I can’t imagine receiving that amount of money and not turning around and giving almost all of it to my local community. Hell I could keep 50 or 60 million and live extremely wealthy for the rest of my life and never work again.
This is the answer to whether AI executives actually take their own rhetoric seriously. If they actually believed in things like UBI as a solution they’d be doing something besides this.
One of the perks of being at the top of the food chain is that you get to define what things mean. Just like the meaning of AGI has been redefined by the masters of the universe to resemble whatever the current state of AI is, so too will concepts like UBI if it ever approaches a state where it could one day impact their wallets.
Where proven anti-poverty initiatives have been kicked to the curb (legislation-wise) in favor of horseshit like "effective altruism", so too will UBI be one day bastardized into a system that requires people to live in company towns (with sub-residential tenant protections of course), be paid in company scrip, and be spent at company food stores - a final solution for the EBT/SNAP food assistance system.
That's enough to personally buy out every politician in certain places for decades.
Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate, because then they would have to come to the realization that the reality they live in is fundementally fucked up. Living is just easier with a bit of intentional ignorance and apathy.
> Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate
I disagree - the current levels of income disparity, then Meta and Zuckerberg’s general conduct along with the general sentiment make it extremely hard to say “attaboy” when reading a news like this. I might be saying this for most readers here.
There's a Board involved with deciding these things who has made the active decision that keeping those particular people in that place is worth it. Maybe the next "hot skill" is "corporate governance auditing" to start profiling the people that keep throwing passively invested funds at such small groups of people in such large amounts. Someone's making the decisions. Food for thought. Mayhaps it's time the rest of the folks in the States made a much bigger point of being on top of who is guiding their capital.
I don’t think that’s a fair expectation given the tremendous success they had with their Metaverse attempts, to the point they changed the company name for it.
I feel like we need a society where the amount of capital you get to keep is inversely proportional to how much you give back to society, on a percentage level. Have $100 billion dollars? Great. The more you give back in charity and community, the more you get to keep. Care more about "number go brrr" and less about your fellow man? We tax all kinds of personally harmful behavior like drinking and smoking. We should also tax anti-social behavior similarly. Someone like Musk with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in capital should lose 75% of it unless you give back at least 25 or 30% of it, minimum. I'm not qualified to decide the exact percentage points. But we have to do something to keep the rich from vacuuming up almost every penny that exists.
Daily reminder that to this day, John Rockefeller is considered one of the wealthiest humans in history, despite the fact that today's billionaires dwarf his raw numbers.
Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.
So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.
Is it just me or has money like this lost it's appeal and value? A billion dollars used to be unthinkable, now it's just some number. Companies valued at X doesn't even raise an eyebrow for me. It's like were playing with Monopoly money.
It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.
To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now
Just undo the damage of Reaganomics and reimplement real progressive taxation with some policy changes so it isn't so easy to sidestep taxation completely.
Of course, the billionaires are likely to fight any changes in this area so hard and so long that they will eventually cause a situation in which whatever solution naturally arises as the masses get increasingly desperate ends up being much worse for the billionaires than fair progressive taxation.
We tried to vote for normal 21st century healthcare and the billionaires spammed race-baiting nonsense and backed an unconstitutional fascist to shut it down.
This point would be more believable if rates of poverty and numbers of ultra wealthy weren't inversely correlated, but they are.
It's almost impossible to be in poverty in the United States unless you're willfully trying to do so. It's certainly impossible to starve. There are free food programs in every city.
Comments like these are usually driven from ideological places or jealousy, rather than a factual linking of billionaires to poverty. Any given US billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs for starters.
Look at evil Jeff Bezos, who created a platform in which basic necessities are sold for margins that are frequently 0%. Previously 'local business' middlemen would charge 50% margins to impoverished locals. Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods. That's merely one example.
this is a very low bar for determining a decent quality of life for a human being.
> ideological places or jealousy
but presumably you are a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"?
> billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs
No, they don't 'provide jobs', they suck up [human] resources that could otherwise have gone to schools and hospitals.
> Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods.
but at what cost to the social fabric (Walmart is probably the greater transgressor there though).
Developed societies tolerate the ultra-wealthy because a) they are an artifact of a free market for capital allocation (vs state control), and b) sometimes having large wealth concentrations has proved a useful 'short-circuit' to normal capital allocation for otherwise unfundable but ultimately beneficial projects.
The key word here is 'tolerate'. If society feels the ultra-wealthy are no longer worth the problems they cause (e.g. hoarding certain finite resources), then society should get rid of them.
I would add that beyond a certain point (a place to live, personal possessions, retirement fund, etc), there is no moral case - in the sense of the natural right of ownership - for their wealth, and we can simply confiscate it. For example in the UK we used 'death duties' to break the aristocracy.
They should invest in a Mars colony and all go there and never come back and leave us alone.
I wish I was overpaid for finishing in fourth place or worse.
Aye, I very clearly picked the wrong career path by developing my small team engineering management and software construction skills over 20 years.
Even worse if you've spent time developing a moral compass
Because they couldn't find anyone decent who would do it for $500 million.
I can’t imagine receiving that amount of money and not turning around and giving almost all of it to my local community. Hell I could keep 50 or 60 million and live extremely wealthy for the rest of my life and never work again.
Actual quote from a Silicon Valley executive: "You can't even buy a decent house in the Bay Area for less than 50 million."
