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by inglor_cz 550 days ago
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.

2 comments

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?
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
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...

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.

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.