- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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He isn’t wrong. All it takes is the right amount of people to be pissed and revolution explodes. If the oligarchs think they have it rough now, wait until they are being lynched in the street by people who haven’t eaten a decent meal in recent memory. Look up 1918 Russia if you don’t believe me.
I somehow feel things have changed. Maybe it’s the internet, lack of education, consumerism, whatever. I hate to say this, bit I feel like a lot of people, when they get hungry, would steal from their neighbours. Far too many folk don’t understand that the wealthy are the author of their suffering and won’t know where to target their anger. Not to mention that oligarchs are hard to catch, whereas your neighbour with a slightly newer car is right there, and may be of a different race. People don’t understand who they should be angry with.
If there is still food to be stolen from your neighbours then things haven’t reached the point of revolt.
If there is still enough energy to be expended on hating your neighbor, then you haven’t reached the true point of revolt
When things are truly at their worst, your neighbor has no food to take. Your neighbor has no goods worth stealing. Harming them brings you no food, no money and less energy.
When things have reached that point, that is when the only option left is revolt and it does not matter what consumerism what gifts are given what lies are said. The only thing left to do is revolt or die. And no group of people will simply choose to die.
No shit. This is my retirement plan.
Please collapse in an orderly fashion, form a queue or something. But don’t come up here, we’re full.
Lets hope he is right.
Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk told LBC: “If Elon Musk says he needs a trillion dollars because he’s going to solve global hunger or something like that, great, have at it. But I don’t know what you could possibly buy with a trillion dollars that you couldn’t buy with a hundred billion, or probably even $10 billion.”
Well at least he’s aware of how much money a trillion dollars is and how easy it would be to solve world hunger.
He once said that if there was a concrete plan to solve world hunger he would do it. Then a representative of an actual plan to solve world hunger showed up on his Twitter feed and provided him with information and he was like ‘nah’.
And the plan would only cost a small amount of his fortune. He bought Twitter for much, much more.
I think it was only like 6 billion, right?
A huge number on its own, but in this context it’s nothing.
He paid 44 billion for Twitter and it took him a few days to raise that much money. He could have been the man to write the cheque to end world hunger and be honored by millions for generations to come (despite all his other bullshit), but he chose not to.
The world starves not because we cannot feed the hungry, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.
Yup. The actual sources of world hunger aren’t material but systemic. So it’s not as easy as just “giving everyone food”, but the more complicated “give everyone access to a robust agriculture supply chain”.
Fortunately, giving 1-2% of people fertilizer and some work animals might be a bit more complicated, it’s significantly cheaper.
Millionaire CEO? Who is this broke bitch?
Lmao I’m thinking the same! Like damn he’s struggling with us normal folks in the trenches!
I mean the millionaire class is a grey area between those who are so rich they are completely out of touch with working class realities, and those who were working class who got a break and played a good hand right.
Personally I don’t really have a problem with millionaires, that’s an amount you can make playing by the rules and not bending them to your own will.
Plus it just means “homeowner” in way too many cities.
It’s also just not a huge wealth disparity. Like having 5-10x more than the average is more tolerable than having 10,000x more than the average. if someone drove a car that was worth 10x more than mine, it would be a new Honda. If they had a house 5x larger it would be a large family home. This actually adjusts to the needs of society.
depends on how they got the money, did the guy come from wealth? if so he might be so detached from everyone else, even as a millionaire. or did he build up his wealth from the ground up, without the help of NEPTOTISM.
And there lies the real problem, the handing down of large sums of money. Entrenched wealth and power of an aristocracy. It destroys the meritocracy and the desire to progress society. My grandpa taught me a valuable lesson by giving all his money away. He paid for school, camp, life skills and that was it. True believer in the American dream having secured it for himself. I often wonder what he would think about the current state of the economy. As well as how I would interpret the state of the economy, if I wasn’t living in utter fucking poverty. I would not have the same attachment to social issues if I wasn’t front lines on the war against the poor.
