s why the power remains with the people. If we withdraw, it all collapses.
True human unity and cooperation transcends all arbitrary systems of government, democratic or other.
“most”?
Try “all”. Everything always eventually comes down to someone, somewhere, trying to make more profit for themselves.
That’s why “Follow the money” is the surest way to solve any crime.
More precisely “follow the money” is the surest way to understand why a crime is not being prosecuted
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
We need a maximum wage
The bourgeoisie do not receive a wage. They receive our wages in rhe form of profit
They don’t get wealth from labor, it’s all about owning the shit that gets them wealth.
And even then, they don’t sell it to buy things, they use it as leverage to spend the banks’ money.
We need a wealth tax, is what you want to say. Tax wealth not work.
“the only minority group destroying our country are billionaires” as the bumper sticker on my therapists’s car says… love her
Power, not just money, power in too few hands. Getting there also tends to require extreme selfishness, which only makes it worse for everyone else when the most selfish acquire said power. Democracy was supposed to disperse power across the community to explicitly prevent concentrations of power.
Money results in having power, wether you use it or not/Privilege (SP?) given people with more money over people with less money .
Power is owned by Capital. Capital is owned by Violence.
Exactly. These creatures ARE our only real problem. More-less everything else, we could solve if they just…
…stopped being alive.
We must take matters into our own hands.
Yes. We’re well aware.
BINGO, SUMMED-UP The World on Capitalism!
The wealthy existed long before capitalism.
Nah b…most of the misery in the world comes from people refusing to work on themselves.
If more of us owned our flaws and pushed to be better, we’d lift our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities along with us.
You speak the truth. How else do people like Trump even have a shot of coming to power? He wouldn’t.
On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We’re in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There’s some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we’ve become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It’s not just billionaires, it’s all of us.
Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they’re not the ones releasing the gases. We can’t just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We’ve reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.
Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we’d still have the climate change problem to tackle.
If we depose them, we’d have access to their wealth to tackle climate change. And it wouldn’t be for building the doomsday bunkers they are now.
Zuckerberg spent nearly $400 million for a bunker to be built in Hawaii. This was after Hawaii had fires that cost them nearly a billion in damages.
Zucks $400 million purchase could have repaired half the nation-state. It would have immediately improved ecological recovery, and restore the canopy biome that helps pull C02 from the air as a natural deterent to Climate change. He’d then have most of the population worshipping him for doing so. Likely welcoming him anywhere in the state he’d want to visit.
Instead he can now visit his bunker, needs it because the island hates him, and helped contribute to ecological collapse in building it.
The problem is that billionaires are the worst humans imaginable to have such wealth. It will always go towards cthe acceleration of climate collapse for their benefit instead of preventing it. Whether you feel they’re a contributor or not, they’re still in charge of the resources that could easily stop climate change faster than any other mechanism on the planet.
Instead they’re building bunkers with that money to run from the problems they’ve actively contributed to more than any other human on the planet.
Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday one of your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.
tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.
There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer.
I mean that’s just a false narrative. We’ve know about the negative effects of fossil fuels on the climate since the early 20th century. Back then there may have been no other viable alternative. However, that’s not the case after the beginnings of the nuclear age in the 1950s.
The only reason we have been as dependent on fossil fuels is because of fossil fuel corporations influence over government. No one is saying that we needed to completely divest from fossil fuels all together. If we just used it for things like plastics, fertilizer, or just divested from using it for power plants it would have prevented the crisis we are having today.
Yeah, the current crises have all got one similar social foundation, and that is this:
middle-class people are aware that it would upset their rich bosses if they raised a hue and cry about it
When the middle class people step out of line, they get fired, they get demoted, they sometimes get thrown out of a window (accidentally), or they kill themselves, supposedly, according to the coroner’s report.
So if we start killing the rich people or forcing them to sign contracts saying that their wealth requires that they provide for the lessors, then what bad actually happens?
The world becomes a happier, better place that’s cleaner and healthier and we have fewer poor people and?
The only downside is that some of us middle class people might die in the process.
The thing is: it is no longer necessary to burn fossil fuels for transportation or energy production. The idea that this is still necessary is a narrative fueled by the money of a few unscrupulous people, which is what this random post is about. It is a lie that will lead us all to ruin.
We simply cannot continue the status quo. This conclusion is not just my opinion, but a proven fact that, to my knowledge, no reputable scientist would dispute.
Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.
And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.
Sure fossil fuel was necessary for some time but the only reason we kept going and still dependent on it despite the technological advancements and available alternatives is because of big corporations and some politicians who benefit from the industry (either financially or politically).
We could’ve stopped contributing to climate change some time ago but we choose not to. We can even do it today but we won’t. Change has been painstakingly way slower than necessary because some rich people decided it was not worth the effort.
It’s amazing what humans can achieve when we work together. We stopped using Chlorofluorocarbons and found viable alternatives when we decided it was worth the effort. We’ve eradicated smallpox ffs and we could’ve eradicated more diseases if we choose to.
That’s simply not true. We don’t even have the technology and resources today to achieve a zero carbon economy. We need a ton of new investment across a ton of industries.
I think the average person believes that we can just switch gasoline cars over to EVs and we’re done. That’s not even close! Less than 1/6th of emissions come from transport (all cars, trucks, trains, and ships combined).
Since CO2 emissions grow by about 0.9% per year, even if we eliminated all emissions from transport overnight (but did nothing else) it would buy us less than 20 years before emissions were back where we started.
