this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
There are no innocent millionaires. The threshold of wealth that requires some seriously unethical behaviour is pretty low.
What do you count as innocent? Like doesn't use products made in factories with human rights violations? I'm never gonna hit a million, but economists are saying we all need to have a Mil or three in order to retire? I know a couple million airs who seem like normal people, they're just business owners?
I mean there is no way to goss a million a year without directly and knowingly exploiting people on a daily basis.
Millionaire refers to total wealth or cash on hand, not annual salary. Someone making $1M a year is probably worth $100M+ if they own stocks and may be well on their way to billionaire.
That's not true you can earn a few million from hard work. Its rare these days, but doable. Still pennies compared to Elon et. al. I think the cutoff should be between 50-100 million. After that we name a park after you and you get a trophy for winning at capitalism. Congrats or whatever, but we're taking the rest.
Whatever the threshold, it needs to be indexed to inflation and COL in the local area.
You definitely can not become a millionaire on YOUR hard work. It takes the hard work of other people working for you. And unless you over charging for their work or under paying them for their work, you aren't going to be making millions.
That's completely, 100% untrue.
I'm going to make these numbers up, but the math checks out.
If you're a nurse making 100k/year, let's assume you take home 60k of that. You'll take home a million dollars after "just" 17 years. Are you really going to tell me that nurses are exploitative labor?
Now, I'm not going to get into the math of expenses because I'm lazy, but I'm also not factoring in any kind of investing either.
Now, those nurses need a supervisor to handle advanced work they aren't familiar with, scheduling, dealing with mgmt, telling Drs to fuck off, etc. So if that nurse lead takes home 100k, they can do it even sooner at just 10 years. You can argue that this is exploitative labor, but you'd be wrong.
At some point you get supervisors that don't do or contribute anything and pull in like 500k/year. Those jobs should probably not exist since they are by definition exploitative. But earning a few million dollars over the course of your lifetime is easily achievable on your own labor alone.
You can't be a billionaire on your own labor. You can be a millionaire on your own labor, but it isn't easy and takes a long time.
My net worth is almost a million dollars because my wife and I don't have kids and our jobs pay decently. We should be millionaires in the next five years or less. We don't have anyone who reports to us. Who have we exploited? In my col area we need (currently) 3 million total to live a modest retirement. Under your plan, this would be impossible to achieve. Do you want to make everyone a wage slave forever? And that's ignoring high COL areas like NYC and LA where a million dollars might get you a small house.
I disagree, since the Internet allows indie studios for things like music and games to reach a massive audience. Selling your indie game that you made with your friends for $20 to 300k people makes you a millionaire without exploiting anyone. As long as you can avoid publishers leeching most of that away... Plenty of people also have become millionaires just by selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper.
I made millions by buying bitcoin years ago. Who did I exploit?
Third world Bitcoin miners, the energy it costs to run block chain math and transactions, and the harvesters of the materials of the hardware.
But in terms of capitalism, only 3 exploits is pretty low so I wouldn't feel too bad about it, you're no different than myself or anyone else existing with a computer, you just got a bit luckier.
(This is really only to point out that there are few businesses where exploitation cannot exist, namely those of small businesses, and even then, they exist in capitalism which bred the exploitation. That is to say, you just can't get away from it. This is not a critique of you, and also, congratulations! That's quite incredible :) )
Thanks. I think there are other examples. For example, authors of (best selling) books.
But most ethical millionaires are just extremely privliged or lucky or both.
Most arts are exempt due to the nature of them. Music, visual art, etc, the resources they take can be fairly ecofriendly, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they will be.
I was actually just thinking about this from an article that got posted, "Can music be sustainable?" and I was thinking about the production and supply side of it, like with records and CD's, or in the case of books, print and cloud. As an author, there's options for how you publish your book, but I would imagine not many think about how they publish being more or less eco-friendly than other alternatives.
It's an interesting question -- do paper books take more resources than cloud-streamed books (via Kindle)? I would imagine not, but they do need to process the paper and then ship the copies. But, Kindles need to be produced, and AWS needs to exist to serve them via the cloud.
Similarly for music - does the process of making records and shipping them have a bigger impact than we realize? The article itself was talking about touring emissions, but it got me thinking about the product side of things too with CD's, records, and streaming music.
Also, back to the topic at hand, I think any service business could have the potential to earned a million dollars ethically, a lot of the factors just come down to luck and opportunity. My father is a photographer, he could earn a million dollars with his business if he had the right number of clients. All it could take is a viral TikTok and suddenly he's the most requested photographer in the state. In a way, businesses have a social media lottery now, where virality can make you a millionaire as long as you can keep up with the demand. We see it happen with individuals too who get meme status and a bunch of interviews.
You're spot on with that, I would think.
You could say others who bought in later than you, but regardless I wouldn't really classify that as "hard work".
You need to be a millionaire to comfortably retire so...