Meanwhile in this week’s episode of “Billionaires, they are just like us”
Surely thats a deepfake?
Bloke is tone deaf if it isnt.
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Posted on Zuckerberg’s Instagram. It’s real.
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Would like to try one of those foil boards
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The only thing fake is him pretending to be human.
Worst public holiday ever.
Jan. 26 says hello.
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What a farkhead.
I legit thought it was a deepfake - it looks like a mannequin and the hair looks painted on.
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This is fine.
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We should not worry too much about this wealth distribution. So, 18 families are very rich? So they live, they get sick and they die. The wealth is quickly diluted, mainly to ex wives and the families which grow exponentially.
These wealthy people either have created technologies, industries, jobs and prosperity or can marshal resources to create them because of their accumulated wealth. You cannot rely on nation states to do that.
The point of that graph is that top-end wealth concentration is increasing faster than any of these processes happen. Wealth concentration has increased fourfold since 1993, and that’s less than half an average lifetime. And the ‘ex-wife’ effect is wildly overstated. Generally, this sort of wealth is generational. You don’t make it, you inherit it. And when someone marries into one of those families, the prenup will prevent meaningful dilution of the billions (the ex is never going to go hungry, but they’re not going to come close to 50-50 either).
The couple of exception - Bezos especially - are due to the minority of actually self-made millionaires who were married before they were rich enough to make the prenup mandatory. But most of the wealth is held by heirs to billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, even the Murdochs. And that established wealth is carefully protected.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Did amazon (for instance) create more than it destroyed? I’d argue yes in their cloud services division, but it’s much more blurry in books for example (the Kindle is a plus, but the widespread destruction of bricks-and-mortar bookshops is a no). Companies like Uber and AirBNB made small numbers of people billions, but they basically did it by legalistically sleazing their way past wage, safety, working conditions regulations etc so they had an price advantage against incumbents who were following the rules. It was a win for customers, but it was on the backs of the lowest paid, so it accelerated the wealth concentration problem even further.
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My statements are simplistic. There is no doubt that the massively wealthy 18 families skew wealth distribution too far. But lets not get angry about it. The point is that appealing to resentment, jealousy and anger is not going to solve this issue. What is, is the opportunity being given to more people to be financially successful, to educating them so they can build careers for society which help to raise standards of living for all. I think we are ticking the boxes more and more in this era.
Extreme wealth may be concentrated in small numbers of people and its not a good thing, but lets also look more positively at the “adequate” wealth that’s created by very large numbers of people who are well educated and work hard in our society.
This sounds alright in principle and might ring true for some countries, but it doesn’t seem to reflect what it’s probably like in America.
Sorry, but this is BS. The ability to improve your station in the USA had gone backwards in recent decades. The USA is now more structured by class than the UK. If you grow up poor, you stay poor, is more true now than at anytime since before WWII.
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Wealth disparity is going to be the biggest risk to nation stability over time.
As multinationals become increasingly powerful, they have become more effective at passing legislation than the voters. The legal environment will increasingly favour companies over people. Standard of living will be suppressed. Wages and conditions capped. Profits from economic growth funnelled to the owners, not the workers.
It’s been happening for 20-30 years. Real wages haven’t increased, while global economic wealth has skyrocketed.
There’s an end game here. When governments don’t prioritise the needs of the people, the people will eventually rebel.
The rise of Trumpism is an example of this frustration from the working class.
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So it went from 4 families to 18 families, i.e quadrupled. Decent progress if you ask me.
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Might be a very small data point but what I am seeing in San Francisco is very pertinent.
The city has never been richer. The rise in tech shares and big IPOs like Airbnb have flooded the city with cash. We were hoping to upgrade from our 2 bedroom apartment to a home and suddenly realized how relatively ‘poor’ we are. We would see a place and think “yes, with a bit of discipline we can afford it” and then get outbid by $500-$750,000. No jokes. For example, we saw a place advertised on a Saturday morning, called our agent to arrange a Sunday showing (due to COVID all showings had to be by appt), and then got a call late Saturday evening that a buyer had paid $500k over, all cash, WITHOUT seeing the place.
We have since given up the “house in the city” dream.