“I will have you know I am a self made man! Just like my father and his father before him!”
If your parents left you a home, you’re probably a millionaire too. Many blue collar working folk are millionaires, except if they tried to spend those millions they’d become homeless.
I know right he only has an estimated 1/10th of a billion.
Not even close to that third comma, amateur.
VC usually has 100s of millions or billions. hes probably the one that uses funds from billionaires into his company?
People are too divided for an Actual revolution, but I’d say let’s try
Internet echo chambers are literally “Divide and Conquer” at scale.
Wake me up when the masses give up their algorithmic app addictions.
This^. Most of us are part of the Machine. Any revolution must begin outside of it.
One of the most revolutionary actions people can take is put down their phones.
If the government bans social media, we will riot
I’ve been waiting for the pitchforks since 2008.
Eat the rich and use their money so there is no poverty in the world anymore.
and do something to prevent new people from taking their place so the problem doesnt just start again with different people
Maybe we just need the ever present threat of being eaten should one become too rich to achieve world peace.
The US govt shutdown is a distraction. The real story is the generals being fired by Hegseth. When they are replaced by Trump loyalists, the real civil war will begin. The goal of Project 2025 is to install a white supremacist evangelical ruling class in power. They have already published everything they want to do, all you have to do is look.
Nothing is just a distraction. They’re all just similarly evil parts of the plan, that they have fully documented, and that people just kinda keep ignoring.
For there to be any kind of real “civil war” there would need to be a very clear distinction between sides and goals alongside states declaring their intent for sovereignty, as well and would need some form of oppositional army with organization.
The USA is far, far from a real civil war. We’re talking a generation or more and that’s in the worst case timeline.
The terms people need to recognize and understand are “militarized police state” and “civil unrest.”
These conditions may lead to a civil war at some point, but so far the bickering between states that don’t want Trump to do this and that are nothing remotely close to the conditions that start a civil war.
I get it, we want something to happen. We want retribution and justice and some kind of satisfying pushback. But I don’t think it’s helpful for any of us to “Tim Pool” the situation and try to pound the war-drums so we normalize violence. The current situation can and most likely will start facing mitigation during the mid-terms if there’s no authoritarian takeover. Right now, even if that happens, you would see rioting and possibly even a coup long, LONG before you would see a civil war.
For there to be any kind of real “civil war” there would need to be a very clear distinction between sides and goals alongside states declaring
That’s how the US Civil War happened, but frequently a national Civil War does not have such clear boundaries and sides. See Syria for a very messy conflict where about the only thing defining one ‘side’ was ‘not Assad’ and very little agreement other than that.
Civil war would be the worst possible outcome to be sure, but a messy situation can just as easily feed a civil war.
happened
I’m not saying it has to be the same conditions as our “last” civil war, that might as well have taken place on another planet compared to today’s political and information landscape.
I’m saying here and now, today, we would need far different political and geographic lines for there to be anything resembling a “civil war” and really what we’re talking about is civil unrest and groups who may rise up in the coming years or decades willing to commit acts of violence. Even then that’s not a “civil war” and many nations have come back from that kind of disturbance. Even the US has had more internal revolts, coups and domestic terror groups than we have now. (Look up the original anarchist movement in the US for a wild ride through history.)
I personally take issue with people talking about “civil war” because it doesn’t help anything, if anything it removes us further from reality and reinforces the idea that “something is going to happen” by itself, that “someone is coming” to do something and create a big change. Literally, this is the same narrative the Christian right uses but theirs involves Jesus. It prevents people from investing in anything, from taking part in their community, from starting grassroots movements to change our political foundations.
Some of those fired generals might be taking their knowledge and experience with them, FWIW.
The goal of Project 2025 is to install a white supremacist evangelical ruling class in power.
Pretty sure that’s Project 1776.
