7 ms·

At any given time, there are large numbers of influential people with no long term horizons, only a short one that is rapidly approaching. For these people, a g

At any given time, there are large numbers of influential people with no long term horizons, only a short one that is rapidly approaching. For these people, a good 5-10 more years may be all they really need. That’s why we need to invent life extension tech that gives elites more incentive to think long term, even if most regular people only live normal lifespans.

wat10000 1mo ago
That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.
- elcritch 1mo ago
  Military coups don’t often get led by generals or top brass. It’s usually colonels or mid ranked officers who lead coups. Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game. Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.
  - themaninthedark 1mo ago
    "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck
    - BLKNSLVR 1mo ago
      "I supported this revolution, should I not get more than those who did nothing?!"
      - themaninthedark 1mo ago
        I think it was more the notion that those who don't have it that bad pushing for a revolution with the idea that their lives would be more comfortable, they will end up with more things or power. I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.
  - svachalek 1mo ago
    1 in 6 households in the US are millionaires. And they're nearly a mutually exclusive group with the underemployed and educated. These are very large groups of ordinary people who are very much not running the ship right now. There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - GolfPopper 1mo ago
    >Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit. It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.
    - elcritch 1mo ago
      > The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence. Personally I prefer to avoid "Reign of Terror" (1) or similar situations where a "unified public" wantonly destroys the ultra wealthy. That revolution was led by educated elites clerks, lawyers, etc and not by commoners. The peasants were pawns. > the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit. Billionaires wealth may need curbing, in particular unlimited mergers. However in my estimation it's the millionaire class level actively destroying the economic foundations of the west, not just the USA. It's CEOs like the ill fated Brian Thompson worth only tens of millions who made those millions by driving exaggerated profits and share price at UnitedHealth. It's Jim McNerney former CEO at Boeing who drove up share prices by gutting engineering that made himself a centi-millionaire. Meanwhile SpaceX and Tesla made Musk a trillionaire, but you don't need a Tesla. Similarly for Bezos or Zuckerberg's products. However food, healthcare, education, etc are all continuously increasing their profit margin's at the expense of everyone else and their companies/brands. For example Dorito's market share plummeted recently after they kept driving up prices to over $7 / bag. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
    - 59percentmore 1mo ago
      The low-end millionaires run interference for the billionaires. Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party. If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.
  - BLKNSLVR 1mo ago
    Only billionaires can afford to pay to have their entire reality replaced with fantasy. Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.
  - wat10000 1mo ago
    Extreme wealth decouples people from the game, especially in the modern world. You think the richest of the rich will suffer when it's time for the US to pay the piper? Of course they won't. It's all a game to them. Of course they're not going to lead a coup. They already run things, why would they need to?
- specialist 1mo ago
  Yup. Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy. Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.) eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.
  - 59percentmore 1mo ago