Having said all of the above, San Francisco also has never been POORER. Homelessness is off the charts. Coupled with mental illnesses and the lack of public healthcare it is downright dangerous. The number of homeless folks walking around carrying knives is crazy. And, petty crime is everywhere. From folks casually walking into chemists and stores, filling bags with stuff and walking out, to gangs roaming around smashing car windows to steal anything within reach.
It is 2 cities and not at all sustainable.
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This most read article is in the Washington Post today, but behind a paywall.
Given the first sentence is particularly brutal, I don’t think I need to read anymore.
Opinion: Trump’s latest ridiculous lawsuit shows how small he has become
Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday in Bedminster, N.J. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Opinion by
Columnist
July 7, 2021|Updated today at 4:31 p.m. EDT
0
For someone who filed thousands of lawsuits during his career in business, former president Donald Trump has been rather quiet on the legal front since he left office — particularly if you don’t count the criminal charges his business and associates are facing — with only a few minor suits filed here and there.
But that ended on Wednesday. Trump announced that he has filed suit against Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their CEOs, a class action that will at last seek justice for the people those companies have so grievously wronged, starting with Trump himself.
It sounds like something big: a former president, facing off against some of the biggest, most influential and most profitable tech companies in America. But, in fact, it’s puny and pathetic.
Perhaps because of his company’s struggles, Trump is returning to his roots as a small-time grifter, desperate to draw attention to himself and willing to do just about anything to grab a few extra bucks.
The lawsuit itself is so laughable that it gives away the game; not even Trump could think this is something he’d actually win.
His complaint against Facebook — presumably prepared by actual lawyers, hard as that may be to believe — claims that it “rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor. As such, Defendant is constrained by the First Amendment right to free speech in the censorship decisions it makes regarding its Users.”
It goes on to use the word “unconstitutional” again and again to describe Facebook’s decisions, despite the fact that only government action is or isn’t constitutional.
Facebook may be one of the most pernicious forces on Earth, but it’s a private company that set up rules for those who chose to use its service. Trump repeatedly violated those rules, and was kicked off. It really isn’t all that complicated, and it’s the furthest thing from “unconstitutional.”
Of course, this is only the latest in a long-running series of complaints from conservatives about social media companies, which gained urgency when Facebook and Twitter removed Trump’s accounts after the 2020 election. Despite his repeated violations of their rules, they no doubt waited that long because they worried that banning him beforehand would look like they were trying to help him lose, despite all their services had done to enable his rise.
And it isn’t just Trump; other Republicans looking to establish their Trumpian bona fides have tried to use their own power to target these companies. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law banning social media companies from kicking politicians (i.e., Republicans who violate their terms of service) off their platforms; a federal judge quickly blocked the law, citing its blatant infringement of the companies’ right to create and enforce standards.
The Texas Senate passed a similar bill; after it failed in the House, Gov. Greg Abbott — like DeSantis, a Republican who might hope to ride the Trumpian base to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — called a special session of his state’s legislature. Among the things it will consider:
Legislation safeguarding the freedom of speech by protecting social-media users from being censored by social-media companies based on the user’s expressed viewpoints, including by providing a legal remedy for those wrongfully excluded from a platform.
To repeat, even if the companies were just removing Republicans for being Republicans (which they aren’t), they would have every right to do so.
Ambitious politicians often stage stunts to appeal to their party’s base; the dumber they think that base is, the dumber the stunts will be. But Trump is a former president. No one expected him to discover dignity for the first time in his 75 years, yet so much of what he is doing these days is just petty and small.
And what is this suit about? It’s about money, of course. As soon as Trump announced the suit, fundraising texts were blasted out to his supporters.
“President Trump is filing a LAWSUIT against Facebook and Twitter for UNFAIR CENSORSHIP!” they read. “ Please contribute IMMEDIATELY to INCREASE your impact by 500% and to get your name on the Donor List President Trump sees! ”
Five dollars? Ten dollars? Whatever you can contribute to help Trump, get out that credit card and do it now.
This is a reminder of Trump’s truest nature: a sad small-timer telling everyone how big he is.
For much of his career, there has been no scam too small for him to pull and no product too cheesy for him to hawk, whether it was steaks or ties or vodka or vitamins. That last one involved people sending in a urine test, after which they’d receive a package of vitamins supposedly tuned to their unique metabolism. You can guess how it ended.
If it could bring in a few bucks, he did it. And that’s what he’s still doing.
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