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And yet I feel I always come back to this: _What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_ It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wal
by fenaer 7mo ago
And yet I feel I always come back to this:
_What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_
It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wall.
- niek_pas 7mo agoThere’s not much you _can_ do on your own. Vote, get politically involved on a local level. Try to change people’s minds.
- Aeglaecia 7mo agoI feel like a few people tried recently but they missed
- dudefeliciano 7mo agoso then let's just give up altogether?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- thousand_nights 7mo agoi'm kinda jaded because it seems the type of people that get into politics do it to gain money and power.. so voting always feels like picking the lesser of two evils
- carlmr 7mo agoI think idealists often get into politics as well, but they're not cold, calculating and power hungry enough to get into the important positions.
- bell-cot 7mo agoStart by just attending a some meetings of your local school board, city council, etc. Sit, watch, and maybe take notes. Compare the reality with local press coverage (if any) of it. Try analyzing the social dynamics. Talk to other ordinary citizens about it. If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.
- wiseowise 7mo agoNot only that, but one rotten apple can kill decades of work (see Trump, Putin).
- navane 7mo agoThere are very concrete actions an individual can take against wealth inequality of another individual.
- wiseowise 7mo agoAnd then what? Another bald head will replace them, but this time with an army of peons on their side to protect them president style, because for them it is much easier to buy loyalty of even 1000 men than it is for you to rally people to your cause.
- iso1631 7mo agoGiven the number of assassination attempts on Trump, some which got very close, it makes me wonder how effective those peons can actually be. But yes, generally this is how druglords work.
- wiseowise 7mo agoThat’s because Trump needs to show his face. If you’re making billions as a CEO you can protect your identity, there are billionaires in Germany that hadn’t shown their faces online in decades.
- glerk 7mo agoWhy don't you start your own Amazon?
- Sayrus 7mo agoLet's assume he does and is very successful, he makes $1T. Then what? Giving it all away won't resolve growing inequalities. Using it to influence medias and politics?
- glerk 7mo ago[flagged]
- wiseowise 7mo agoBecause obviously anyone who disagrees with the system is a toddler. What shaped your mindset? Are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking that defending Bezos and the likes will put you at the table with them? You know you can respect them without simping for them, right? You’re a maggot to them, just another dust particle.
- glerk 7mo ago[flagged]
- csoups14 7mo agoWhy should someone need to start a business just to have as good a life as their parents did? Why is today's wealth inequality optimal for society? Rich people in the past got by just fine. They started businesses, succeeded, lived incredibly comfortable lives, all while earning a smaller multiple more than the people working for them. The centralization of wealth is a sign of a sick society, especially when people who provide labor suffer and get less of the pie.
- wiseowise 7mo agoNot saying that you shouldn’t vote or try to change things, but nothing short of starting massive revolution with military insurrection and enforcement is going to change anything.
- JuniperMesos 7mo agoI'd much rather live in a society where Jeff Bezos has more wealth than me and I can buy things on Amazon, than in a society where Amazon no longer functions as a company because it was destroyed by a military insurrection and also the leaders of said insurrection have unequal access to resources compared to most other people (because they're the leaders of a military insurrection; there's not a whole lot of equality in a military)
- wiseowise 7mo agoSupposedly you’ll be at the helm, Lenin style. Also, who said anything about Amazon? Why are you myopic? The whole system is rotten to the core when a single person can make it in a minute more than 99% of world’s population and not use the money to advance the world. And before you mark (ha, get it?) me as a communist – I’m not against wealth and personal ownership. It’s one thing to own a Ferrari and an expensive home, and is another to live in a cookie clicker world watching number go up and doing nothing with it but multiply the money.
- JuniperMesos 7mo agoAmazon is the reason Jeff Bezos has a lot of money, and why you've heard of him and not a number of other people who have similar amounts of money.
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo agoI'd much rather neither, but apparently that's utopian. Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality. At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do. There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
- ricardo81 7mo agoUsing alternatives surely helps. I think so many people use Amazon because of familiarity and predictable delivery costs (free IIRC with Prime). A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.
- RobotToaster 7mo agoTitle I of the Smith Act prevents me from answering that question.
- iso1631 7mo agoA classic example of how the vaunted "First Amendment" doesn't actually help. Sure after a couple of decades it might be repealed, and your conviction would be quashed. Doesn't mean it doesn't stop the damage in the first place.
- cronin101 7mo agoSerious (but not easy) answer: You can move to a different country that more aligns with your moral standings or interests. You're (presumably) a valuable asset that will provide a net-positive contribution wherever you move, and a loss will be incurred when you emigrate. It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one. I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
- butterbomb 7mo ago[dead]
- cronin101 7mo agoYou don't need to be rich to get a working visa (assuming you are a competent software engineer -- plenty of places in Europe will hire you, and there is a path to citizenship). You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
- smokel 7mo agoWhat you can do depends highly on your skill set, your network, and your willingness to spend effort on this. If you feed this into a decent chatbot, or in an Ask HN, you might be surprised.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]