    Ironically, the only way out of a volatility spiral (inflationary, deflationary, doesn't matter) is radical application of private capital to public good. Whether you're dealing with an economy that has locked up because of falling asset prices, or an economy that's insolvent because no amount of inflation can outstrip rising interest rates, the answer is to commandeer capital from those most likely to survive its absence so that it can be used to stabilize and make sustainable real production. "But incentives." The aftermath of this is an authority (still deriving its power from the will of the people) that's shown that it will keep you housed and with food on the table, and still able to access education and creativity and community and healthcare, and all you have to do is keep working like you always have and give up your exceedingly remote chance of one day being an oligarch or living on Mars. The elite are terrified that we'll realize how good of a deal it is.
    - 59percentmore 1mo ago
      Went from 3 points up for 4 hours to 0 in the 5th. It's always funny to me how threatened the sockpuppet brigaders are by small posts like this. They really can't stomach the idea getting even the littlest bit of traction. Well, I'll say it again: capital redistribution is our way out of this. Our elite can stomach only owning one or two houses and businesses in exchange for saving the entire system from collapse.
      - rudolftheone 1mo ago
        [flagged]
- goalieca 1mo ago
  Marxism doesn’t work out well.
  - wat10000 1mo ago
    Heavy taxes on the rich is not Marxism.
    - goalieca 1mo ago
      Taxing them into oblivion is class warfare, seizing capital, whatever you want to call it.
      - wat10000 1mo ago
        They'd still be wealthy enough that they and their children would never do another day of work in their lives except by choice. They just wouldn't have wealth comparable to that of a small country.
        goalieca 1mo ago
        And where would that money go? To the people? No.. power will always concentrate as it did in every socialist movement around the world.
        wat10000 1mo ago
        Man, high taxes isn’t even socialism either.
        goalieca 1mo ago
        Let me break down your first post again. > That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place. 1) blame the “bourgeois” for a problem the government created. 2) “tax the billionaires into oblivion” sounds a lot like seize their capital and destroy their class. 3) “it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.” Except for the government who obviously exercises the power to tax them into oblivion. In a socialist regime, no one shall oppose the power of the government.
pjc50 1mo ago
Absolutely not. The only thing saving us from these people and their senility is the knowledge that they will eventually die. (Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)
- jmward01 1mo ago
  This is why we need term limits everywhere. People are living longer. Without term limits on every position democracy won't survive.
  - coldpie 1mo ago
    There are pros & cons to term limits, but I think an age limit would be an easy win. It gets you most of the same benefits with a lot less resistance. Anyone who will be over 65 when entering a position should be ineligible to be elected or appointed to that position. Judges with lifetime appointments should be forced to retire on their 65th birthday. It's a clean, easy to understand & enforce rule, and provides plenty of time for people to make a succession plan before their brains turn to mush.
    - budman1 1mo ago
      72 ?
      - coldpie 1mo ago
        Huh?
        AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
        I suspect that they were proposing 72 as the age limit, rather than 65. And I could see it. Airline pilots are age limited at 65 (IIUC), but judges do not make split-second unappealable decisions that can kill hundreds. They could go a bit longer than 65. OTOH, I think after seeing Biden, Trump, and McConnell, it's pretty clear that it should be some distance below 80.

