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The richest man on Earth and the richest woman on Earth are both French
- jsnell 4y agoEnglish version: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/04/05/the-richest-man-and-woman-in-the-world-are-for-the-first-time-in-history-both-french_6021808_19.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/04/05/the-ric...
- dang 4y agoChanged from https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2023/04/05/l-homme-et-de-la-femme-les-plus-riches-du-monde-sont-pour-la-premiere-fois-dans-l-histoire-tous-les-deux-francais_6168342_3234.html https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2023/04/05/l-homme-e.... Thanks!
- louwrentius 4y agoIt’s funny to me how we focus on the rich and wealthy whereas the vast majority of the HN visitors - even those with 6/7 figure salaries are closer to the homeless than to those billionaires. You can’t have that much money and be ethical anyway. With the wage stagnation of the last few decades, we know a lot of that wealth is basically wage theft. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoWe live in a society that worships wealth because it uses wealth as its sole metric for basically everything. Intelligence, success, worthiness, importance, etc. Those on HN are, if anything, more prone to this than elsewhere because of the original startup culture orientation. I will not be surprised if a significant portion of HNer's start cargo-culting by learning French.
- louwrentius 4y agoWell put. In the same vein, I hate the focus on GDP as some kind of single unified metric that defines how well a country is doing. nous devrions manger les riches
- neogodless 4y ago> closer to the homeless than to those billionaires To have a net worth closer to $1 billion USD than $0, you need at least $500 million USD. Pedantry aside, do you have knowledge about the median net worth of an HN visitor, or is this a complete guess that most live in such a way that they have a very low net worth? (Or were you really just making a point that most of us have less than $500 million?)
- louwrentius 4y agoThe latter is my point. And since housing is so expensive, a 6/7 figure salary means less if you live in the Bay Area or similar locations.
- runamok 4y agoI think it's more useful to think in terms of ratios. A Millionaire ($1,000,000) is to a Thousandaire ($1000) as a Billionaire is to a Millionaire. E.g. they have as much wealth as a thousand of the former "tier".
- ch4s3 4y agoThis is just warmed over labor theory of value which even contemporary Marxist economists(such that they still exist) reject.
- louwrentius 4y ago[flagged]
- shagmin 4y agoWhat's an example of a society that's more human-oriented, that doesn't have capitalism? I feel like when people push to end capitalism, what they really mean is they want a large social safety net, higher pay for low end workers or higher taxes for the wealthy, more or better enforced regulations, etc., which doesn't necessarily negate capitalism as the fundamental driving force of the economy. Just my take.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoCapitalism is awful. The alternatives are worse. The Nordics do capitalism better than we do, but that's still capitalism.
- ch4s3 4y agoWhy is capitalism awful? It has literally lifted billions of people out of poverty. Capitalists were the original abolitionists. Capitalism and the associated innovation have given us everything that’s good about modern life.
- version_five 4y agoI think the point is that it's not perfect, and nobody really argues it is. But it's imperfections aren't an argument for a better system. Inequality is the easiest example. There's tons of inequality under capitalism, and you can point to it and say it's bad. Problem is that every other system has orders of magnitude more inequality, plus a worse overall average.
- Georgelemental 4y agoCloser in terms of numbers, perhaps. Not closer in terms of happiness or quality of life!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ren_engineer 4y agosaddest thing is that they are both rich based off luxury fashion, an industry based off manipulating human psychology and effectively an industry that contributes nothing to humanity. Tech and manufacturing you can at least somewhat defend
- bastawhiz 4y agoAd tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry is represented by that. It's certainly untrue that fashion is also entirely about manipulation. I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments.
- JPKab 4y agoThe fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence. Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry. My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.
- barrysteve 4y agoArbitrarily obsolete items controlled from the top down, shares conceptual similarity to a list of tech products. Games, digital currency purchases, kickstater projects, web apps.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoNitpicking: they are not tangible items. So the effects are much less impactful on the environment. Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption) We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry. The damages have already been done and some are irreversible. - Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. - Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment. - Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill. - The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030. - If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years. - Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
- jacknews 4y agoWhat's up with this atrocious 3d LV logo, it doesn't even line up: https://r.lvmh-static.com/uploads/2014/09/hp_maisons_site.jpg https://r.lvmh-static.com/uploads/2014/09/hp_maisons_site.jp... I get the feeling the world would not stop if all this stuff just disappeared overnight.
- LazareisSoaked 4y agoNot very surprising with everything our beloved Macron does to make France a tax haven
- rcarr 4y agoCalling bullshit on this. Musk reckons it’s Putin and I’ve read that some people think it’s possibly one of the Saudis but at the end of the day these billionaires have got that many assets hidden all over the place no one has any true idea.
- Koshkin 4y agoUnless he is one of (a dozen or so of) other genders.
- benoliver999 4y agoThere's a good book about this - 'Moneyland' by Oliver Bullough.
- rfwhyte 4y agoXi's been in charge of the hyper-industrial scale grift / corruption machine that is the Chinese economy for over a decade now. I gotta reckon he's at or near the top of the true global rich list.
- tomatotomato37 4y agoI've heard there are also a lot of old old money types that actively avoid appearing on richest people lists. While I highly doubt one of them is on top, I would definitely bet a few of them are in the top 10.
- rcarr 4y agoI’ve also heard this and agree it’s highly likely. I think I heard it via an interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus who comes from a billionaire family so probably a credible source.