TFYS

8 ms·

61.
by TFYS 1y ago
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people tha
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by TFYS 1y ago
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. A
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by TFYS 1y ago
If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.
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by TFYS 1y ago
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. Bu
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by TFYS 1y ago
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and ine
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by TFYS 1y ago
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants ar
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by TFYS 1y ago
Thomas Piketty has collected that data. He showed that the rate of return for capital is larger than the rate of growth, meaning capital owners are getting an ever increasing share of the economic output. Income inequality doesn't real
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by TFYS 1y ago
I wouldn't call people working for a salary rich, which most of the people in those groups are. They pay plenty of taxes and many of them probably support funding public services as well. I meant the actually wealthy, who use their pol
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by TFYS 1y ago
> Wealth inequality isn't great but the existence of wealthy people in successful countries helps fund service for the entire population. I think it does the opposite. Those services were mostly built during the last century after t
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by TFYS 1y ago
> It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Those are the same thing. > The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the ce
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by TFYS 1y ago
There are probably very few things people wouldn't do if the price is high enough. How many people would refuse to lick a boot for ten million dollars? The bigger the wealth differences become, the harder it is to resist the people wit
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by TFYS 1y ago
The same thing would happen by focusing on technologies that improve more lives right from the start. Instead of cars we'd be developing better public transit, instead of food delivery we'd be developing ways to deliver food to th
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by TFYS 1y ago
Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.
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by TFYS 1y ago
Inequality can be a cause of suffering, as it can price average individuals out of essential, limited resources like power, land, and skilled labor. For instance, some combination of skill and knowledge held by a few scientists could be app
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by TFYS 1y ago
I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.
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by TFYS 1y ago
> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about o
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by TFYS 1y ago
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "eas
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by TFYS 1y ago
That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way. Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or me
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by TFYS 1y ago
That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other peopl
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by TFYS 1y ago
Isn't the point still valid if you consider just the return on capital? If the market cap of the S&P500 was about 18 trillion in 2015 and returns 10%, the income going to to the owners of that capital is 1.8 trillion. In 2025 the m
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by TFYS 1y ago
Where does this return on investment come from? From people working. It's not possible for everyone to live on investments, someone has to do the actual work. Imagine if everyone started investing most of their money now, and after a g
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by TFYS 1y ago
Coming from a country with no tipping at all, it was somewhat creepy how the people expecting tips acted when I visited the US for the first time. You can tell when friendliness is fake/forced, and living in a country without tipping y
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by TFYS 1y ago
> Here's how a rational market works. Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulati
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by TFYS 1y ago
Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (e
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by TFYS 1y ago
Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn. Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to
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by TFYS 1y ago
I don't think the definition of genocide includes a time frame during which the whole group must be killed.
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by TFYS 1y ago
> said it wont rest until all isrealis are dead You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of
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by TFYS 1y ago
Maybe, but it's not possible to critically evaluate everything you see and read. For sure most people don't, and probably no one does all the time. So if before 10% of information was lies and manipulation, most of the information
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by TFYS 1y ago
We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust any of the things they see or read, so what's the value of
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by TFYS 1y ago
I believe there's enough capable people to whom money is not all that matters for this to not be as big of an issue as you think. Sure, people who only care about their personal wealth and power will leave everything behind for a chanc

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