testfactor @ testfactor @lemmy.world

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How do you unethically usurp a popular musician's fame in a way that lets you earn more money than them, given the parameters of my above example?

But we're talking about this in the context of a thread that started with the claim that all billionaires are morally bankrupt (paraphrasing).

I agree with you that the system is flawed, but if the stance you're taking is that there is literally no set of actions before or after becoming a billionaire that someone could take that makes them not morally bankrupt, then maybe the initial position is flawed at best and useless at worst?

Not to repeat myself again, but I agree that labor should be fairly compensated and that systems need to be fixed to reduce inequality, and I am in no way shape or form stating otherwise. I feel like this conversation keeps going in loops, where I say that it's self defeating to state falsehoods in defense of advocating for systemic change, and you countering with "but there needs to be systemic changes!"

We're on the same page in that regard. I have exactly one point, and it's that if we agree that the statement that all billionaires are necessarily morally bankrupt is false, then we should stop using it to support our advocacy, as it is merely an additional reason to dismiss said advocacy.

I mean, I certainly think it's possible to become the richest man on earth through purely ethical means. It's wildly, incredibly unlikely, but strictly possible.

You could become a recording artist that self publishes your own music, only distribute online, and become unprecedented levels of popular. Sell each mp3 for $5 and sell a few trillion of them.

Is that likely? Absolutely not. Exceedingly unlikely. But becoming a muliti-billionaire in general is exceedingly unlikely. This is one of the lesser likely ways for sure, but it's fathomable, at least in the sense that it's a coherent narrative that strictly could occur.

What about that scenario is strictly impossible? Not vanishingly unlikely, but literally could not happen?

Man, I feel like we reached an agreement and now you're trying to walk it back. :P

And while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, it feels like a setup to goal shift. Like, any example that gets brought up to counter the narrative can now just be dismissed as, "oh, but he's not enough of a billionaire."

And let's be real, a billion dollars, right now, is almost certainly beyond that arbitrary dollar amount X you speak of. There's only 3000 of them in the world! The *world! There's 8 trillion of us. How much more selective do we need to be??

Absolutely I'm willing to agree to that.
I am only pushing back on the statement, "it is impossible to amass a billion dollars without exploiting the labor of the working class."

I certainly don't think that's the majority of billionaires. If your definition of exploiting the labor of the working class includes "having any employees that aren't part owners of the business," then of course the number of billionaires who can say that is vanishingly small.

But they do in fact exist, and I think the majority of people are aware of that. Therefore, making statements like "all billionaires exploited labor" makes the average person think your position is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

But if becoming a billionaire is truly just luck, then what are they to do? If I gave you a billion dollars right now, out of the blue, no strings attached, are you now morally bankrupt because you're a billionaire?

What if you leverage your power and capital to affect positive change (like Bill Gates for instance)? Do you still deserve the guillotine?

If you bankrupt yourself by giving every American a one time 4 dollar payout ($4 × 300mil Americans), are you now clean, or did you waste your chance to make a meaningful difference with your power and capital?

What exactly would you have to see Notch do now or have done in the past to make him not the villain in this narrative? What can he or could he have done to be morally in the right?

So, I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes: Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder) Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder) Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder) Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)

There are several other examples in the top ten list that are lesser known but also one hit wonders, but even if there weren't, that's 40% right there.

I suppose you could argue that those companies do more than one thing, especially Google, but the vast majority of the cash flow for each is behind one product or line of products.

The only differentiator between any of them and Notch is that Notch was a one man team, and therefore wasn't "exploiting the capital generated by his employees."

And let's be real here. You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above. Microsoft started in Gates garage. Facebook was a college project. Almost all businesses start as small mom-and-pop shops. Some do in fact become multi-billion dollar businesses. Just not the vast majority because, again, it's based on luck.

And look, you keep circling back to try and paint what I'm saying as "it's fine for billionaires to price gouge medicine and stomp homeless people to death" or something. That's not what I'm saying no matter how many times you circle back to it.
To repeat ad nauseum, the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor. Full stop. No other point beside that. If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement. That is, again, the only point I'm arguing.

I don't think this is semantic though. The initial post said that "Nobody earns a billion dollars. It can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor."

That statement does not read as "they were at least involved indirectly in some behavior at some point in their life that was in some way unethical." It is purporting a direct relationship between their achieving a billion dollars and an active exploitation of others direct labor. That is why I pushed back against it.

And here is my issue with including indirect exploitation in the consideration. It vastly waters down culpability. A billionaire is just as guilty of indirect exploitation as you or me or the Pope. There is literally no action at all that one can take that I couldn't make some argument for being a form of indirect exploitation. So when you say that billionaires are exploitative for indirect exploitation reasons, it seems churlish. It loses all meaning because it's basically tautologically true. Why should I care about it if the person telling me that the billionaire is exploiting people is actively and continuously engaging in the exact same type of exploitation?

Firstly, it's no more luck based than any other method. There are less than 3000 billionaires in the world. If there was an even pseudo-reliable system to become a billionaire, there would be more than 0.00004% of the population who've managed it.

And selling a popular video game is just as much "exploiting a supply/demand gap" as any other method. You have an effective monopoly on an asset that people want.

All that to say, I'm pushing back on the "massively oversimplified," because it's not, it's just counterfactual.
I wouldn't have minded if the OP had said "the overwhelming majority of billionaires got there by exploiting the working class." That's just as "massively oversimplified" as what they did say, but isn't objectively false.

I don't disagree with a single thing you have just said, nor have I. But then, based on all that, would you agree then that the sentence "[A billion dollars] can only be stolen and exploited from other peoples' labor" is counterfactual?