This is the answer to whether AI executives actually take their own rhetoric seriously. If they actually believed in things like UBI as a solution they’d be doing something besides this.
One of the perks of being at the top of the food chain is that you get to define what things mean. Just like the meaning of AGI has been redefined by the masters of the universe to resemble whatever the current state of AI is, so too will concepts like UBI if it ever approaches a state where it could one day impact their wallets.
Where proven anti-poverty initiatives have been kicked to the curb (legislation-wise) in favor of horseshit like "effective altruism", so too will UBI be one day bastardized into a system that requires people to live in company towns (with sub-residential tenant protections of course), be paid in company scrip, and be spent at company food stores - a final solution for the EBT/SNAP food assistance system.
That's enough to personally buy out every politician in certain places for decades.
Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate, because then they would have to come to the realization that the reality they live in is fundementally fucked up. Living is just easier with a bit of intentional ignorance and apathy.
> Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate
I disagree - the current levels of income disparity, then Meta and Zuckerberg’s general conduct along with the general sentiment make it extremely hard to say “attaboy” when reading a news like this. I might be saying this for most readers here.
There's a Board involved with deciding these things who has made the active decision that keeping those particular people in that place is worth it. Maybe the next "hot skill" is "corporate governance auditing" to start profiling the people that keep throwing passively invested funds at such small groups of people in such large amounts. Someone's making the decisions. Food for thought. Mayhaps it's time the rest of the folks in the States made a much bigger point of being on top of who is guiding their capital.
No, the Meta board is beholden to shareholders and must work in their interests.
Zuckerberg is kind of rare among tech founders in that he still controls 61% of the company. Therefore the board serves him.
None of this is a secret and this setup is why Facebook is what it is.
Meta's board is a joke. Zuck controls majority votes, so the buck stops with Zuck. You can very much attribute Meta's direction squarely to him.
They must have done really well with their AI projects.
I don’t think that’s a fair expectation given the tremendous success they had with their Metaverse attempts, to the point they changed the company name for it.
No VORP calculations in US tech I see.
Genuine Stupidity
I feel like we need a society where the amount of capital you get to keep is inversely proportional to how much you give back to society, on a percentage level. Have $100 billion dollars? Great. The more you give back in charity and community, the more you get to keep. Care more about "number go brrr" and less about your fellow man? We tax all kinds of personally harmful behavior like drinking and smoking. We should also tax anti-social behavior similarly. Someone like Musk with multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in capital should lose 75% of it unless you give back at least 25 or 30% of it, minimum. I'm not qualified to decide the exact percentage points. But we have to do something to keep the rich from vacuuming up almost every penny that exists.
Relevant for perception, possibly the greatest such illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg
Daily reminder that to this day, John Rockefeller is considered one of the wealthiest humans in history, despite the fact that today's billionaires dwarf his raw numbers.
Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.
So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.
Is it just me or has money like this lost it's appeal and value? A billion dollars used to be unthinkable, now it's just some number. Companies valued at X doesn't even raise an eyebrow for me. It's like were playing with Monopoly money.
It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.
To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now
Why is AI so much worth to Meta?
Zuckerberg has FOMO. Maybe it's justified.
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Just undo the damage of Reaganomics and reimplement real progressive taxation with some policy changes so it isn't so easy to sidestep taxation completely.
Of course, the billionaires are likely to fight any changes in this area so hard and so long that they will eventually cause a situation in which whatever solution naturally arises as the masses get increasingly desperate ends up being much worse for the billionaires than fair progressive taxation.
[flagged]
[dead]
We tried to vote for normal 21st century healthcare and the billionaires spammed race-baiting nonsense and backed an unconstitutional fascist to shut it down.
They gutted peaceful democracy, so FAFO
This point would be more believable if rates of poverty and numbers of ultra wealthy weren't inversely correlated, but they are.
It's almost impossible to be in poverty in the United States unless you're willfully trying to do so. It's certainly impossible to starve. There are free food programs in every city.
Comments like these are usually driven from ideological places or jealousy, rather than a factual linking of billionaires to poverty. Any given US billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs for starters.
Look at evil Jeff Bezos, who created a platform in which basic necessities are sold for margins that are frequently 0%. Previously 'local business' middlemen would charge 50% margins to impoverished locals. Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods. That's merely one example.
> impossible to starve
this is a very low bar for determining a decent quality of life for a human being.
> ideological places or jealousy
but presumably you are a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"?
> billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs
No, they don't 'provide jobs', they suck up [human] resources that could otherwise have gone to schools and hospitals.
> Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods.
but at what cost to the social fabric (Walmart is probably the greater transgressor there though).
Developed societies tolerate the ultra-wealthy because a) they are an artifact of a free market for capital allocation (vs state control), and b) sometimes having large wealth concentrations has proved a useful 'short-circuit' to normal capital allocation for otherwise unfundable but ultimately beneficial projects.
The key word here is 'tolerate'. If society feels the ultra-wealthy are no longer worth the problems they cause (e.g. hoarding certain finite resources), then society should get rid of them.
I would add that beyond a certain point (a place to live, personal possessions, retirement fund, etc), there is no moral case - in the sense of the natural right of ownership - for their wealth, and we can simply confiscate it. For example in the UK we used 'death duties' to break the aristocracy.