[jollofricepeas]

As stated in the book “Lessons of History,” this is what billionaires should be doing with the wealth that they’ve snatched from the poor, marginalized and unlucky.

When we started on this tech journey, the hope was for a better more equal world,

Instead we have the worst inequality since the Great Depression, mass surveillance on a global scale and the destruction of the middle class.

Inequality is a part of our society. Some are born with better genetics and opportunities in a lucky part of the world.

If you are lucky to become a billionaire your purpose is to serve humanity and redistribute that wealth to your workers and to society at large.

If not, the only eventual outcome is repression by the billionaire class or forced redistribution through violent revolution.

These are the lessons that history has taught us.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lessons_of_History

[graemep]

> If you are lucky to become a billionaire your purpose is to serve humanity and redistribute that wealth to your workers and to society at large.

If that is your purpose in life you are unlikely to become a billionaire in the first place.

[snapplebobapple]

Serving humanity is compatible wealth redistribution isnt.thats the great thing about free markets, build a better mousetrap and the world bets a path to your door. Do that a few times and you are a billionaire and the world is far better off.

[newyankee]

What is needed in my opinion is a statistical definition and acceptable boundary for Universal Basic Income as a function of the country's wealth and the taxes on billionares to service this.

It should definitely not be median but something like 20 percentile threshold works best. This should be transparently clear and communicated.

However receiving UBI should genuinely lead to a charter of responsibilities as well to incentivise good behaviour.

Every party will keep on pushing the responsibility further (Govts and billionares will say cos will go to different jurisdiction, people earning pittance will defend trust fund billionares based on cultural inculcation etc)

Important to understand that a nation country is still the unit the world operates at and the wealth amongst them is by definition not equally distributed and they fight for it either logically (competing to build the best and cheapest industries) or hoarding resources (Australia, Canada and whatever places were conquered first) or Military superpower.

There is no perfect solution but some consensus on identifying the problem is a first step.

Alternative is simply Civil war in an AI world where the owner class retreats to their islands.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

> It should definitely not be median but something like 20 percentile threshold works best.

We could just start with the goal that everyone has access to basic medical care and a roof their head, like many other wealthy nations. If we want to accomplish that via UBI, we should pick a number that aligns with these goals.

[moffkalast]

You know it's funny, you'd think it would be more efficient to not rob people blind in the first place, but I guess then you can't pretend to be a benevolent saviour afterwards.

[inglor_cz]

The poor, almost by definition, don't have enough money to snatch, as amply illustrated by the total share of tech revenue coming from Africa or ghettos in Missouri.

In the modern tech world, you become a billionaire by servicing people with enough money to afford a somewhat banal subscription or enough travel under their belt that they need something like AirBnB or TripAdvisor.

Almost all the money I ever spent on tech was from the "discretionary" part of my budget, and so did everyone in my surroundings. This may sound bad, but it is probably better than the earlier times, when money was strongly associated with mining of vital resources and similar enterprises. In some places, that still holds, and those places are (with exceptions) usually more brutal and inequal than the West.

That said, violent backlash against the rich is certainly possible, but the outcome will likely be the same as it used to - transfer of power and wealth from the capitalists to the apparatchiks of The Party that takes absolute power in the mayhem.

People like Ceausescu and Assad were far from poor. Poor elite just isn't a thing in modern civilization.

[feerfreeflight]

Not to be pedantic, but isn’t the billionaire’s class wealth mostly derived from their ownership of an asset class that does draw from everyone, stocks?

[snapplebobapple]

Stock prices dont go up in a vaccuum. Most first gen billionaires got there by owning founders shares that were worth near nothing when they got them and billions eventually as their business made more revenue as a result of their stewardship. Said company iant drawing from every(ne in a vaccuum either. Thry make the money as the best option in a sea of options usually. There are market power issues in some instances but tjat isnt solved by rediatribution, its solved by breaking up the market power holders like weused to pre rhenquist supreme court

[jollofricepeas]

Cmon man.

There’s a thing called facts. Billionaires exploit the poor.

Why do they fight unionization and workers rights?

https://www.jwj.org/emboldened-billionaires-take-aim-at-new-...

The prison phone market is owned by billionaires: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmate_telephone_system

Amazon now accepts SNAP/EBT payments after destroying small businesses:

https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/amazon-now-accepts-ebt-car...

Farmers are not allowed to reuse seeds from billionaire firms:

https://grain.org/en/article/5142-seed-laws-that-criminalise...

[inglor_cz]

You are stretching the meaning of "poor" if you call non-unionized tech employees or US farmers "poor people". They aren't as rich as Bezos is, but "poor" is something very different.

Amazon warehouse workers are closer to the definition of "poor", but they will likely be replaced by robots fully anyway. Which I would say is good, because putting stuff into boxes for hours is arduous work that is suitable for machines, not humans.

Amazon destroying small businesses is somewhat similar to e-mail destroying telegraph, an almost inevitable development stemming from the technology. Even in Europe, where we don't have one big Amazon, there are obvious advantages to several big online retailers that operate on economies of scale. Customers prefer lower prices, and that includes poor customers.

[MrMcCall]

Making money, itself, is not the problem. How and why one makes it determine the results of every endeavor.

Efficiencies do help us all, but they must not come at a harmful cost to the cogs in the wheels.