Moving to: m/AskMbin!

Agreed.

For me personally it's more a question of does your money hoarding system exploit people or is it family money that's been made unethically. I think keeping that kind of money to yourself is unethical. And I don't mean you should go living from riches to rags but recognize that you own something to society and do something about it.

Another way to describe individuals who hoard enormous amounts of wealth to the detriment of society and other humans is ... pathologically unsound and incapable of compassion or empathy for others around them

idk, you probably have a small number of artists and genuinely lucky-sons-of-bitches who get proper rich without being bad people. Or at least with their wealth not coming from being a bad person.

I agree totally, which is why I made that distinction. And my last point about participating in the system that oppresses the poor just to maintain your own wealth. I can't see how someone like that could be considered good.

You can be born into it.

I’d say you’re a bad person if you’re born into it and don’t actively try to get rid of it.

I think the point of being a rich asshole is 1 billion dollars usd. Even 999mm is too much, but over 1 bil is an easy demarcation of excessive wealth.

I think you're missing the points about scale and marginal utility. If you have more food than 3 generations of your family will ever eat, and continue to take more while others are starving, you can make a moral argument that maybe you shouldn't have so much food. Much less continue to try and get more. It becomes more egregious when you, say, take food from your employees who don't always have enough.

Have you looked up how much a Billion dollars really is? Billionaires are not living paycheck to paycheck. They could do so fucking much with their money and resources, but they choose to invest in shitty submarines and privatized space travel. I am all for pursuing advances in tech and life, but let's solve the issues with earth first like world hunger, homelessness, and climate change.

There's a huge difference between having food to eat

And having millions of dollars doing nothing

Or me living in an apartment

And someone living in a building that could take up a whole city block

It's not the fact that they have money. It's how they get it and what they do with it.

I have money, but I don't have enough to save. I don't make enough to do much outside of maybe buy a small amount of food for a homeless person. I'm not solving shit. However, living in the city I have had people ask for some change, and I've done it. But I can't do shit.

However, there are people who can actually help that won't. They get more money than they need and then just sit on it. Many of them get it through exploiting others.

But if we want to ignore things scaling and just reach, if I give a homeless person a dollar, should he not share that?

I have nothing new to reply to this with because others who have replied to you have already said what I would have said perfectly. I do want to say I find your reply incredibly ignorant and I hope the other replies have opened your eyes a bit.

are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?

My 'excess' that doesn't go to bills and food is like 15 bucks, while theirs is several hundred million. Great comparison 👍🏼

I don't think everyone should be forced to give away everything they don't need to survive, I just think (in America's case) if you have enough wealth for several generations to live in luxury while our people are dying from inaccessible medicine and healthcare and more than half of our country has no savings living paycheck to paycheck, we've massively failed as a society to provide basic needs for our people. You could fund universal healthcare with just a tax on billionaires and they wouldn't have to change their lifestyle at all. If I had enough money that I lost 90% of it and I literally couldn't notice the difference, I'd be full of guilt every night watching people die because they rationed their insulin.

Yeah this is missing magnitudes of scale here. Someone with 100,000 and someone with 1,000,000,000 are wildly different scales of magnitude. It's like people who look at a mag-4, mag-5, and mag-6 earthquake. Each of those is on a log scale, so while you're just going form 4 to 5, the scaling means that's a massive amount of change.

Same diff here. The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change. So going from 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a pretty big change in the amount of security one has. So going from 1e5 to 1e9, that's a change of 1000 on the scale. The level of change between those two is absolutely astronomical.

I get this facet of mathematics eludes folks. All the while the whole "double the number of grains per square on a chessboard" thing we all like to play with because it's interesting. But this is that IRL. The average person and the average billionaire are on two totally different scales. It's like saying, "why a beetle doesn't glow when the sun does?" Like you can't reasonably compare those two things. Yeah, both contain hydrogen at some level but in massively, massively different quantities. It's like saying, your computer is just an overgrown abacus. It's just ignoring scale so much that it veers into very wrong.

I get what you're trying to say. But you've got to acknowledge the vast difference of scale here and that your point is not just oversimplification of an issue, but a gross by planetary magnitudes oversimplification of an issue. Just mathematically speaking, the average person and the average billionaire are not even close to the same kind of person in economic terms. It's just completely unreasonable to even remotely think they are. The numbers are just too far apart, to even attempt this argument in good faith.

I'm sorry, but being able to feed yourself and dedicate decades of your life saving for a home, is not comparable to having multiple homes, and going on holidays for half of the year.

Moving to ex-millionaire? A million isn't even enough to retire in the US.

My thoughts as well, pretty much exactly what I meant in my post.

if you're a good person, you wouldn't be rich.

Hardly any millionaires become ex-millionaires by choice, it's that difference that can help distinguish the 'good ones' from the 'not good ones'. If they chose that route through donation, charity, whatever it may be, they are good. If it had to be ripped away from them through just natural shitty circumstances, and otherwise would keep being hoarded, not so much.