Except most of the Founding Fathers were Deists. The churches of the time were mostly semi-Puritanical, and to an Evangelical, would be an absolute horror. A church that held so strictly to doctrine that they punished everyone for anything sinful, actually cared for the poor and sick (if only to bring them into the fold), and preached damnation and punishment in Hell. Stark contrast to the newer Prosperity Gospel (aka Grift), philandering, do what I want to whom I want and ask forgiveness at the end Evangelicals. The Founding Fathers were against religious control because they knew they wouldn’t be able to do much, or lose their power, as it would be seen as sinful. Now the Church has become so damn corrupt it now gives politicians a pass so long as it brings the Church more money. At this point I’m waiting on a holy war or two and a schism of power to eliminate the Church’s power again…
There were nearly ~150 years in colonial america (1630-1776) wherein the puritan crown did exactly what you describe as evangelical. My 8th great grandfather was arrested for baptizing too late into the day on a Sunday and spent many months incarcerated in Boston as a result.
The witch trials were really the puritans of Massachussets attempting to annex Maine. History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
Sure seems like the rich are doing everything they can to see what they can get away with before it pops off.
A repeat of the French Revolution is the real reason behind the bunkers of the ultra wealthy.
I hope they enjoy staying in that bunker forever instead of the surface world
Somewhere, somehow, those bunkers will need air intakes. Some potatoes to plug tubes, or mustard gas packets down the hatches … the problem is, bunkers make excellent prisons and/or tombs.
The ultra wealthy also don’t do shit in their own and will be expecting at least a small team of other people to cater to them while they weather the storm. There is no future where the ultra wealthy get to keep all the things they have collected.
You don’t realize how far gone some “house slaves” are gone down the rabbit hole. They have their chosen special ones. Who will do anything they want.
wasnt there are article about zuckerberg/bezos compound they dont know what to do with the HUMAN waste they produced,a nd they wanted to dumped in some random area to pollute. since you dont pay for public services.
A healthy and well designed septic system will handle a free humans for decades if you treat it right.
That shouldn’t be the hard part.
There’s a whole rich people Island neighborhood (I didn’t think they were bunkers) that wanted to pipe their waste back to the mainland because they didn’t think anything through when building it
I like shitting on billionaires as much as the next person, but presumably they didn’t design any of this themselves. Most likely story is they just don’t want to pay their fair share as usual.
They didn’t want it near them and assumed they’d be able to pay their way to dumping it on the poors. Don’t give them an out.
I bet those
servant’s quartersaccomodations for staff are real nice so that they stay loyal.They will, in all likelihood, involve counter measures like explosive collars.
Or the one from Horizon. Surgically implanted “Off” switches that kil function implanted into sterilized individuals. Literally had the surgery center at the entrance to the bunker.
What part of the device will do the killing?
Would installing such devices make the news?
What if an enemy did a mass triggering of switches?
In horizon the device was in your head from the moment you entered the bunker.
Would installing such devices make the news?
If you have to enter the bunker then the world has gone to shit. There is no more “news”.
What if an enemy did a mass triggering of switches?
Then everyone below the billionaire would be kill.
Weird jump after defending a multi billionaire govenor that won’t defend his citizens and just wants to make sound bites…
Fair, but in this case, they’re not wrong.
My toilet needs to flush
somehowsomewhereEdit I can’t type
Press the buttons on the top.
Water is one of the most destructive things on the planet. Find where water is pumped out, plug it, flood it (or just let them sit in their own filth unable to flush a toilet)
I’m more of a proponent on getting these criminals out of their bunkers, giving them a trial, then permanently sealing the bunkers after removing luxuries.
And unless there is something I dont know about the construction of these bunkers, they are never impossible to break into.
We could seal them in and let them rot inside? I personally feel like indefinite imprisonment in a vault of their creation could be plenty punishment. Could also cut electricity. Maybe they desire to come out on their own, we wouldnt need to break in.
