And I might add maybe not the happiest people either. They could have everything they want yet they don’t always seem all that happy. Elon Musk for example doesn’t seem much happier than the average person, maybe even less so (depends on who you’re comparing against of course).
CEOs have a higher rate of psychopathic traits than average. In order to get into a role like that, you are by definition, morally bankrupt.
This was reported for not being a shower thought. It’s certainly not hard to get a bunch of up votes on Lemmy by saying “ultra rich people bad”, and I agree. At the same time I understand people that want to limit the community to more ‘typical’ shower thoughts, like on r/showerthoughts.
I error on the side of leaving posts up. If there is an objective way to enforce what is or isn’t a shower thought, I’m open to ideas from the community.
But one thing they don’t seem to have is enough.
What do you really need to be happy? Somewhere to live where you feel calm and safe, money for food and bills.
The reason a lot of people want more and more is because they compare themselves to others, and then they need a life style to support that luxary house or whatever it is. Meaning they are probably not happy because now their job is eating up all their energy and time.
At a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager, Kurt Vonnegut turns to Joseph Heller and says, “Our host made more money yesterday than you’ve made from Catch-22 over your whole life.”
Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have—enough.”
It’s impossible to earn that much money, but at some point it’s also impossible to hold or spend. Banks can only take so much safely, so it needs to be placed in companies and investments that require some management and all the consequences and responsibility of running those. Spending it is problematic because it will disrupt whatever market it is injected to, potentially harming a lot of people.
The only real solution is to avoid billionaires in the first place by taxing corporations much much harder.
I’ve never seen it from this perspective before. From this perspective, it makes even more sense to place regulations in order to avoid such circumstances.
It gets me thinking of what methods (on top of taxing megacorps appropriately) we could implement to achieve a narrower wage gap while avoiding the corrupt type of communism.
No shit that’s why they’re rich.
Great username
I don’t think you can get THAT rich without ripping off someone. Like, if I started a business and it was raking in the cash in some actual not harmful way, I would pay myself a healthy salary but raise everyone’s pay, why would I need more than I need? Nobody needs a billion dollars. Nobody.
The guy who said he doesn’t fear the cops anymore, I don’t feel that. But I do agree money insulates you from a lot of stresses.
I still think it’s akin to hoarding. Billionaires are like those people in the houses they can’t move around in because they can’t stop accumulating.
i recently escaped the labor trap myself (that is what rich people call working btw), until that moment i had always been in survival mode…stressed about basic needs which all required $, something i didn’t have enough of. figured out how the stock market works, how it’s basically just one big casino a bunch of rich cunts with more $ than sense dump their ratfucked funds into…once you know how it works in incredibly easy to 10x your working capital (to a point, there’s scaling problems eventually…but by that point any normal person has more $ than they can spend)
first thing that happened after this was a mental breakdown as my mind apparently felt comfortable enough then to process a bunch childhood trauma i had mostly (consciously atleast) forgotten.
this trauma processing/breakdown eventually lead to my mom being concerned enough to reveal to me that i had been diagnosed with autism back as a kid when i was originally diagnosed with adhd, had kept it from me so i could “grow up normal” apparently…probably should have told me after highschool atleast…had these breakdowns atleast 2-3 times prior just not as bad.
after this i had the horrible realization of just how fucked our country/world is, that the reason nobody seemed to be doing anything about all this horrible shit (especially the blatant corruption of trump admin…) wasn’t that noone knew…it was that everyone knew, they’re just waiting for things to “return to normal”. they’ve all just either given up or don’t care to begin with because the system benefits them. the realization that now even with effectively infinite (personal) $, i’m still pretty much powerless to change/fix any of this…
Can you tell me more about how easy is to beat the bank? (In your Casino analogy). I want to learn such power.
And let me ask you as well… are you sure that you are not presenting survivorship bias? (The same as the billionares we are talking?). Ex: “I am a billionare because I worked hard and am way smarter”, etc.
I am genuinely asking, it sounds passive agressive but I guarantee you it’s not.
there’s a book called Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written over 100 years, that lays it out pretty cleanly.
but the biggest point is this, the US’s financial markets are specifically left unregulated compared to others to “facilitate liquidity”. in practice, the various actors meant to “facilitate liquidity” are more often than not just extracting liquidity for themselves, as US financial rules essentially give control of the PA (price action) to whoever has the most $ in play.
US style option exercise rules vs. European style being the biggest kicker
the next is just this, that even given derivative has actual value (in theory, future projected dividend returns) and it’s current value (whatever it’s trading at now). the more these 2 values diverge the more someone who trades understanding actual-value can take advantage of people only trading on current-value. note, anyone who “invests” automatically/passively is trading on the latter, and the majority of people trading actively trade on the latter deliberately (they know the game is rigged and pull their profits out deliberately and often). for example, the overwhelming majority of stocks don’t, and never will pay, pay a dividend. therefore…rheir actual value is worthless, so why is anyone trading them?
