I read a wonderful short story once about mankind venturing into the stars where they become a symbol of hope, friendliness, and community across all physical and psychological barriers. They would be the ones you turn to in times of crisis, to deliver aid and make repairs, to mediate in times of conflict and to bring joy in times of celebration.
However, occasionally, the humans would see one of their own ships adrift in the sea of stars, and they would stop at nothing to destroy it. The abrupt and merciless hostility would always shock onlookers and associates. “Why” they always ask. The answer was always the same; “when the earth was suffering, they used up our resources and left us behind.”
Got a link or a name for this story? I’d like to read it.
“If the billionaires are so determined on quitting humanity, perhaps it would be best to give them what they want and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them.”
+++
Let them be cake
Always have been
Always will
We should abandon them, by expropriating their wealth!
Lew- e-geee style.
The Billionaires are a bunch of Degenerate Morons who diddle children, much as the ruling class has always been. They’re funneling the world’s wealth upwards thinking capital will insulate them from the coming climate crisis they’re exasperating. How I wish I could be there when they realize that it won’t.
Have they not learned from Mario’s brother?
Removed by mod
Think about how much empathy your parents generation has for yours. They kind of sympathize, wish things were easier, but ultimately do not understand the wealth gap or your day-to-day.
Think about how much empathy you have for a 3rd world exploited labourer. You kind of sympathize, definitely wish things were easier, but ultimately do not understand on how they live on less than a dollar a day.
Billionaires aren’t just one or two levels removed from understanding your situation. They are whole planets apart. They cannot comprehend our daily struggles. They do not see it except through summarized news reports that pander and reframe it to their lifestyle.
Billionaires are the most removed species on this planet
Billionaires are the most removed species on this planet
If we all do our part, they could be removed further
Your generalizing re your parents and the previous gens sympathy.
Especially those of us who were poor as kids.
We know how hard it is. In 1968 a house was about twice a persons average yearly income, now? Forgot it. My son probably will never have the option. The. Again, I really didn’t either.
My son will probably never be able to own a house, may not live in a free country, will face runaway inflation and much more
I faced much in my time. Some way worse than anything my son will see
But those were instances. Moments I. Time. Hard, difficult, but fleeting after a while
What we are living in now is pervasive, all consuming and total greed stifling the younger generations and pulling what little safety nets we have for the old.
I grew up harder. But I also grew up easier. For instance I. The early seventies , you could get a full weight set for 18 bucks ( don’t ask how I know that )
Today that weight set is 300. I mean wages were WAYYYYY. Lower.
But when a house could be got for 20 grand , they didn’t have to be.
I feel like we are in agreement
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
That’s too generous.
I think they already do, hence the private islands and Bond villain style lairs.
If every piece of MAGA trash you know isn’t afraid of you, you’re a coward and a failure.
Reagan and Thatcher were politically successful, remaking even their center-left opponents such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair into celebrants of streamlined government. But this political success has not in fact solved the problem of stagnation, which remains as severe, by Thiel’s account, as it has ever been. Thiel and his cohorts have gotten everything they want politically, but that has still failed to solve the key problem of our time. The fact that he still advocates a failed economic program suggests the deeper stagnation is in his own mind.
Since politics has failed, Thiel and the other plutocrats are also toying with another solution: secession from society and the human species. Thiel has long been an advocate of various post-human technological solutions that will allow him and his fellow plutocrats to free themselves from the stagnant mass of humanity: cryonics (to overcome death), sea-steading (to create sea-board libertarian utopias), colonizing Mars, and artificial intelligence.
I’m all for it. Send them to Mars and make sure they don’t come back!
One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.
They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.
And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.
So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.
Sea steading, BioShock here we come…
But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it’s still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.
Anyone who says that is pretty stupid, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who actually held that position
I will say that working to colonize Mars will teach us to fix the Earth… But it would be real nice if we stopped fucking up the Earth in the first place
Personally, I would prefer Venus. I want these bastards to melt.
Nah, Mars sounds great. A tiny prison of their own making, as the corners they cut slowly come back to bite them? That’s poetic
Unchecked capitalism has failed, and the USA is the first victim. This is what happens when you dumb down a country so much that they can’t see the danger for themselves. Too bad for regular Americans but the leopards are going to feast.
Uhh, USA is one of the last to fall, off the backs of what we have the nerve to call “third world.”