Either is fine for me if these guys get what they wrought
See that’s the thing with me.
To me, justice isn’t served until the institutions they tried to destroy are the ones used to punish them. It’s like the penultimate form of justice.
Yes. It’s for show. The end result is the same. But to the people, we can witness it, and remind ourselves that these institutions of justice and government are meant to serve the many, and not the few.
But part of me also really just wants to use thermite to cut through a big steel bunker door
The problem is that the rich own all the lawyers. And judges. And congresspeople.
More eggs to break. The people are getting hungry
if they have been collaborating they should be there with the billionaires.
It’s like the penultimate form of justice.
What’s the ultimate form then?
Fixing all the damage they caused. Since they can’t do that, it’s the penultimate.
Giant blender, everyone gets a sip. Or minimum wage servitor.
Now I’m curious how many rich people we would need to blend up to give everyone else on earth a sip of bougiejuice…
You just gotta know where they are, and many of them are doing it right out in the open. Crews of construction workers, locals, they know where to find the bunkers.
I propose this plan: billionaire brawl.
A reality TV show akin to the gladiator arenas of old.
They don’t respect the institutions of law and have danced around them/dismantled them, so they do not deserve it.
Instead, they turned our public institutions into theater. That is what they deserve.
For our entertainment, a new billionaire brawl occurs every day. There are thousands of them so we could have years of entertainment. They fight to the death with all sorts of strange instruments and situations.
I should mention, in Billionaire Brawl, the strange Instruments they use to survive? Yes you guessed it, they must buy them, and they are not cheap. Each piece of equipment costs billions to buy. A sword? A billion. A shield? Another billion. Clothes? Yes, a billion. A helmet? Billion. The proceeds from Billionaire Brawl go to the workers of the industries they pillaged from, and to the environments they destroyed for their riches, and to the people they brainwashed for their riches.
The great thing about this is that it would catalogue exactly what happened here. Future generations would have a historical goldmine. Millions of people who were abused, starved, exploited, and lied to would be able to watch their billionaire brawl and feel a sense of justice.
They feast while they poison our air and waters. They live in luxury while making us beg to give 1/2 of our income to a slum. The moment AI became seemingly advanced enough, they tossed us aside like nuisances.
Billionaire Brawl. Don’t let them escape to bunkers. Pull them out. Let them fight to the death for freedom, like they’ve made us fight for generations.
Almost like an inverted Hunger Games. Nice!
Truthfully if it gets to the point the mega wealthy are hiding in bunkers the people will have access to military arsenals.
The US has spent a lot of money researching and purchasing munitions designed to bust underground bunkers
They almost always need some access to the outside, for air or water. Regardless, it’s only so strong. Even if it’s self-sustaining, a few guys with pickaxes could get through whatever wall they have in probably a few months, at most. Assuming everything doesn’t collapse, heavy machinery or explosives would make quick work of them. A bunker is only useful if there’s nothing on the outside actively trying to open it up.
Couldn’t we just plug up their vents? Or maybe fart a little bit in them?
we can seal them in with concrete.
An easy way to avoid anything like the French Revolution … or any kind of revolution … is to just feed people.
You can do whatever you want, abuse people, jail people, arrest people, even start a war, build concentration camps and for the most part people will go along with it all, as long as you keep them fed. You don’t even have to feed them much … just keep them fed enough to keep them from rioting and revolting.
TBF some of us are already fairly revolting.
They’re deliberately starving people right now.…
YES! Commented many times that our masters won’t let us starve. Well…
apparently Thiels compound construction was denied by the NZ government so he abandoned that country, hes probably shopping elsewhere.
Find the bunker and then cause a mini Chernobyl on top of it so that the radiation half life doesn’t occur until all the bunker people’s lifespans are over. We’ll trap them there forever.
Lots of lead shielding and warning signs to anyone coming from any direction other than the bunker door.