Because that's the only point I'm making. I'm with you on the additional social responsibility that should be encumbant upon billionaires. I'm with you on fixing systematic issues that allow them to exist.

My one and only point for this whole thread is that you can be a billionaire without "stealing and exploiting other people's labor."

The issue I'd take with that is that it's hardly any more or less "luck" than any other billionaire.

There's less than 3000 billionaires in the world. It's not like the other 2999 were wildly more qualified and had the perfect strategy that inevitably and directly led to their billionaire status.

And while he did become a billionaire by selling to Microsoft, he would have even without that most likely. The game has sold enough copies that it would have made him a billionaire, even without the sale to Microsoft.

And I think it's unfair, even if that wasn't the case, to lay the sins of the buyer at the feet of the seller, when the seller isn't otherwise doing anything wrong. It's basically the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing. There is no one he could sell to that wouldn't be "unethical", and therefore he'd be morally obligated to never sell it to anyone. He's as "morally corrupt" for that as any of us are when we shop at a grocery store or buy/rent housing.

And I said it elsewhere, I am in no way arguing against him being appropriately taxed on this income (or potentially standing wealth). I simply push back on the idea that billionaires can only become such by being morally bankrupt exploiters who stomp on the heads of millions of the proletariat to get where they are.
Are there some like that? Absolutely. Is it the vast majority? Depends on how you define "stomping on the heads of the proletariat," but it's probably a good chunk at minimum. But the only requirement is luck. Not cruelty or exploitation.

I'm all for progression tax structures. I'm all for taxing the rich. But statements like "all billionaires got their money by exploiting the poor" makes one look, at best, uncritical of your own positions. It's counterfactual name calling of the out-tribe, the same as calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi.

I am talking about that level of success, yes. I in fact was using it's numbers and exact case information, lol.

Notch is a billionaire. The original claim was that no one becomes a billionaire without stealing or exploiting the value of the work of the laborers. My question then is, the value of whose labor did Notch steal or exploit to become a billionaire?

Note: He is also an awful person, so setting that aside for the moment. He's not awful in a way that directly relates to the question at hand.

I think you misunderstand me. I don't strictly disagree with anything you've said. I'm not sure that I'm on the 100% tax above a certain threshold idea, but I'm not terrible interested in debating it one way or another.

The point I was interested in was what makes it inherently exploitative to earn that much money? You repeat the claim (and clarify) that making anything above 10mil is exploitative, but what I'm curious about is the justification.

Typically, my understanding of when people say billionaires exploited the working class, it's because they are pocketing the excess value of those that they employ. But we have real world cases of billionaires who employ no one.

In those cases, what have they done that is exploitative?

And to further clarify. I'm not asking why it's unjust from an equity standpoint. I'm not asking why it would be better if that wealth was taxed. I'm specifically asking after the word exploitative.

Out of curiosity, let's say I'm a video game developer and I make games by myself (no team). I have a hit success and sell 300 milion copies worldwide for an average of $20 a piece and am now a billionaire.

Was that money stolen or exploited? If so, how? If not, how does that jive with your stated position?

Do you really think the reason people hate Java is because it uses an intermediate bytecode? There's plenty of reasons to hate Java, but that's not one of them.

.NET languages use intermediate bytecode and everyone's fine with it.

Any complaints about Java being an intermediate language are due to the fact that the JVM is a poorly implemented dumpster fire. It's had more major vulnerabilities than effing Adobe Flash, and runs like molasses while chewing up more memory than effing Chrome. It's not what they did, it's that they did it badly.

And WASM will absolutely never replace normal JS in the browser. It's a completely different use case. It's awesome and has a great niche, but it's not really intended for normal web page management use cases.

Look man, you seem to be buying into the boogy-man of people just getting these implanted on a whim. That's not the use case, and probably won't be in the next 50-100yrs.

This is a technology specifically for people with hugely debilitating conditions. People who can't move or talk, and have to communicate with eye movements.

You can talk all you want about how dangerous this technology is, and you're right. It potentially could be. You know what else that's true for? Pacemakers. Pacemakers are hugely invasive to put in, and have proven vulnerable to Bluetooth attacks over and over and over again. It's trivially easy to hack someones pacemaker and potentially kill them. It's an IoT device implant through and through. And you know what no one is advocating against having? Pacemakers. Because without them people would just die instead.

This is the same thing. Are there dangers? Absolutely. You know who doesn't care? The person who literally takes 20min to type out "Hello" on an eye tracker keyboard. This tech is game changing for them. It gives them the ability to interact with the world far beyond any other measure we have today. And I don't think it takes much empathy to realize that maybe that makes it worth investing in.

So you would be fine with them "spending the money on developing fancy thought chips instead of a cure" if the implant had similar complications/survivability rates as cochlear implants?

And cochlear surgery, while quite safe, isn't exactly the most minor surgery. They're going pretty deep into your head to put that stimulator gizmo on your auditory nerve behind your inner ear.

What are your opinions on cochlear implants?

For context so other people don't have to dig into it like I did.

This is the Alabama state HoR. Not the National HoR.

This is the Alabama 10th district, which is suburban Huntsville (more PhD's per capita than any other city in the union).

That said, it's been pretty 50/50 in past elections, and this was a 66/33 split in the Democrat favor, which is a pretty enormous swing.

So, Alabama's going to be an interesting watch. I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot more flips come November.

I think there's several reasons for that, not the least of which is that you can't distribute python bytecode.

With java, I run through an intentional compilation step and then ship the jar file to my consumers. I'd never ship a .pyc to the field.

In python (specifically cpython), that step is just an implementation detail of the interpreter/runtime.
If you ever used something other than the default python interpreter, it probably wouldn't implement the same bytecode subsystem under the hood. Python bytecode isn't part of the spec.