It’s rich Theil refers to a book with a colonial slogan of “no free lunch,” after he and his ilk already sucked the husks of humanity dry. Pun intended.
It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.
He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”
They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
He believed in rationally-considered governance:
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.
All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.
The main problem with modern civilization is that it’s no longer possible to rob rich people. If Peter Thiel’s money actually physically existed, in like a vault somewhere, SOMEBODY would have burgled the vault by now, purely because of the insanely favorable risk vs reward ratio - like a lottery where the cost of buying tickets of every possible combination costs less than the jackpot, once the reward is high enough, there will always be SOMEONE who will make the necessary investment to negate the risk. And “robbing the rich” would always have enough popular support that there would be little effort to find the thief as long as the oligarch was unpopular enough. But now Thiel’s money no longer physically exists, and it’s basically impossible to forcibly take it from him without basically having to destroy the entire global banking system first in order to get at it.
This is why we used to let government deal with overgrown wealth. They’re the only ones with the power to stand up to robber barons. It’s too bad that this time they bought the government.
You’re not wrong, but billionaires are just as easy to kill now as they ever were. If you can’t take the money away from the planet destroying psychopath, take the planet destroying psychopath away from the money.
Killing them doesn’t give you their resources though. If you managed to get away with it, you will have to spend money staying anonymous and some board of directors will use the company value to enrich the next asshole.
You don’t need their money. You need them not to have it. Do it enough times and whoever ends up with it will make more responsible choices with it even if nothing else changes.
I know that, but we’re talking about incentives to rob the rich, which in the best case would include a robinhood style give to the poor.
We’re clearly need to eliminate wealth inequality, but I’m skeptical killing a few billionaires will help.
Then kill them all
They redistributed it away from us, they can redistribute it back. Democrats decided it’s been 80 or 100 years, so we forgot they were never on our side, **remind them we remember. VOTE. THEM. OUT. PRIMARY. RIOT. **
Thiel has worried that Western civilization had entered a period of long-term stagnation in the 1970s which will continue unless there is a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: lower economic growth, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a general cultural malaise.
Imagine looking back at the proud of time where there was literally the most advances in the wildest technology and thinking it’s stagnation. It was from a time period where people remembered refrigeration as new and exciting to the time where your phone has more computing power than the ones that put people on the moon, and it’s in your freaking pocket, and say that technology stagnated.
As for the lower economic growth and the “stagnating” culture, that’s squarely on the shoulders of corporations, and therefore, billionaires.
interestingly, i get the sentiment that the economy has stalled since the 1970s from a surprising number of people, and i figured out that it’s probably because blue-collar jobs have stagnated since the 1970s, and that’s what most people feel. That sentiment coming from Thiel, who invests in software, is very weird though.
The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.
You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.
On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.
Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.
man who hoarded and centralized wealth from software companies concerned about decay of entrepreneurship
A human’s humanity is inversely proportional to the amount of money they have. After a billion, you stop being human and turn into a lizard person. We are quickly approaching the day when a lizard person will evolve into something even weirder once they hit a trillion.
It’s because they become an avatar for their money
Every tweet Elon makes affects his horde. Every single one - and usually it’s just a few hundred thousand and balances out- but occasionally it’s hundreds of millions in the red
And Elon can’t help himself. Most of them can
They can only be themselves in locations with tight information control, which is generally resorts with other billionaires. Who seem to be consistently in a pissing match with each other about their wealth and influence
And that’s why they’re fucking inhuman dragons
Money amplifies who you are. There are actually a number of quiet rich people living good lives, though that doesn’t justify the bad ones regardless of their wealth.
There is a point after all your basic needs are met for Iife and you have enough money to do something fun/ intellectually enriching and interesting every day of your life and pay for any healthcare you may need if an emergency arises or as a result of your own mortality where the accumulation of more wealth to satiate your ego is detrimental to one’s own sense of humanity. I think $5-10 million is a reasonable sum for someone to live a fulfilling life. With the rate of continual currency devaluation through the increase of our national debt and introduction of more printed currency into the supply (the main driving forces of inflation which current inflation models used by the IMF and world Bank intentionally exclude from their inflationary models) $20-25 million may be more reasonable in the next several decades.
I can guarantee you, they turn into a lizard person way before a billion. I’d set it at $20 million even.
Luigi
Maybe it is required to be inhumane to be a billionaire?
If so, then
Maybe it is required to be inhumane to
bea billionaire