One very large and just-subcritical block of something with a long half life and just seconds of fatal exposure, between that and the door.
The crazy thing is millionaires have more on common with us normal workers than they do with billionaires.
Hasan Piker was listing all kinds of "a million _____ is _____ but a BILLION ______ is [some ufathomably larger thing].
People don’t understand multiplication very well…
The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.
You’re 99.99% correct.
edit: I can’t do math for shit.
99.9%. The difference is 999 million, or 0.999 billion.
But also, at that point, less than a tenth of a percent isn’t a significant difference any more. Point is, a million is nothing to a billionaire. Let alone a multi-billionaire. Let alone a double digits billionaire, and it gets worse from there.
If you were to count 1 second, every second, until you reached one million. It will have taken you roughly 11 days.
If you were to count 1 second, every second, until you reached one billion. It will have taken you over 33 years.
I like this one because it helps establish a relative analogy we can all kind of feel and puts things into perspective. We all know what 11 days feels like, and almost all of us know what 33 years feels like. Either because we may have lived it directly or we’ve lived enough of a portion of it to extrapolate that experience.
One trillion seconds is almost 32,000 years. The analogy is broken again as 32K years is already becoming a nonsensical number that none of us can meaningfully interpret. It’s longer than all of recorded human history
Anyways, https://apnews.com/article/musk-tesla-electric-trillion-pay-stock-f2140db92e8032121f4c114234059165
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion
Comparing a million dollars to a billion dollars is like comparing one dollar to a thousand dollars.
Yeah a billionaire buys a million dollar house as easily as a millionaire buys an expensive TV or pretty good gaming pc as easily as a person with only a thousand dollars buys a cheap soda
Also most millionaires are just homeowners.
As if that isn’t an extreme privilege based on depriving others…
Owning your own home should be the norm, not the exception. It is not like a home is some kind of luxury item. A home is a bare necessity.
And yes, that is quite different once you have more than one home.
Comparing a million dollars to a billion dollars is like comparing one dollar to a thousand dollars.
That’s kind of like saying that comparing a billion dollars to a triillion dollars is like comparing one dollar to a thousand dollars.
Yes?
While that is absolutely true, the millionaire still has the biggest things in common with a billionaire. They will never have to worry about a lack of money. They will never have to choose between clothes or food. And they will never be forced to keep a job, because without it they will literally die due to lack of medical insurance.
The millionaire isn’t your friend either, they’re just a wannebe billionaire.
Dude, someone who has a freehold home and a retirement portfolio is a multimillionaire in many places.
There will absolutely be people with large assets and low income struggling to make ends meet.
Boohoo the millionaire can’t afford all the luxuries they want. How will they make the payments on their BMW this month, they might have to switch to weekly tennis lessons instead of 3x weekly.
A million is easily enough to live a comfortable life and never work again. If they ‘struggle to make ends meet’ they are bad at budgeting. They are not working class, they do not need to work. Maybe they work because they want to live in a HCOL area and have extra luxuries but anybody with a million dollars worth of assets can stop working any time they feel like it.
Especially any multi-millionaire is distinctly bourgeois.
This is not true. A million dollars buys you a house, so basically cancels rent. But it does not feed you for life and lets you live without working.
There is a big difference between people who own a millon dollars in money and assets and those who have a million dollars in their checkings account.
Of course, afaik almost no billionaire’s money is liquid either, it’s in properties and businesses and shit.
Like I’m sure bezos has plenty liquid, but most of his billions is just a valuation of amazon/aws/whatever other shit he owns.
Like, if we wanted to take all his money we’d have to completely liquidate amazon and aws, and his house etc, selling the assets off to whoever can afford it, it’s not just breaking into his Scrooge McDuck vault full gold coins.
Not that it’s impossible, it just seems that many people don’t realize this and think it is just the Scrooge McDuck vault.
Yes rich people don’t just sit on piles of cash whether a millionaire or a billionaire.