A bubble is when these “liquidity facilitaters” deliberately run the price of everything up well beyond their actual value, then those that know the rules and actual value hunt this liquidity down and don’t put it back it (or atleast, don’t put it back in mindlessly), the MM’s then dump the prices in an attempt to trigger a selloff by emotional traders (people seeing their retirements evaporate etc.) so those that know can buyback in at massive discounts.
I don’t mean this in some conspiratory way either, this is just a natural consequence of how the rules have been designed over the centuries. if you can get anyone experienced in the financial industry to talk to you honestly (a rare thing, admittedly) about the industry they will confirm this. how our financial markets are setup is arguably the main reason the rest of the world deals with our shit, not our bloated military but how much exit liquidity we provide other countries rich-people. because the american population as a whole as way more $ than sense, we have an incredibly rich and incredibly stupid population that buys into this casino constantly because our politicians were
bribedlobbied to tie our pension systems into the casino and people just…accepted it, for some reasonI’m glad that worked for you. Everything changed in 2008. I would say the old cycles of the market and PE valuation rationality is gone in favour of meme stock style gambling. I think that anything written prior to 2008 on the subject is less useful and the yearly value taking cycle is only still maintained by the old school investors. Some who want some sort of comfort in their approach and want to believe they can make it work. Those people are just handing money to each other now while the billionaires just gamble large sums for bragging rights.
oh for sure, as far as P/E and “expected future dividend returns” and shit it’s all cooked for the overwhelming majority of bluechip shit. that’s not where the $ is made
that book really is eye-opening, wallstreet never changes, they just occasionally rebrand.
PFOF is just bucketshops all over again, for an example. the game is rigged, knowing/accepting that is the first lesson you have to get into your head before you start making serious returns…it’s…so easy honestly, actually really messed with my head. made me realize just how much time i wasted working the last 5-7 years of my life, made more in the last 3 months than the prior decade pretty much (and all with very little risk, i’m still not confident enough to short anything)
I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
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It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel. (n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)
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Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
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Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
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Dude has a tiny broken penis and is cucked by everybody.
He’s either secretly estatic or a very, very sad little manchild.
Going off how childhood fame messes up people pretty much always, I’m gonna go with the second one.
But yeah, good job getting there in the shower 👍 it’s not everyday that people do that on their own. You should be proud of yourself.
Same as it ever was.
They’re gamblers. Capitalism is gambling. I’ve seen people die from it, I lost a good friend to gambling. These are gambling addicts, they will never get enough, it will never be enough. They will keep going and drag everyone else down with them in the process, at any and all cost, and with absolute certainty.
I don’t need the problem described any more. I need ideas for fixing it.
You got to vote and be active in politics and encourage as many people to do likewise. If more people did that the sum of our power would be far greater than the power of billionaires. We can then have reforms like regulating campaign contributions and lobbying and passing more regulations that protect the people.
For some countries there are things working against us. For example in the US billionaires have a lot of power and contribute heavily to politics in part due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC which opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending and has really harmed our country. My solution to this is to encourage people to boycott companies that donate heavily to Republicans and most importantly encourage people to vote for people who will help stop all the corruption.
Another thing that gets me is how many people will say voting doesn’t matter when they maybe only vote on presidential elections.
Voting is not a 4 year thing, it’s an absolute grind and locally can affect more of your day to day life, as well as keep building its way. higher up. I live in a state that so many people showed up and voted for bills that went against the state legislature, but they actually voted less for the people… now of course the state is overthrowing the things voted in.
So yes, SO VERY MUCH vote and be active in politics.
Democracy is dying in the Untied States, it may be too late for voting to matter
right on brother
Financial obesity is neurotoxic.
And you would be morally bankrupt were you rich. I forget the psychological term, but the idea is well documented. When people attain wealth and power, they don’t feel the rules apply to them. And it happens to all of us. “I would be better!”, you scream. Nah, probably not so much. No one is immune.
Saw a great case of this with Hillary Clinton, though I forget the particulars. She’s stumping for some law or policy that she blatantly violated and a journalist (we used to have those) called her on the hypocrisy. “But… that doesn’t apply to me.”
Not like she started out rich and powerful. Sure, she had some privilege, but not First Lady of the United Fucking States and Secretary of State kinda privilege.
The whole concept is kinda horrifying. When I hit the “middle-aged white-guy with a decent income” zone, I started not giving a fuck about breaking simple laws. Fuck they gonna do? I’m driving without a legal license ATM. When I was young and broke, jail. Now? They won’t pull me over in the first place, slap on the wrist, at worst. See how that psychology builds with real wealth and power?
Now think on that kinda thought process as one get’s truly rich and powerful. Morals, out the window. You still think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re badly misaligned with the lowly common people.
And *you* would be morally bankrupt were you rich
Which is why capitalism begins with the word “cap”. There needs to be a cap on the maximum wealth any one individual can accrue, because absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Keep on justifying parasites, maybe you’ll become one!
Many parasites require special conditions to grow. We can manage their populations by managing the environment.
Think about it. He can never really know if someone likes him or is just sucking up because he’s rich and famous. Gotta be rough not having any friends. I think that’s why some rich people get caught with prostitutes. They KNOW where they stand.
Don’t mistake this as sympathy for him, just an explanation as to one of the reasons he may be unhappy.