wat10000 1mo ago

That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.

elcritch 1mo ago
Military coups don’t often get led by generals or top brass. It’s usually colonels or mid ranked officers who lead coups. Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game. Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.
- themaninthedark 1mo ago
  "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck
  - BLKNSLVR 1mo ago
    "I supported this revolution, should I not get more than those who did nothing?!"
    - themaninthedark 1mo ago
      I think it was more the notion that those who don't have it that bad pushing for a revolution with the idea that their lives would be more comfortable, they will end up with more things or power. I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.
- svachalek 1mo ago
  1 in 6 households in the US are millionaires. And they're nearly a mutually exclusive group with the underemployed and educated. These are very large groups of ordinary people who are very much not running the ship right now. There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- GolfPopper 1mo ago
  >Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit. It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.
  - elcritch 1mo ago
    > The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence. Personally I prefer to avoid "Reign of Terror" (1) or similar situations where a "unified public" wantonly destroys the ultra wealthy. That revolution was led by educated elites clerks, lawyers, etc and not by commoners. The peasants were pawns. > the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit. Billionaires wealth may need curbing, in particular unlimited mergers. However in my estimation it's the millionaire class level actively destroying the economic foundations of the west, not just the USA. It's CEOs like the ill fated Brian Thompson worth only tens of millions who made those millions by driving exaggerated profits and share price at UnitedHealth. It's Jim McNerney former CEO at Boeing who drove up share prices by gutting engineering that made himself a centi-millionaire. Meanwhile SpaceX and Tesla made Musk a trillionaire, but you don't need a Tesla. Similarly for Bezos or Zuckerberg's products. However food, healthcare, education, etc are all continuously increasing their profit margin's at the expense of everyone else and their companies/brands. For example Dorito's market share plummeted recently after they kept driving up prices to over $7 / bag. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
  - 59percentmore 1mo ago
    The low-end millionaires run interference for the billionaires. Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party. If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo ago
  Only billionaires can afford to pay to have their entire reality replaced with fantasy. Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.
- wat10000 1mo ago
  Extreme wealth decouples people from the game, especially in the modern world. You think the richest of the rich will suffer when it's time for the US to pay the piper? Of course they won't. It's all a game to them. Of course they're not going to lead a coup. They already run things, why would they need to?
specialist 1mo ago
Yup. Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy. Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.) eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.
- 59percentmore 1mo ago
  Ironically, the only way out of a volatility spiral (inflationary, deflationary, doesn't matter) is radical application of private capital to public good. Whether you're dealing with an economy that has locked up because of falling asset prices, or an economy that's insolvent because no amount of inflation can outstrip rising interest rates, the answer is to commandeer capital from those most likely to survive its absence so that it can be used to stabilize and make sustainable real production. "But incentives." The aftermath of this is an authority (still deriving its power from the will of the people) that's shown that it will keep you housed and with food on the table, and still able to access education and creativity and community and healthcare, and all you have to do is keep working like you always have and give up your exceedingly remote chance of one day being an oligarch or living on Mars. The elite are terrified that we'll realize how good of a deal it is.
  - 59percentmore 1mo ago
    Went from 3 points up for 4 hours to 0 in the 5th. It's always funny to me how threatened the sockpuppet brigaders are by small posts like this. They really can't stomach the idea getting even the littlest bit of traction. Well, I'll say it again: capital redistribution is our way out of this. Our elite can stomach only owning one or two houses and businesses in exchange for saving the entire system from collapse.
    - rudolftheone 1mo ago
      [flagged]
goalieca 1mo ago
Marxism doesn’t work out well.
- wat10000 1mo ago
  Heavy taxes on the rich is not Marxism.
  - goalieca 1mo ago
    Taxing them into oblivion is class warfare, seizing capital, whatever you want to call it.
    - wat10000 1mo ago
      They'd still be wealthy enough that they and their children would never do another day of work in their lives except by choice. They just wouldn't have wealth comparable to that of a small country.
      - goalieca 1mo ago
        And where would that money go? To the people? No.. power will always concentrate as it did in every socialist movement around the world.
        wat10000 1mo ago
        Man, high taxes isn’t even socialism either.
        goalieca 1mo ago
        Let me break down your first post again. > That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place. 1) blame the “bourgeois” for a problem the government created. 2) “tax the billionaires into oblivion” sounds a lot like seize their capital and destroy their class. 3) “it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.” Except for the government who obviously exercises the power to tax them into oblivion. In a socialist regime, no one shall oppose the power of the government.

pjc50 1mo ago

Absolutely not. The only thing saving us from these people and their senility is the knowledge that they will eventually die. (Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)

jmward01 1mo ago
This is why we need term limits everywhere. People are living longer. Without term limits on every position democracy won't survive.
- coldpie 1mo ago
  There are pros & cons to term limits, but I think an age limit would be an easy win. It gets you most of the same benefits with a lot less resistance. Anyone who will be over 65 when entering a position should be ineligible to be elected or appointed to that position. Judges with lifetime appointments should be forced to retire on their 65th birthday. It's a clean, easy to understand & enforce rule, and provides plenty of time for people to make a succession plan before their brains turn to mush.
  - budman1 1mo ago
    72 ?
    - coldpie 1mo ago
      Huh?
      - AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
        I suspect that they were proposing 72 as the age limit, rather than 65. And I could see it. Airline pilots are age limited at 65 (IIUC), but judges do not make split-second unappealable decisions that can kill hundreds. They could go a bit longer than 65. OTOH, I think after seeing Biden, Trump, and McConnell, it's pretty clear that it should be some distance below 80.