Then sell the house.
Owning a house in a HCOL area is one of the luxuries I was talking about. Any million dollar asset is a luxury.
There is a fundamental difference between working to survive and working because you don’t want to move out of your NYC brownstone or further from lake como or whatever the fuck.
I wouldn’t say a house is a luxury. It is a necessity.
Really the whole concept of renting is exploitative.
And live where, genius?
If you’re a low end millionaire you can buy a nice house.
If you’re a low end billionaire you can buy an entire town of nice houses.
Neither really has to worry about keeping their homes.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
To a billionaire, a mere millionaire is as much a pauper as any homeless person. When the Psychopathic Oligarchs demand a reduction in population, being a millionaire won’t save them.
In fact, the Psychopathic Oligarch’s Capital Hoarding OCD will kick in even bigger over a millionaire, because he actually has the money that they covet so badly. The rest are just drains on society, but a millionaire has something that the mentally-ill financial hoarders actually want - more wealth.
It will be for different reasons, but they’re going to kill the millionaires, too.
It will be for different reasons, but they’re going to kill the millionaires, too.
I want to try to imagine what that actually looks like.
The billionaires have been raiding the federal budget and debt. Eventually we will hit a wall, and then it will be time for some good old-fashioned crisis austerity! And the president will get on the podium and somberly tell the American people. (Imagine this as someone (of either party) after Trump or feel free to translate this to Trump drivel.):
My fellow Americans. After generations of reckless spending, we have finally reached the end. We have tried to balance the budget, but the opposition party has spent years bleeding the budget dry. You know all they have done. Ultimately this is their fault. But unfortunately, we now are incapable of borrowing the amount of money we need to keep the light on, and tough choices have to be made. We will all need to tighten our belts. Taxes will go up, and reforms will be made to retirement programs…
And then out of nowhere a “must pass” reform package will appear. It will be a thousand pages long. Despite the crisis only appearing this week, the bill have clearly taken years to write. They clearly had this thing written beforehand. And the part that will hit the millionaires the hardest? Severe restrictions on the tax-advantaged provisions of IRAs, 401ks, and home ownership. That’s how ordinary people who amass a few million of their working careers usually manage to do it. That and home equity is where most of the wealth of single digit millionaires is kept.
For 401ks and IRAs, look to see that minimum withdraw range rise higher. Make it so you have to be age 70 to access the funds in your 401k without an early withdrawal penalty. Or apply penalties to social security benefits for those with large 401k and IRA balances. If they were really cynical, the billionaires might even cynically sell this as “taxing the millionaires.”
Look for curtailments to the tax advantages to home ownership. It’s very rare for ordinary people to pay capital gains taxes on any increase in their home’s value when they sell it. When a couples sells a home, they are exempt from the first $500k of home appreciation. Plus there’s the mortgage increase and property tax income tax deductions. Etc.
This is how you effectively steal what remains of the wealth of the middle class. The billionaires use both parties to raid the nation’s credit until it is maxed out. Then they keep the grift going by removing all the tax advantages the middle class has earned for itself over the generations. Then at some point, when that is not enough, taxes will simply be raised, but in forms that fall lightest on the wealthy. There is a reason these guys love tariffs.
Excellent speculation. Add to that their out-of-control health care costs, which have been deliberately engineered to strip their wealth, and bankrupt families.
I truly believe that one of their objectives is to kill middle class inheritances. Back in the days when it was possible for the average person to actually build wealth through savings program, pensions, and Social Security. People would then inherit the result of their parents’ saving efforts, hopefully two inheritances for a couple, and somewhere in the 50s or so, between decent jobs, a decent savings account, and an inheritance or two, and a person might be able to retire early, or quit and start their own business, which a company isn’t going to like if if it’s competition. Even if it’s NOT competition, they don’t want to lose a highly experienced worker who might hold an important role. They want to fire them when they gets older, at THEIR discretion, not the workers.
