what are you saving up for : politicalmemes

[–] jubilationtcornpone 62 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

The Gospel According to Luke

18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 21 He replied, “I have kept all these since my youth.” 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Here's my personal fave:

20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

Exodus 21:20

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

The Gospel according to Capitalism

Greed is good

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

This one in Matthew feels relevant here too:

19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

[–] wombledomble 46 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Billionaires are playing cookie clicker with our lives.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

You joke, but that's close to how the rich see money. It's a score keeping device.

[–] wombledomble 13 points 4 weeks ago

I'd love to say so, but I wasn't joking.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes, the mentality behing it is flawed. But those are the people that make it to the top in the current economic system.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 weeks ago (11 children)

Being a billionaire should be listed in the DSM as a mental illness.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 weeks ago

Not even as a joke. I oppose systems that create macro wealthy and powerful. Those systems create sociopaths.

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[+] [email protected] 26 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Although I am agnostic atheist, I do wish that heaven and hell are real so that the greedy are given due punishment in the afterlife.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

What separates a person's last dying breath from a baby's first one?

Heaven and hell don't need to be real, neither does any other metaphysical concept. When we die, we owe it to the people after us to leave the world in a better place.

I agree with the sentiment though. Fuck billionaires.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It would be better if people stopped fucking billionaires. Really we don't need their spawn.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

I feel like this is part of how wealth concentrates, but idk.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

It honestly is a waste for a true capitalist. Like, if you have enough money to cover all your expenses, while also having 2-3x your fun money expense, why aren't you following the capitalist ideal and doing something with it?

Start a nonprofit that suits your interests, buy a company you believe it, spin up scholarships, blow it on a do nothing project, but for fucks sake do something with it!

[–] hector 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

In France, they're buying medias to bring about a fascist state and using islamophobia and the fear of the enemy from within to justify an increasingly violent police state.

I guess they are bored and need to ruin something else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

Please! It's islamphobia and "narcotraffic" (i.e. small-scale pot dealers, who have no future anyway because of racism, classism, prejudice, and Paris-centrism.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

In their eyes, they sort of are. “Investing” your money into stocks gives you the feeling you’re giving back to the world with it, while also giving you the feeling it’s secure, still belongs to you, and is earning you more.

Meanwhile, the people actually living this ideal create trusts for philanthropic efforts. They wave goodbye to the money completely, asking for no return but worldly benefit. There’s not nearly enough people like that in the world though.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Amassing wealth is an obsession. These people get a dopamine rush anytime their line goes up. Which is how they got there in the first place. At some point, the value doesn't really matter anymore but the obsession remains.

Greetings, your most experienced armchair psychologist

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Because it's not about money for them, they've already surpassed that concept, it a about power. Us peasants aren't quite evolved enough to understand that yet.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It's not just about power. For many, it's also a way to keep score, to feel better about themselves compared to others. (Not trying to justify; it's still a sickness.)

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[–] SapphironZA 12 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

They just like sitting on a Dragons hoard.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

At least in D&D no dragon hoards that much, and the chromatic dragons have a legitimate reason for it.

The wealthiest dragon you'll encounter in any fantasy setting, we aren't talking about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk where the real life billionaires are dragons, is an ancient red wyrm. They will have 1.5 million to 5 million gold pieces of treasure. 1 gold piece is ⅒ of an ounce of gold. Therefore the absolute wealthiest dragon in all of D&D and Pathfinder is only worth about $1,200,000,000, and that is only one of them. 99.99% of all other dragons would be worth less than a billion.

The chromatic dragons have to eat their hoard just before they die. If they don't have enough gold to pay Tiamat, then she eats their souls.

Also, gold is a nice soft bed according to every metallic dragon I have encountered.

[–] SapphironZA 7 points 4 weeks ago

I think once your net wealth hits 100mil, it should buffer overflow to NaN and you have to start over.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago

I’m poor now but one day soon I’ll be a billionaire and then those poors better watch out!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

You're assuming they're saving at all.

A lot of billionaire wealth is tied up in assets that is only a "savings" if it's converted to cash, like stock options.

Amazon stock is $200 a share, Bezos has 908,804,311 shares. $181,760,862,200 in stock.

https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/amzn/ownership

But that money doesn't go anywhere unless he sells it. Stock market is closed Monday for memorial day, but let's say he does nothing on Tuesday morning and decides to sleep in until 11:30 AM, shit, I WOULD. In that time the stock goes from $200 to $214.

Bezos "makes" $12,723,260,354 while sleeping.

When you have that many stock shares, the wealth is self perpetuating... but it's not "real" until you sell it.

What happens if he's sleeping and the price drops to $180 because of more stupid Trump shit. Now he's "lost" $18,176,086,220 overnight.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe you should read "saving" as "hoarding". The skeet (tweet?) Is making a point about their odd motivation to continue to accrue unimaginable wealth far beyond the point where the costs of their wildest dreams are trivial. The whole while having the ability to literally end world hunger many times over after subtracting those costs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, that's what I'm saying, beyond a certain point, the wealth accumulates itself with no active intervention on his part besides making sure the stock price doesn't tank.

But that's the whole point about "world hunger" too. It's not like he can liquidate 900 million shares of Amazon at $200 a share.

Estimates are it would take $40 billion a year, EVERY year, to solve world hunger.

https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

So to solve world hunger for 1 year, Bezos would have to sell 200 million of his 900 million Amazon shares at $200 a pop.

Nobody has the money to buy 200 million Amazon shares at that price.
As soon as he sold a fraction of that, it would flood the market and the stock price would crater.
When it became clear Bezos was the one flooding the market, everyone else who had Amazon would panic sell, tanking the price even harder.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

You don't even need to sell, you can take a loan out against an asset like every rich asshole or nation...

I refuse to accept that the most powerful people in the world are so helpless.

There's a myriad of ways to handle covering wealth into purchasing power. The wealthy falling to do anything about the evils in the world is part of what makes them evil. They aren't even trying. They use arguments like yours to throw their hands up and claim they're helpless and that the system would fail, that the world would be worse off if they did anything at all.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

Thank you - well explained.

It's also interesting to think of the stocks that the various oligarchs and politicians control or own as a backdoor for institutional capture. You want Trump on your side and his administration making decisions that benefit you and your companies? Easy - just buy some of his BS stock and use it as leverage. You won't even have to push it - he'll do what you want because that's how his underdeveloped brain perceives existence - as a series of quid pro quo agreements.

Of course, it's not just stocks. He's created so many other avenues to bribe him. It's bonkers.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

My theory is that when you get that first Billion with a B, something fundamental breaks in the human brain.

They don’t think like us normal folks anymore, even multimillionaires are “other” to them.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago

Maybe that's just it. They've accomplished something, but ultimately they know it's meaningless. So they try to find a context where it has meaning.

Some of them find that meaning in charity, helping large portions of humanity.

Others realize that the only circumstance where the distinction between a billion and a hundred million matters is if the world is absolutely going to shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago

In a way.

This world IS hell and them gaining larger and larger parts of it for their own benefit...

Capitalists are demons. Or might as well be, outcome's the same in the end.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

they think that if for one brief moment they have the most billions, they will exist forever.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

It's their version of setting the high score in the game of life

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

The shroud has no pockets

Political Memes