There’s no silver bullet that billionaires are somehow hiding from us. Curbing emissions is going to take huge investments across many different sectors of the economy and new technologies in many different industries. Take solar panels for example. We could not have achieved their modern levels of efficiency and production capacity without going through decades of advancement in semiconductor technology. No one was holding that technology back. It has seen enormous investment since the mid 20th century for the development of faster CPUs and GPUs. Solar simply rode on the coattails of the computer revolution. It could not have advanced the way it has on its own.
They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
Unfortunately, the Eppstein case proves that not even this is their downfall.
Posting this because I already had the link copied. I guess just because it seems true.
You should probably read more history.
Lots of suffering for lots of reasons.
Oh, I enjoy studying history. And I find it terrible that apparently no one learns from history, because otherwise fascism would not be back in vogue.
Fascism sucks for any person that actually has to live under Fascism. Look at how Italy treated Fascism.
They were like, oh, well, you want to eat fancy bread? You’re not supporting your country! You eat the shit bread that the Fascists gave you, and you fucking like it!
You should be happy that you’re one of the people that’s getting shitty bread! We can change that for you if you really don’t like it.
Stupid idealist, religious crap
Please go to therapy instead of projecting your misery into others.
Oh dont worry, the earth will still spin. Life will go on.
Humans are fucking this up for themselves and wont be missed. [Beep boop, im not a robot]
Money. We need a new system of commerce. The quest for even more money is the longest problem we refuse to look at in human history. Excessive greed should be punished not aspired to. All we seem to do is turn to rich people for answers like they’ve figured out the world, when in fact they ignore the world and supplant a system called “the economy” over actual reality. We make goods and send them there to buy back their goods from over there to make people in the middle rich for doing nothing. Completely ignoring health, safety, the environment in the process, things that are real in the real world that we all experience and affect us. Make it make sense to me.
Or more to the point; money is the problem. Currencied are useful tokens thar make trade more convenient. But systems have been built around the simply concept of a trade token that a person can have power over others by just having a bigger number.
But it’s just a number. Most of the time a number that doesn’t even represent anything real or physical. Just a number of a hypothetical thing(s) that has a certain hypothetical value because someone said so.
Money is not the problem. Money is being used to translate the value of the real resources that the Uber rich hold.
They don’t hoard money. They hoard companies, houses, stocks, bonds, debt.
When you work to create a surplus? It goes to them. When you pay your landlord? It goes to them. When you pay taxes? Believe it or not, it also goes to them through the form of interest debt.
You gotta weed that shit out at the root. Tax wealth not work.
Debt is not a real resource, it’s a complete fabrication, and all the richest people have a value that doesn’t exist in real world resources, rather a perceived agreed upon value of what their assets might cost, based on the vague idea that it will appreciate in value in the future, and the debt cycle that may continue printing money for banks.
So most money isn’t based on anything. And the value of currency these days is entirely fiat.
As it ever was. It’s humans. We are the problem.
It is a little weird that this had never occurred to you until it popped into your head during a shower, but better late than never!
capitalism. capitalism causes most of the misery in the world.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
One could argue that the currency system itself legitimizes the amassing of enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny minority.
It is a bit more complicated than that
What got us here is a complicated but simple story. Those without morals have no problem cheating the system and using other people. Capitalism rewards this behavior so it as inevitable that the unscrupulous will continue to vacuum up the money and power. We are experiencing the end game of this social construct.
You can’t blame everything on “capitalism.” We’ve done the same thing for centuries.
The problem is that the world has given a unfair advantage to some people. It really boils down to poor laws and regulations causing havoc.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”
One of the most carbon intensive things someone can do, especially in the developed world, is to have a kid.
If money was more equally distributed more people would have more kids.
So really the billionaires are helping with climate change.
/s
The love of money is the root of all evil
If money didn’t exist there would still be a small group of people vying for power and the belief that they should rule over the rest or us. Money just made it easier.
shittydwarf@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Hunting billionaires for sport would make the world immeasurably better in every way
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
There are a tiny proportion of relatively decent ones, such as Mackenzie Scott (Bezos’ ex-wife), so I would only ask that such a hunt not be completely indiscriminate.
Biffsbraincell@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
They can give their money away if they really are decent. Like she is doing. A notice of the start of hunting season should be all they would need to move themselves out of that class.
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
All billionaires are bastards. Full stop. It doesn’t fucking matter if they got there through marriage. It doesn’t fucking matter if they donate to charity and seem like nice people. Nothing they can do can excuse the evil done by them or on their behalf to become that wealthy in the first place. You can tell they’re cool with it because they never seem to stop being billionaires of their own free will.
Zombie@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Still married Bezos. Still has billions of dollars to her name. Still owns part of Amazon. There is no such thing as a decent billionaire.
pseigo.github.io/what-does-a-billion-look-like/
GreatWhite_Shark_EarthAndBeingsRightsPerson@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Get Woked more, there are none. They have all these resources that poor-extremely (disgustingly, no one ever wants to live like, but when forced to will) poor people will never have, not just in poor countries, but in The 1st World’s wealthiest countries. And those people do not care enough to reduce their wealths/resources, hidden from taxes in USA & Etc. banking, to devote to truly making a difference in those poor-extremely (disgustingly, no one ever wants to live like, but when forced to will) poor people‘s lives & generations after them.
GreatWhite_Shark_EarthAndBeingsRightsPerson@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I would never actually think of that & what about to say should be done… Remembering ‘The Aerosmith’s song ‘Eat The Rich’ every time this pops up. I once was so mad (not as mad as today, so progress in my peaceful mind-peaceful practice) told a cousin that The Rich-Super Rich Economic Classes/Owners should be made in editable food for people starving around the world.