Today, pensions barely exist, financial corporations manage retirement programs to benefit the firm over the investor, and savings accounts don’t have any significant interest. By the time someone dies, they have little or nothing left to pass on to their kids. If they died of a prolonged illness, they may even pass on debts.
So future middle-aged couples can’t look forward to a decent inheritance from their parents to boost their lives into retirement.
And future generations will also die with student loans still to be paid, which will have suppressed any savings opportunities for their entire life, as the career they spent tens of thousands to pursue, is now mostly poorly-handled by AI. I wouldn’t be surprised when the student loan generation starts to die, that the permanent MAGA government will force their heirs to pay off the loans, and saddle the next generation with the previous generation’s debt, too.
The overall objective is to keep prices high (which rich people can always afford), and keep us economically enslaved with several low-wage jobs per multi-generational household in order to stay alive, leaving little time to plot a Revolution.
I like the idea of setting a wealth cap at 1000x the median household income. That would be somewhere around $80 million today. The reason for this is that this is really the upper limit of wealth that can be achieved through individual direct effort. This is the kind of fortune that a couple could make if they:
- were both neurosurgeons
- both had long careers
- never had kids
- lived like absolute paupers, saving every penny
- invested it all in the stock market In other words, it’s the kind of money that people who get their fortune through actual work could acquire if they absolutely maximize their lifestyle to have the biggest wad of cash at death. Or, perhaps said differently, the highest fortune achievable through the work of your own hands. The highest fortune achievable through ordinary wage labor. I believe 1000x the median household income is a nice round number around that level.
You can certainly earn a fortune larger than this. Again, we’re talking over about $80 million here. Fortunes orders of magnitude larger than this exist. But the only way to earn more than this is not through labor, but through things other than your own work. Being a high level corporate CEO. Inheriting it. Founding a company that makes it big and combines the work of thousands of employees. All of these involve making money primarily through means other than through the work of your own hand and mind.
under 5millions ish, but once you reach 10s millions in worth, the psycopathy starts to show. hasan probably a poor example, as hes comes from a very wealth turkey family but acts like lefty tankie, but hes really just a resistance grifter, he pretends likes hes poor. but his fans are calling him out he never had an actual job before, the one that wasnt due to nepotism, one given by his uncle cenk ughyr, hes part of the bourgeois.
Many leftist have been those from high class families who had the education and means to make a difference. Guevara and Engels being two examples among many. FDR, though absolutely not anywhere close to a leftist, betrayed his own upper class and championed the new deal.
I am not defending wealth. I am a dyed in the red and black commie, but I do think we should recognize that sometimes it’s actually those with enough material means to make a difference who do so.
BTW. Hasan’s a internet personality who abuses his dog, so… This comment was more about people coming from wealthier families being able to do good things.
The crazy thing is millionaires have more on common with us normal workers than they do with billionaires.
I get what you’re saying, that they are millionaires are closer to being broke than to being a billionaire, but they still have more in common with billionaires than normal workers. Once you reach the mid to high single digit millionaire you can pretty much choose your own adventure.
Lemmy is seriously underestimating the number of comfortable millionaires. Got $1M? You can retire and live modestly. Got $3M? That’s a new way of life, not radical, but much better. Got $10M? You’re well set for whatever happens.
In the US, 1 million is not enough to retire comfortably unless you are already retirement age and can collect social security and Medicare. It’s not like you can retire early on 1 million dollars. That doesn’t even buy you a house where I live.
I have a friend who made it big young (well earned IMO, they started working at 15) and they have about 2M in investments.
They make 4k/month after taxes just from the stock dividends every year.
That’s well enough for a comfortable life over here, as their house and cars are paid for - and the money keeps growing in investments.
I’m not quite at that level, but I’m getting there. My main concern would be health care. And that my house isn’t fully paid off. And with Trump manipulating the market, idk I get nervous. 2 million might work. But I know 1 million is for sure not enough, at least in the US.
This question always depends heavily on where someone lives and someone’s expected standard of living.
Someone who lives on that much already thinks it would be enough for them until they die, but they might not have ever had open market insurance, and likely not a catastrophic illness while on it. That kind of thing makes you realize how financially vulnerable you really are. It’s not about steady state while healthy, it’s about contingency planning.
I’m in a situation where I could probably relatively safely retire with $2 million, but like you I would be nervous about $1 million.
We’re aiming for $2.5-$3 million in investment income. That’s based on two things:
- The median household incomes in the US is about $80,000.
- The safe indefinite withdraw rate in stock index funds is about 3%.
(2) is based on the 3% rule, a common retirement planning tool. People have crunched the numbers on historic market returns, factoring in inflation, dividends, etc. 3% is about the amount you can safely withdraw each year while the principal will still remain steady through time, even after adjusting for inflation and crashes. It is the amount you use if you want to be reasonably certain you will not outlive your retirement income.
1 million is ‘not enough’ when you want a passive income that is higher than what half of working people earn.
That’s literally the definition of retirement though. The ability to live without working. And no, $1 million is really not enough to retire on. You’re vastly overestimating the amount of passive income that can safely be earned on $1 million.
You know what a million is worth? $30,000 a year. That’s based on the 3% rule. That really is the safest amount you can rely on in a stock market account while still factoring in the risk of market drops. In retirement planning, that is a number you can use if you want to be reasonably sure you will not outlive your retirement savings. If you do a whole bunch of math on historic returns, inflation rates, and market bubbles and crashes, historically a 3% withdraw rate would be safe to keep your principal constant over time.
Can you live on $30,000 a year? Maybe, but the median household income in the US is $80,000. Half of households earn more than $80k, half less. Some couples do survive on $30k/year. But not many people would be willing to retire on that lifestyle. A couple with a million in retirement savings can safely earn $30k/year from that investment. That’s it. And this is investing in the stock market. If you invest in inflation-indexed treasury bonds, your safe annual income would be more like $10k per year on a $1 million asset.
In 2025, if you want to retire with retirement income (w/o considering social security) equal to the median US household income? Using the 3% rule, that would require approximately $2.7 million in an investment portfolio.
I know this because this is how we’re handling our own retirement planning. We’re probably going to need $2.5-$3 million in retirement assets. We’re lucky enough that unless things go catastrophically wrong in the US economy, we’ll be able to do it. And our wants aren’t incredible. We would like to have a retirement income right around where the average US household income is. And that will take $2.5-$3 million in retirement savings.
So a few things. Since we’re in the weeds at this point I want to remind us both that the original point was that a millionaire and a billionaire both have the same general relationship to living and labor which is ‘they don’t have to worry about selling their labor to have their basic needs met’. This is still true. I was also talking in terms of individual wealth not household wealth but the figures aren’t really that different because housing is such a large share of expenses.
The retirement scenario you’re describing is a very comfortable one. 3% is a conservative drawdown, 3.5% is considered safe, and higher is typical if you can be flexible in spending. Retired households do not have the expenses associated with commuting and most do not have the expenses of childcare. Being able to afford living near employment centers is a luxury for a retired household, not a need. So a retired household with the income of a median working age household is doing quite well.
That’s fine to want to retire moderately well off but once your income is based on rents from capital your class interests are not aligned with the working class.
3M invested is a nice retirement, not a new way of life. That’s a barely 6-figure a year payout. Of course, a chunk of a3m networth is likely your house.
Your math is a bit off
i think is when you reach 10s of millions in wealth is when things becomes very seperate from the plebs.
Hasan Piker mention? In MY lemmy.world post? Without immediate ridicule?
Based
Don’t threaten us with a good time…
At least hes just a millionaire and not a billionaire. We can trust him
